Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  The day stretched on. When Johnson finally stirred, beers and joints were passed. Around three, Minnie Lewis’s children returned from school. One, an eleven-year-old named Timmy, marveled at all the guns.

  “Who are you?” he asked DeFreeze.

  “We’re your mama’s friends.”

  “No, you’re not. I know all my mama’s friends.”

  DeFreeze told the boy to sit down. Suddenly Timmy, apparently a more avid consumer of mass media than his mother, recognized him.

  “Are you Donald DeFreeze?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Timmy darted out the back door and ran toward his grandmother’s house. DeFreeze kept watching the street. Something wasn’t right. There were too many people around, too many police cruisers driving idly by. Johnson, now awake, still drunk, assured him that police in the neighborhood were nothing new. But DeFreeze didn’t like it. There was still no word from Hearst and the Harrises. He kept glancing at the street, wondering where Freddie Freeman had gone with his $450.

  “He ought to be back by now,” he kept saying.

  Another police car cruised past.

  “We gotta get outta here,” DeFreeze told Mizmoon. “It’s getting too hot.”

  “Why?” she replied. “It’s hot everywhere.”

  A few minutes later, trouble arrived—but not at all the kind DeFreeze had feared. An angry grandmother, Mary Carr, came storming through the front door and, ignoring DeFreeze and the armed white people for a moment, found her daughter, Minnie Lewis, passed out on a bed. “Is everybody here drunk?” she demanded.

  The teenager, Brenda Daniels, took her elbow and whispered that there were two white women in the other bedroom. Making bombs.

  This was too much for Mary Carr. She marched into the kitchen, where DeFreeze had wandered, studiously avoiding her.

  “You get out of this place right now!” she hollered.

  DeFreeze mumbled something about black people sticking together. Mary Carr took two of her grandchildren by the collar, stalked out the front door, and went in search of a policeman. She didn’t have to look far. Hundreds of men in blue were already streaming into the area.

  • • •

  The LAPD knew they were close. A search of the house on West Eighty-fourth Street produced a trove of evidence: gas masks, a radio, three suitcases packed with clothing, a bag of medical supplies, one of Angela Atwood’s poems. “Now is the time—we’re all alive,” one couplet read. “Eat it Pig!” Neighbors described the two vans. Dozens of police cruisers began crisscrossing the area, and at 12:20 p.m. a pair of Metro Squad cops spotted the vans in an alley on East Fifty-third. Black plainclothes detectives began filtering into the surrounding streets.

  Neighbors did the rest. At two o’clock one called the FBI to say the SLA was hiding at 1462 East Fifty-fourth Street—next door. A caller to the LAPD phoned in an address on South Compton—around the corner. By three, when a meeting of senior LAPD and FBI officials convened at the Newton Street Station, the noose was tightening. By four o’clock, when police set up a command post in a tow-truck office a few blocks down East Fifty-fourth, four houses had been pinpointed. At four twenty a perimeter was established. By five, 127 FBI agents and more than two hundred police officers, including two SWAT teams, had surrounded the area. When Mary Carr found her way to the command post, the last piece fell into place.

  Inside the house at 1466 East Fifty-fourth, DeFreeze sensed it. The block was slowly draining of people. Minnie Lewis disappeared. Freddie Freeman never returned. The Harrises were nowhere to be found. Christine Johnson, an epileptic, collapsed in the kitchen, and DeFreeze dragged her to a couch. When Brenda Daniels went for more groceries, police took her into custody. By five thirty, besides Johnson, the only occupants of the house other than the SLA were a neighbor named Clarence Ross, taking pulls from a pint bottle of whiskey, and Minnie Lewis’s eight-year-old son, Tony, who was watching cartoons.

  At one point, a neighbor girl—curious to “see the SLA”—wandered into the house and told DeFreeze police were in the area. She followed him into the kitchen, where he drank from a jug of Boone’s Farm wine. The end was near, DeFreeze said. He was ready. “But we’re gonna take a lot of motherfucking pigs with us,” he promised.

  Everyone knew what was coming. Even news reporters had arrived on the scene; one tried to interview a next-door neighbor, Mattie Morrison, who told him to get lost. Detectives crept up to houses up and down the block, warning residents to leave or remain inside; most ignored them, peering from their porches, waiting. By 5:40 p.m. the SWAT teams, eighteen men in all, had hustled into place, one team splayed behind cars and bungalows in front of the house, another on the block behind. At 5:44 their leader raised his bullhorn:

  “Occupants of fourteen-sixty-six East Fifty-fourth Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department speaking. Come out with your hands up. Comply immediately and you will not be harmed.”

  The house was still. After a pause the announcement was repeated. Down the block television crews raised their cameras, correspondents their microphones. The evening news was just minutes away. All three networks went to the scene live.

  The house remained silent. Behind it, a SWAT marksman could see a refrigerator being moved to blockade the back door. “People in the yellow frame house with the stone porch, address fourteen-sixty-six East Fifty-fourth Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department. . . .”

  Suddenly there was movement on the front porch.

  “The front door,” one of the police walkie-talkies squawked. “Somebody’s coming out.”

  It was the eight-year-old, Tony, curious what all the noise was about. He hopped down the front steps, drifted toward the sidewalk, and froze, wide-eyed. Everywhere he looked were men with guns.

  “Come this way, over here,” a SWAT team member called.

  Tony was a statue.

  A policeman scurried up, grabbed the boy, and carried him away in his arms. Tony began screaming, “Mama! Mama!”

  A minute later Clarence Ross stepped onto the front porch, hands clasped behind his head. He and Tony were led around the corner, where SWAT leaders fired questions at them. Ross said little. But Tony gave a good description of DeFreeze, his people, and their weapons. As he did, the SWAT team at the front of the house endlessly repeated its bullhorn announcements, eventually eighteen times in all.

  With nightfall barely two hours away, the LAPD wanted to avoid an all-night siege in a tough neighborhood. They decided to bring matters to a head. At 5:53, nine minutes after the first warning, a pair of Flite-Rite rockets streaked from the street, shattering a front window and exploding in Christine Johnson’s living room. Wisps of tear gas could be seen wafting through the windows. From inside came the SLA’s reply: a burst of machine-gun fire from an M1. Bullets chattered against the side of an apartment house across the street. Up and down the block, officers rose and fired their weapons into the house.

  The entire neighborhood seemed to explode in gunfire. For five full minutes bullets whizzed and ricocheted everywhere, all of it broadcast live on television. Policemen ran to and fro. Everywhere residents ducked, climbed out windows, and sprinted for cover. Dozens more tear gas canisters were fired into the house, one hundred in all. Clouds of gas enveloped the house and front yard.

  Then, at 6:40, after almost an hour of confusing gunfire, black smoke could be seen pouring from a rear window. Police would later theorize that one of their tear gas canisters had ignited the gasoline Nancy Perry had been seen pouring into bottles. Then Christine Johnson wobbled into the front yard, where police whisked her away. By then the first flames could be seen.

  “Cease fire!” a SWAT leader barked. “Cease fire!”

  Another officer lifted his bullhorn. “Come on out, the house is on fire,” he announced. “You will not be harmed.”

  The only reply was a sustained burst of auto
matic-weapon fire. The police again opened fire. Then, at 6:47, came a lull in the shooting. Police would later discover that DeFreeze and his soldiers had chopped a hole in the kitchen floor and wriggled into the eighteen-inch crawlspace beneath the house. It was then, as the firing continued, that officers behind the house saw a tiny woman in combat fatigues emerge from a hole in the crawlspace. It was Nancy Ling Perry, “Fahizah.” She took a step forward and, spying SWAT officers in the alley, raised a pistol and fired. Police fired back. Two bullets struck her in the back, severing her spinal cord, and she fell dead. Camilla Hall—“Gabi”—emerged from the crawlspace firing a pistol. A bullet struck her flush in the forehead, killing her. Officers watched as a pair of hands grabbed her ankles and dragged her back inside.

  By then the house was engulfed in flames. Even then the SLA kept firing from the crawlspace. Finally, at 6:58, the roof began to collapse. The walls caved in. All that was left was an inferno, black smoke billowing into the early-evening sky, visible for miles. Three neighboring houses caught fire as well. All around, the police, the reporters, all of Los Angeles, were spellbound. For several minutes bullets and a pipe bomb or two could be heard exploding inside. A few minutes later the first fire engines began to move in.

  The deadliest single day in the short history of America’s radical underground was over. Six people were dead; not a single lawman had been hurt. Later that night, when police began sifting through the rubble, they found DeFreeze, Mizmoon Soltysik, and Willie Wolfe in a rear corner of the crawlspace, burned to cinders, crushed, gas masks melted to their faces. Angela Atwood lay nearby. Nancy Perry had been buried beneath a falling wall. Camilla Hall’s body wasn’t found for two days. But that was it. The one person the LAPD, and all of America, most wanted to find, Patty Hearst, was nowhere to be found.

  For days police cars cruised the neighborhood, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. What the police never learned was that others were searching as well: a team from the Weather Underground led by Bill Ayers’s brother Rick. “We really thought groups like the SLA were nuts and horrible, and yet we felt some responsibility,” Ayers recalls. “We could recognize that level of craziness, and that someone needed to get a hold of them and say, ‘Just chill.’ We just tried to find them, just drove around looking for them. We felt it was bad for everyone, and we thought, I don’t know, that we could save them.”

  But Patty Hearst was gone.

  14

  WHAT PATTY HEARST WROUGHT

  The Rise of the Post-SLA Underground

  As Patty Hearst and the Harrises drove south from Los Angeles toward the city of Anaheim that day, May 17, 1974, their car radio was alive with reports of the LAPD’s failure to capture their comrades in the house on Eighty-fourth Street. Harris roared with laughter and pounded the wheel every time an announcer repeated the news that the SLA had gotten away. The laughter stopped, however, once they checked into a hotel room down the road from Disneyland late that afternoon. Flipping on the television, Harris watched for a moment, confused, thinking at first that the scenes of policemen creeping toward a house on every channel were recordings of the morning raid on Eighty-fourth Street. With mounting horror, he finally realized this was a second raid, being shown live.

  “That’s our people in there!” Emily Harris screamed.

  They watched it all, live, for hours, the firefight, the flames, the burning house, the bodies. Harris shouted at the television throughout, demanding that the three stage a rescue attempt, then realizing its futility, finally collapsing in Emily’s arms in tears, blaming himself as Patty, curled up on the floor, trembled.

  “It’s all my fault,” Harris kept saying. “I killed them. . . . Oh, I wish I was there. . . . I wish I was dead, too.”

  Shell-shocked, they spent that weekend at the hotel, then drove to Costa Mesa, where they stayed for a week at another hotel, watching the news, going over what had happened, going over their mistakes, before each of them swore their renewed allegiance to continue the SLA’s struggle. On Memorial Day, ten days after the conflagration on Fifty-fourth Street, they drove north on Interstate 5, returning to the Bay Area, the only place they had friends they felt they could trust, who might hide them.

  Their car broke down as soon as they reached San Francisco. After two days lugging a heavy duffel bag packed with guns between hotels, they managed to rent an apartment in Oakland. For the next few days they lay about inside, swilling jug wine as the Harrises squabbled, over money, over their plans, over sex; when Emily denied him, Harris simply mounted Patty, who felt powerless to object. Most of all they discussed who might be safe to approach. It was Emily who finally came up with a promising name: Kathy Soliah, one of Angela Atwood’s waitressing friends. It turned out to be a fateful choice.

  • • •

  By all rights, the fiery destruction of the SLA should have brought an end to what little remained of the underground movement. Instead, it reinvigorated it. Where the vast majority of Americans viewed the SLA as a tiny, bizarre cult, those still inclined to believe in armed struggle envied the SLA’s “achievements”: the food program; the humbling of the Hearsts, millionaire capitalists; and most of all the publicity, the endless magazine covers and television coverage. For the first time in years the underground was part of the national conversation again. To those few who still yearned to hear it, the message was clear: Armed underground struggle was still a viable alternative, even in mid-1970s America, and its new crucible was Berkeley.

  Within two years, in fact, four significant new bombing groups would emerge, three of whose founders either came from the Bay Area Left or had visited Berkeley in attempts to join the underground. Two new radical journals began publishing, the first since the death of Eldridge Cleaver’s Right On!, both devoted to chronicling underground bombings and the printing of communiqués. Within weeks of the SLA’s immolation, a series of public events—the trial of Joanne Chesimard, massive rallies in support of Attica plaintiffs, and the unlikely reemergence of the Weather Underground—would provide opportunities for scores of new underground members to meet, mingle, plot, and plan. The bombings, robberies, and deaths that resulted would, against all odds, extend the life of the radical underground into the 1980s.

  It all began, in a way, with Kathy Soliah, who was twenty-seven that spring. Tall, with straight brown hair and a strong jawline—in some photos she bore a passing resemblance to Bernardine Dohrn—Soliah had waitressed with Angela Atwood before both women quit in anger after their manager ordered them to wear low-cut blouses. Like Atwood, Soliah was an amateur actress, and like Atwood she had wanted to join the SLA; according to Patty Hearst, Bill Harris had rejected Soliah, saying she was “too flaky to be trusted with the SLA’s underground activities.”

  She was, in some ways, the SLA’s biggest fan. News of their deaths incensed her. In the following days she cobbled together a protest rally. Held on June 2, 1974, in a corner of Berkeley’s Ho Chi Minh Park, it drew four hundred or so onlookers, many of whom seemed to drift into the park out of curiosity; the FBI filmed the proceedings from a nearby building. Along the front of the stage, someone had lined up bottles of DeFreeze’s favorite beverage, Akadama Plum Wine. Soliah took the microphone wearing pink bellbottoms, a turtleneck sweater, and enormous sunglasses. “I am a soldier of the SLA,” she began.

  Cinque, Willie, Camilla, Mizmoon and Fahizah were viciously attacked and murdered by five hundred pigs in LA while the whole nation watched. I believe that Gelina and her comrades fought until the last minute. And though I would like to have her be here with me right now, I know that she lived happy and she died happy. And in that sense, I am so very proud of her. SLA soldiers, although I know it’s not necessary to say, keep fighting. I’m with you.

  The Harrises read about Soliah’s appearance in the newspapers and decided to contact her. Emily made the approach, slipping Soliah’s aunt a note asking to meet at a Berkeley bookstore. Soliah appeared overjoyed. They gathered the
next night at an Oakland drive-in; The Sting was playing. The Harrises spent hours telling Soliah every last detail of what happened in Los Angeles. Soliah swore that many in Berkeley still supported the SLA; she and her boyfriend, Jim Kilgore, in fact, were ready to sign up then and there. For the moment, though, Harris was less concerned with new recruits than with finding a safe place to hide. When he mentioned the possibility of heading to New York, Soliah said she knew someone who might be able to take them. His name was Jack Scott. He was, of all things, a radical sports writer, a onetime college athletic director who went on to write for Ramparts.

  Scott had already spread word around Berkeley that he wanted to meet the SLA, but not to chauffeur them. He wanted to write their story. A meeting was arranged at the Oakland apartment. Scott said he was happy to drive them to New York, provided that they went unarmed; Harris objected, and their argument stretched toward dawn. Finally they agreed the guns would remain in the trunk. On June 7 Patty and the Harrises recorded a new communiqué for release; in it, Harris announced that the SLA lived on, now operating as a unit of something called the New World Liberation Front. The name meant nothing to police. Afterward everyone piled into three cars and drove east, toward the mountains. It was the beginning of what the press would later call Patty’s “lost year.”