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Gary Thomas, prosecutor paralyzed in 1970 courthouse shootout, dies
San Francisco Chronicle ^ | April 21, 2017 | Kevin Fagan

Posted on 04/21/2017 7:42:53 PM PDT by artichokegrower

Gary Thomas went to work one hot August day in 1970 as just another prosecutor in Marin County, and by the end of the day he was a hero — but one who never let that title define the rest of his life.

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


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS:
The kidnappers had hustled their hostages into a van and were preparing to leave when one of them shot out a window. Another pulled the trigger on a shotgun taped to Haley’s head, killing the judge instantly. That’s when the Gary Thomas grabbed a .357-caliber pistol from one of the convicts and began firing.

By the time he was done, he had fatally shot three of the four convicts and had taken a bullet to the spine. He was paralyzed from the waist down. But he and the three jurors survived.


A hero died today. Too bad that festering pant load Angela Davis, who supplied the weapons to the murderers, is alive and collecting a State of California pension.

1 posted on 04/21/2017 7:42:53 PM PDT by artichokegrower
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To: artichokegrower

He was a hero. And Davis should have died in the joint.


2 posted on 04/21/2017 7:46:30 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: artichokegrower
ag, thank you for posting this. I reads the piece and note a major discrepancy, and I am not being critical, to be hones I am shocked. He died April 3, 2017. Over two weeks ago.

Again, this is not directed at you, but why is this just now being covered by the local media?

3 posted on 04/21/2017 7:52:43 PM PDT by Michael.SF. (Women who are 25 pounds overweight tend to live longer than the men who mention it.)
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To: Michael.SF.
I reads the piece ????

Sorry, I slipped into ebonics on that one.

4 posted on 04/21/2017 7:54:53 PM PDT by Michael.SF. (Women who are 25 pounds overweight tend to live longer than the men who mention it.)
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To: artichokegrower
These guns were supplied by Angela Davis! The FBI at that time screwed up the case so bad and she walked!

And HERE IS THE COMMUNIST who bailed her out of jail! From LIFE MAGAZINE...


5 posted on 04/21/2017 8:26:24 PM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar ("You know Caligula?" --- "Worse! Caligula knows me!")
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To: dragnet2

a good man....a real man.....God bless his soul...


6 posted on 04/21/2017 8:29:34 PM PDT by cherry
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To: Ruy Dias de Bivar

The McAfees are well known to us in California agriculture:

When a new E. coli strain sickened several children, the culprit appeared to be raw milk from a Fresno dairy. What had started as a small revolution was now on the front lines.
December 03, 2006|Mark Arax

In the days and weeks of the great E. coli hunt of 2006, it was hard to find farmers more befuddled than the spinach farmers of central California. Their crop had sickened hundreds of people across the country—three were dead—and now they had come out of the fields to stand in the open, where no farmer wants to stand. They looked like victims of a hit and run. How the Escherichia coli bacteria known as O157:H7 had managed to strike their perfect rows of spinach they couldn’t begin to explain. Whether by water or wind or compost or wild swine, the vector was as much a mystery to them as it was to the scores of state and federal investigators now ransacking their fields. The farmers would not rest until they personally had tracked down the pathogen’s source and wiped it clean from the Salinas Valley.

Then one evening in late September, the mass dumping of spinach gave way to a new threat hiding out in the refrigerator, and a farmer with a different face showed up on TV. He hadn’t shaved in a week and his eyes had the look of a man with two hands squeezed around his throat. His name was Mark McAfee, and he ran a dairy and grew almonds 100 miles to the south in the San Joaquin Valley. The state of California had just linked five distinct cases of E. coli poisoning to his milk—raw organic milk—and imposed a quarantine and recall. All of the victims were children. A 7-year-old boy from Riverside County and a 10-year-old girl from San Bernardino County were fighting for their lives inside the same intensive-care unit at Loma Linda University Medical Center. This sub strain of O157:H7 was intricately different from the sub strain carried by the spinach. Indeed, this incarnation of E. coli had never been seen in the U.S.
Yet rather than dump the milk, the hard-core among McAfee’s 15,000 customers in California, who regarded the recall as nothing more than a government conspiracy to deny them “living food,” raced for the last bottles on the health-food market shelves. McAfee—the nation’s biggest producer of raw milk, milk not pasteurized or homogenized, milk straight from the cow’s udder to a child’s mouth with only a cotton sock filter in between—did not discourage them. Before he could bring himself to believe that his cows had sickened anyone, the state would have to find the fingerprints of the O157:H7 subtype in his milk or at his dairy, just as investigators had done with the spinach. And that hadn’t happened, at least not yet.

“I told the state, ‘Have at it. Take your probes and poke into every crevice and crack on these 400 acres.’ So 16 state inspectors in their little plastic spacesuits came here and took hundreds of samples. I lifted my kilt for full inspection and they did every test in the book. They tested the milk, the drains, the bottling machines, the milkers, the rear ends of cows, the fresh manure in the pasture, the fresh manure off the udders. Not a pathogen anywhere. No O157:H7. No salmonella. No listeria. So why am I still shut down?” He glared. “Because they’re afraid of the revolution.”

McAfee watched himself on the news that night. He wondered if people saw the same thing he saw. Isn’t that Rodger McAfee’s son? Sounds just like the old man. Commie father. Commie son. A thousand revolutions left undone. Isn’t that the same land Rodger used to bail Angela Davis out of jail? Wasn’t his youngest son killed because of all his malarkey? As hard as Mark McAfee had tried to suppress the traits of his father, it was plain to see the patrimony. In some ways, that bit of Rodger was the best part of his oldest son. How else could he explain, after all, that he, too, had become a heretic on the land?

Mark McAfee had come to believe, like the physicians of the first half of the 20th century believed, that raw milk is powerful medicine. Through the chemistry of what is known in the naturopathic movement as probiotics, McAfee had seen his milk cure asthma in kids and irritable bowels in adults. For thousands of years, man and cow had shared the same space. The farther we as a society had moved away from our cows and our soil, science was showing, the more sick we had become. Without our barns and our pastures, we didn’t have the inoculation of the farm to help us fight off the bad bugs. Raw fresh milk, in all its living, breathing culture, was the blood of the farm sent straight to the city. All those steroid inhalers, all those little purple pills to treat the old-fashioned heartburn that the pharmaceutical industry had turned into billion-dollar diseases with the acronyms of war—I.B.S., G.E.R.D.—were rubbish as far as Mark McAfee was concerned. They were just one glass of fresh raw milk removed from the trash heap


7 posted on 04/21/2017 8:36:22 PM PDT by artichokegrower
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To: artichokegrower

Very interesting. Thanks for the reference.

“This is a war between me and the state.” McAfee was a liberal like his father who sees the state as the enemy. Then why would McAfee support communism which just makes the state a bigger enemy? Capitalism makes the state a much smaller enemy and expects individuals to be virtuous.

Note to Mark McAfee. Five kids are suffering because of your milk. Please be decent and support the state inspectors.


8 posted on 04/21/2017 9:25:31 PM PDT by Falconspeed ("Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others." Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94))
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To: Falconspeed

Did you read that? It was 10 years ago, and it wasn’t found there to boot...


9 posted on 04/22/2017 1:14:52 AM PDT by Axenolith (Government blows, and that which governs least, blows least...)
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To: artichokegrower

A true hero

Killed several Soledad black trash murderers


10 posted on 04/22/2017 1:38:54 AM PDT by wardaddy (Multiculturalism: Everyone wants to inhabit the world of white men with no white men in it)
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To: artichokegrower

Prayers to Gerry Thomas’ family. He was a hero...


11 posted on 04/22/2017 5:23:34 AM PDT by ConservaTeen (Islam is Not the Religion of Peace, but The religion of Pedophilia...)
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