Donald DeFreeze

Donald David DeFreeze, also known as "General Field Marshal Cinque Mtume," was the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Born November 15, 1943, DeFreeze was a career criminal and informant for the LAPD who emerged from the California penal system's Vacaville Medical Facility, where he had been during the time of the MKULTRA experiments. At Vacaville, DeFreeze came under the tutelage of Colston Westbrook, a CIA psychological warfare specialist who ran the Black Cultural Association at the facility. Westbrook enlisted DeFreeze into the organization, which connected white radical leftist students from Berkeley with Black prisoners.¹

Escape and SLA Formation

DeFreeze, an armed robber, had obtained early release from Vacaville by performing a "favor" for prison authorities, a reference to submitting to psychiatric experiments, before eventually being transferred to Soledad Prison from which he escaped on March 5, 1973, and formed the SLA in the Berkeley, California area later that year. The SLA was a radical left-wing group that committed a series of violent acts including assassination, kidnapping, and bank robbery. ¹

The Marcus Foster Assassination

The SLA went public with the assassination of African-American Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster on November 6, 1973. Foster was the first African-American superintendent of Oakland's public schools. The SLA claimed they killed him over a proposed student ID card program they characterized as a surveillance tool. Two weeks earlier, a neo-Nazi group had issued a flyer predicting Foster's death. "Black men" were witnessed scurrying from the scene, but the arrested shooters were white. Blackface makeup was discovered in their apartments.¹

The Patty Hearst Kidnapping

On February 4, 1974, the SLA kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. On April 3, 1974, Hearst announced she was joining the SLA and took the name "Tania." She participated in a bank robbery on April 15, 1974, one of the most widely publicized crimes of the era. Hearst was later arrested, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in prison, though President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence after two years.¹

Death

On May 17, 1974, DeFreeze and five other SLA members were killed during a police siege of a Los Angeles safe house. The confrontation was one of the first major televised police operations in American history and resulted in the burning of the building.¹