A Texas man who bought a second-hand CD from a small-town thrift shop made a surprising discovery inside the case -- a Polaroid photo of President John F. Kennedy on the day of his assassination.
George Rebeles said he was at the Souls Harbor Thrift Store in Ferris when he decided to buy Bachman Turner Overdrive's The Anthology on CD.
Rebeles said he didn't open the CD case until about a month after the purchase, and he discovered an object inside that he soon realized was a Polaroid photo.
The photo depicted Kennedy riding in his motorcade in Dallas. The date handwritten on the back of the photo was "11-22-63," the day of Kennedy's assassination.
"I was shocked. I was shocked," Rebeles told WFAA-TV. "And that's putting it mildly."
Rebeles said he knew it was an unusual find in a thrift store CD case.
"Of course realized immediately that this was an unpublished photograph. So I was excited," Rebeles said. "It just struck me as odd to find it in a CD case."
Farris Rookstool III, a former FBI analyst and JFK historian, said the photo appears to have been snapped as the motorcade left Love Field, a good distance from the location of the assassination.
"I just hope that someone will look at this and say, 'You know what, this is pretty nice to have something from history, to see something that no one has seen in probably 60 years,'" Rookstool said.
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Rebeles said he hasn't yet decided whether to keep the photo or try to sell it to a collector.
The National Archives and Records Administration released nearly 13,000 documents related to the Kennedy assassination in December 2022, acting on an executive order from President Joe Biden. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that 97% of the Kennedy collection is now available to the public.