Last Captured SLA Member is Released From Prison

Los Angeles Times ^ | May 10, 2009 | Ari B. Bloomekatz

[nickcarraway]

James William Kilgore, the last captured member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, was released on parole Sunday morning from a Northern California prison.

Kilgore, 61, was arrested in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2002 after almost three decades on the run.

He was one of five SLA members who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 1975 death of Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was killed by a shotgun blast after she arrived at a suburban Sacramento bank.

Kilgore apologized to Opsahl's family at his sentencing, saying he wished he could live that day over.

He served a two-year sentence for possession of an explosive device and making false statements on an application for a passport. In 2006, he began a six-year sentence for Opsahl's murder.

Kilgore, a former honors student from a wealthy Marin County family, joined the SLA after college. The group was a Vietnam War-era revolutionary outfit that gained notoriety after kidnapping heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974.

After fleeing, Kilgore spent more than two decades in Zimbabwe and South Africa. He had married an American woman overseas, raised two sons and worked as a university professor.

He was released at 12:20 a.m. from High Desert State Prison in Susanville, near the border with Nevada and about 180 miles northeast of Sacramento, said Oscar Hidalgo of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

[Huskrrrr]

No doubt he is a hero in the mind of Obama.

[theDentist]

Kilgore apologized to Opsahl's family at his sentencing, saying he wished he could live that day over.

Yeah, I hear serial killers wish they could live their murders over and over too.

[Lurker]

In 2006, he began a six-year sentence for Opsahl's murder.

6 years for a murder committed in conjunction with a Federal crime? That's it?

I certainly hope some members of the Opsahl family hook up with this creep for a little heart to heart chat.

[a fool in paradise]

These people are championed repeatedly on taxpayer subsidized Public Television.

[Brookhaven]

” he began a six-year sentence for Opsahl’s murder. “

Six years? How many years was her life shortened?

[DoughtyOne]

Thirty years on the run as a fugitive from a murder rap, and he serves two years.

A mother is shotgunned to death, this guy defeats justice for nearly thirty years, and serves only two years.

As for living that day over, if he really meant that, he would have served his prison term with no objection.

This outcome certainly doesn’t reflect my view of justice.

I am really convinced this nation is on it’s last legs.

[RobinOfKingston]

In 2006, he began a six-year sentence for Opsahl's murder.

Six years for murder????? Obviously with time off!!!!!

That is getting cheap enough that some might consider it a fair exchange in some cases.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

After fleeing, Kilgore spent more than two decades in Zimbabwe and South Africa. He had married an American woman overseas, raised two sons and worked as a university professor.

Why does this not surprise me? Just like his buddies Ayres, Dohrn, etc.

[IrishCatholic]

Well, does this mean he is now available for a spot with the administration?
After all, like Ayers he spent years as a professor. Therefore he has made important contributions to society.

Same logic. Besides, how old was Obama when this guy was helping to murder people? We should just move on.
I say a spot in the Education Department, maybe undersecretary.

[DoughtyOne]

We had six years to pull the plug on the Propagandist Bolshevik System and didn’t bother. What a team!

[DoughtyOne]

Exactly! And his credentials spoke for themselves.

[ETL]

"The Symbionese Liberation Army (S.L.A.) was an American self-styled urban guerrilla warfare group active between 1973 and 1975 that considered itself a revolutionary vanguard army [ie communist revolutionaries/terrorists like the Weather Underground]. The group committed bank robberies, two murders and other acts of violence.

The S.L.A. became internationally notorious for kidnapping media heiress Patty Hearst, abducting the 19-year-old as she and her 26-year-old boyfriend, Steven Weed, sat relaxing in their Berkeley, California home."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army
__________________________________________________

"The granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst and great-granddaughter of self-made millionaire George Hearst, she gained notoriety in 1974 when, following her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), she ultimately joined her captors in furthering their cause. Apprehended after having taken part in a bank robbery with other SLA members, Hearst was imprisoned for almost two years before her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter.[1] She was later granted a presidential pardon by President Bill Clinton in his last act as president.[2][1]"

Patty Hearst yelling commands at bank customers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patty_Hearst
__________________________________________________

Soliah-Olson timeline: Radical, bank robber, mom, inmate
Last update: March 21, 2008

(snip)

May 1999: The TV show "America's Most Wanted" features Soliah. The FBI offers a $20,000 reward for her on the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles shootout.

June 16, 1999: Olson is arrested in St. Paul, where she and her family live in an ivy-covered house in the Highland Park neighborhood.

July 1999: Olson signs papers in St. Paul that acknowledge she is the SLA fugitive. She waives extradition and is sent to California to face charges in connection with the 1975 crime. After 35 days in jail, she returns home after being freed on $1 million bail, raised by friends and supporters.

August 1999: Olson legally changes her name from Kathleen Ann Soliah.

September 1999: Trial date set for Jan. 10, 2000.

October 1999: A judge rules that the history of the Symbionese Liberation Army is fair game for prosecutors seeking to convict Olson, saying past crimes attributed to the SLA would be relevant.

December 1999: Olson publishes a 100-page cookbook called "Serving Time: America's Most Wanted Recipes" to raise funds for her defense. She asks that her trial be televised.

May 2000: Trial delayed until Jan. 8, 2001. Patty Hearst violates judge's gag order in case, implicating Olson in a Sacramento-area bank robbery and murder.

July 2000: Judge lifts gag order in case. Olson begins speaking out in public, saying her trial will become a credibility contest between her and Hearst, slamming her prosecution as politically motivated.

January 2001: After President Clinton pardons Hearst, Olson asks district attorney to drop charges against her.

February 2001: Authorities in Sacramento, Calif., say they've reopened their investigation into a fatal 1975 bank robbery that they allege involved Olson and SLA members.

October 2001: Olson pleads guilty in the pipe bomb case, is later sentenced to 14 years in prison.

February 2003: Olson is sentenced to six years in prison for her role in the fatal bank robbery. The other defendants -- SLA cohorts Emily Montague, William Harris and Michael Bortin -- were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to eight years. In court, Jon Opsahl, the son of the woman killed during the robbery, called the four defendants "monsters" and "a group of pathetic, deranged revolutionaries who simply decided one day to make my mother [Myrna Opsahl] instantly and permanently expendable."

March 17 [2008]: Olson is [mistakenly released a year early...] from prison. [this timeline is from 2008, so doesn't include the latest -etl]

http://www.startribune.com/local/16892976.html?elr=KArks:DCiUoaW_eEO7UiacyKUUr
___________________________________________________

Sara Jane Olson and former fugitive Bernardine Dohrn chatted before Dohrn was to lead a panel discussion about conspiracy prosecutions of political activists in 2000.

Article:
http://www.startribune.com/local/stpaul/16944051.html

[NonValueAdded]

White House appointment in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...

[Hacklehead]

Someone needs to fill a cabinet position.

[yazoo]

“Sara Jane Olson and former fugitive Bernardine Dohrn chatted before Dohrn was to lead a panel discussion about conspiracy prosecutions of political activists in 2000.”

Using that logic, McVeigh was just a political activist.

[Waco]

0’b will appoint him to some well-paying, taxpayer funded gov’t job.

[A_Former_Democrat]

That whole SLA saga was one of the weirdest series of events I’ve ever seen. (Yes, I know this is an understatement!) So surreal.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

a former honors student from a wealthy Marin County family

There's a shocker.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

Laugh it up while you can, ladies. Eternity awaits.

[ETL]

That whole SLA saga was one of the weirdest series of events I’ve ever seen.

The Symbionese Liberation Army were comrades of the Weather Underground. Also the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panthers. ALL were communist revolutionaries/domestic terrorists. Of course the head-up-their-butt snooze media never informs their audiences of 'minor' details such as this. Even Sean Hannity failed to tell his audience that the Weather Underground were communist revolutionaries. He may have mentioned it once or twice while reading their quotes, but he certainly didn't make it widely known and go into any detail whatsoever about who and what they were. Part of the reason, no doubt, is due to his profound ignorance of the subject.

[Cindy]

stepping back in time...

QUOTE:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/850510/posts

A Boy Catches a Terrorst Gang
SF Gate (Chronicle) ^ | February 24th, 2003 | Adam Sparks
Posted on February 24, 2003 7:15:16 AM PST by sfwarrior

Jon Opsahl became an unlikely hero. He never forgot his mom’s brutal death at the hands of one of California’s most notorious terrorist gangs, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), when he was 14 years old. His relentless perseverance in helping find his mother’s killers eventually started police and prosecutors on a 28-year odyssey that ended with the rounding up of the vicious killers: the ringleaders of the SLA.

Jon’s mother, Myrna Opsahl, was 42 at the time of her death. She was killed during a robbery of the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, near Sacramento, on April 21, 1975. Opsahl, a mother of four, was simply doing the Lord’s work — depositing a church collection — when she was shot.

Jon later became a doctor — and a hero to many Californians because of his tireless work, helping bring a cabal of one of California’s strangest and most vicious group of fugitives to justice. He kept on putting the obscure pieces together in his mother’s case decades after prosecutors considered the case cold, and his fortitude is an inspiration to thousands, who now have seen that a simple idea, coupled with lots of sweat, can finally produce an elusive victory, and that there is justice.

He was just a teenager when his mother was shot. And when justice was finally rendered on Valentine’s Day of this year and the gavel went down on the SLA for the last time, Jon — whose lifetime of work and single-mindedness had paid off — was, ironically, the same age as his mother at the time of her death.

The SLA began in 1973 when a about a dozen mostly college-educated children of middle-class families went berserk. They were all united in their hatred and distrust for America, its government and its way of life. The same country that gave them such a comfortable life and a good education would now be the one they would attempt to destroy. I’m no Freud, but it sounds like parental hatred to me. The SLA’s angst made its members want to do much more than just carry protest signs, so they adopted an intimidating seven-headed snake as their symbol and made a black ex-convict their leader, and then the terror began. They began a vicious, decade-long rampage that would go down in the annals as one of California’s most violent crime sprees.

In 1973, the SLA made its debut. It first issued a “communiqué” claiming responsibility for the brutal murder of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster, a black man. Soon after that dramatic introduction, the SLA kidnapped 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley apartment in 1974. They bound her and locked her up in a small closet for weeks.

These idealists and humanitarians then brainwashed Hearst to a point that the kidnapping victim joined the SLA and began calling herself Tanya. This is a classic case of Stockholm syndrome, in which captors fall in love with or begin to sympathize and then later identify with their captors. Hearst was later seen assisting in the next SLA robbery, at a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco. The security-camera still of her holding an automatic rifle became famous.

After the robbery, in 1974, six heavily armed members of the SLA, including its leader, Donald DeFreeze, died in a shootout and fire that consumed their Los Angeles hideout. Fortunately for Patricia Hearst and SLA members Bill and Emily Harris, the trio escaped the shootout; they were busted during a shoplifting spree at a Los Angeles store. The Harrises eventually served eight years in prison for the Hearst kidnapping, and the shoplifting arrest may have saved the life of a young Patricia Hearst, who missed the fiery shootout.

The next year, 1975, Jon Opsahl’s mother, Myrna, was gunned down at yet another SLA bank robbery.

This past Valentine’s Day, Opsahl got the best Valentine’s wish of his life as he sat silently in a Sacramento courtroom and witnessed his life’s dream come to fruition: the sentencing of four of the five SLA members involved in his mom’s murder. Emily Montague, neé Harris, got eight years in prison; Montague’s ex-husband, William Harris, seven years; and Michael Bortin and Sarah Jane Olson, six years each.

Olson, known by her birth name, Kathleen Ann Soliah, when she was indicted in 1976 for her role in planting pipe bombs under two police cars in Los Angeles, was a fugitive until her capture in St. Paul, Minn., in 1999. She had built a life there as a doctor’s wife, a mother of three children and an active amateur actress (no kidding). She was well liked and well known among the upper echelon of St. Paul. (I guess this must be in the Left’s playbook: Mingle with the elite after a crime spree. It worked for the leaders of the Black Panthers, who were wined and dined by the New York Philharmonic’s Leonard Bernstein.)

When Olson was finally arrested, her liberal-minded Minnesota friends could hardly believe it. They raised the million-dollar bail in just 10 days. That’s chump change for Olson’s wealthy pals, who were...

(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...

[Vinnie]

These and several other injustices in the news lately cry out for ‘street justice’.