LAPD/SLA Shootout Leaves Six Dead!

By Patrick Mondout

On May 17, 1974, Los Angeles police department officers and SWAT team members surrounded the safehouse where suspected Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) members were hiding. The resulting televised shootout and fire left six SLA members dead (Nancy Ling Perry, Angela Atwood, Willie Wolfe, Donald DeFreeze, Patricia Soltysik, and Camilla Hall).

As the drama unfolded on nationwide TV, an estimated 10,000 people crowded the streets around the neighborhood and hundreds of cops were brought in as much for crowd control. Members of the SLA assumed the many in Compton would rise up in revolution but it never happened.

After the house was set ablaze with gas canisters by police, Nancy Ling Perry and Camilla Hall ran outside firing their guns and were shot dead. The other four SLA members died inside of the house either from gunshot wounds (self-inflicted, in Donald DeFreeze's case) or smoke inhalation (despite having gas masks).

Three other SLA members, Patty Hearst plus Bill & Emily Harris, watch the events unfold on TV in their L.A. hotel room - a day after Patty fired a shotgun at the front of a sporting goods store. They retreated to the Bay area. When the house burned, no one had any idea where Patty Hearst was. It was not until the medical examiner identified the six bodies the next day that the FBI knew she was still on the run.

The SLA - a small, domestic terrorist organization - had kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in February and had committed a deadly bank robbery a month earlier. You can read much more about the shootout and the Symbionese Liberation Army on our SLA page.

References/Bibliography

• Shana Alexander, Anyone's Daughter: The Times and Trials of Patricia Hearst,
• Carolyn Anspacher & the San Francisco Chronicle, The Trial of Patty Hearst, Great Fidelity Press, 1976.
• Marilyn Baker, Exclusive!: the inside story of Patricia Hearst and the SLA, Macmillan Publishing, 1974.
• Mary F. Beal, Safe House: A Casebook Study of Revolutionary Feminism in the 1970's, Northwest Matrix, 1976.
• Jerry Belcher & Don West, Patty/Tania, Pyramid Books, 1975
• David Boulton, The Making Of Tania Hearst, Bergenfield, N.J., U.S.A.: New American Library, 1975
• John Bryan, This Soldier Still At War, (on Joe Remiro) Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975
• Patty Hearst with Alvin Moscow, Patty Hearst: Her Own Story, New York: Avon, 1982. This was the title after the movie came out. Original title: Every Secret Thing.
• Sharon D. Hendry, Soliah: The Sara Jane Olson Story, Cable Publishing, 2002.
• Janey Jimenez (U.S. Marshal who escorted Hearst between prison and the court during the trial) with Ted Berkman, My Prisoner, Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977.
• Jean Brown Kinney, An American journey: The short life of Willy Wolfe, Simon and Schuster, 1976.
• Vin McLellan, Paul Avery, The voices of guns: The definitive and dramatic story of the twenty-two-month career of the Symbionese Liberation Army, one of the most bizarre chapters in the history of the American Left, Putnam, 1977.
• John Pascal, The Strange Case of Patty Hearst, New American Library, 1974.
• Findley & Craven Payne, Life and Death of the SLA, Ballantine, 1976.
• Robert Brainard Pearsall, Symbionese Liberation Army: Documents and Communications, Rodopi, 1974
• Fred Soltysik, In Search of a Sister 1976.
• Steven Weed, with Scott Swanton. My Search for Patty Hearst, New York: Warner, 1976. Weed was Hearst's boyfriend at the time of the kidnapping. That was the end of their relationship.
• Video: Patty Hearst, based on Every Secret Thing, directed by Paul Schrader, 1988.
• Video: The Ordeal of Patty Hearst (1979) (TV)
• Video: Patty Hearst: The E! True Hollywood Story (2000) (TV)
• Video: Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army aka Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, Directed by Robert Stone, 2004, documentary.

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