Earlier in the day on June 3, 1968, Realist publisher Paul Krassner ran into Solanas on the street when he was heading over to have lunch at Brownie’s, a vegetarian restaurant near the Factory. When she walked into Brownie’s a little bit later and asked to sit with him, Krassner politely declined because he was with his daughter, who he didn’t get to see much. “She said she understood and she left,” Krassner recalled. “Right after that, she went and shot Warhol. I still think about that. It’s like, suppose it wasn’t Warhol she shot. Suppose she said, ‘What do you mean I can’t join you?!?’ BANG! It was kind of scary because she really obviously had some kind of mental problem.” Solanas walked from Brownie’s, took the Factory’s elevator up to the main offices, then shot Warhol multiple times as he crawled under a desk and pleaded for her to stop. Sanders heard about the shooting that afternoon when he was in his apartment and became justifiably concerned. “I was afraid she might come to Peace Eye or, worse, to our apartment, with her smoking .32,” he recalled. “I hid behind the police lock on Avenue A until she turned herself in to the police on Times Square a few hours later.”

From Chapter 18 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore