I don't know if he has any surviving family, but even if so, they'd have zero chance of success. If the Federal Government couldn't bring the investigation to trial when they reopened the case in 2003, a civil suit would be doomed.
Then there's the issue of lawyers' fees -- if you read the kron4 series linked above, anyone bringing a civil suit would be facing an army of lawyers, as the federal prosecutor did, with all the time in the world to waste while jacking up fees for the plaintiff. Also consider that many of the WU and Black Panthers (the '71 murder was definitely a BP job, since the WU were too cowardly for direct gunplay) have since made it into respectable positions, even within the justice system itself, as per this description of one of those subpoenaed in 2003:
"He's an African American about 50 to 52 years of age, well respected in the community. [He] works in a government capacity -- in fact he's even worked at the Hall of Justice. He was referred to me by police officers who think of him in the very highest regard," says [lawyer] O'Sullivan.
Many of the Weathermen came from wealthy and powerful families, not least of which was Tom Ayers, father of Bill. It's been said that he was slated for a position in the Nixon administration, but Bill's antics ruined his chances. He was liberal Republican at best, and it's not inconceivable that he had a hand in his son and DIL walking away from their crimes, "guilty as sin, free as a bird."
Not Black Panthers,***Black Liberation Army.
From the article...
"The first murder occurred in February of 1970 [Bernardine Dohrn strongly suspected] when officer Brian McDonnell was killed after a bomb exploded at Park Police Station. Then the following year, sergeant John Young lost his life when two men walked into Ingleside station and began shooting at officers sitting behind a glass partition. For three decades, the police murders remained unsolved. The evidence collected at the crime scenes sat in the police property room. ... Sources tell us, those investigators identified as potential suspects are former members of two militant groups in the 60's and 70's: the Weather Underground and the ***Black Liberation Army.
Article: Patriot Act Used to Reopen Murder Case?
November 11, 2003
http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1521312
Here's another case from 10 years later. The WU and BLA had robbed a Brinks truck in order to help finance future bombings, likely to protest events then taking place in S. Africa and/or Nicaragua. Ayers, having turned himself in in 1980, was attending Bank Street College in New York City. Obama was 4 blocks away at Columbia at the time. It is not known if the two met at this time.
The 1981 Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army-related Triple Murder in Nyack, NY
From David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
"On October 20, 1981 -- long after the Weather Underground had ceased to exist -- former Underground member Kathy Boudin and her soon-to-be husband, David Gilbert, were accomplices in the robbery of a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York. In the course of that heist, one Brinks guard and two Nyack police officers were murdered. Also involved in the robbery was Judith Clark, who had served a prison term for her participation in the 'Days of Rage.' Boudin hired attorney Leonard Weinglass, a law partner of her father, to defend her in the case.
Weinglass arranged for a plea bargain whereby Boudin pled guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for a prison sentence of twenty years to life. She was paroled in 2003, however, over strong opposition from New York State police. Gilbert remains in New York's Attica State Prison, having refused to bargain.
In 1985, former Weather Underground members Susan Rosenberg (who also was implicated in the Nyack robbery [Brinks truck robbery/murder]) and Linda Evans were apprehended while transporting 740 pounds of explosives which they both acknowledged were slated for use in additional bombings. Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years in prison, Evans 40; President Bill Clinton pardoned both women in January 2001."
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808
AMBUSH: THE BRINKS ROBBERY OF 1981
[triple murder involving former Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army and Black Panthers members]
Jeral Wayne Williams (AKA Mutulu Shakur)
[stepfather of murdered rapper Tupac Shakur]
"The armored truck's final stop was the Nanuet National Bank on the second level of the mall. The crew was due to pick up almost $1.6 million dollars in cash from the bank. Inside the truck was an additional several hundred dollars in cash from earlier collections. Pete Paige was assigned to guard his partner as he handled the cash. His partner was assigned to enter the bank, retrieve the moneybags with Paige and place them into the back of the armored vehicle.
Also in the same parking lot that afternoon was a red Chevy van that cruised the area while the guards went inside the mall. The rear and side windows had been covered with plastic so no one could see inside. Inside the van was a man named Mutulu Shakur, 31, already a veteran of several armored car and bank robberies committed in the Bronx, Mt. Vernon, NY and Paramus, NJ. Shakur was an adopted name. His real name, or slave name as he described it, was Jeral Wayne Williams. He was a black nationalist who ran a financially corrupt acupuncture clinic in Lincoln Hospital in New York City, the first such clinic in the Bronx. Williams was an articulate and persuasive individual who recruited many disciples to follow him. Under the banner of black self-determination, he convinced his accomplices that it was up to them to seize funds from legitimate sources and "redistribute" the money to various black causes. With each robbery committed, the gang improved on its methods and became more sophisticated. They studied the reaction of guards and the police. They took the time to learn how police handled and investigated such crimes. Then, they made the appropriate adjustments on the next job.
"David J. Gilbert, 37, rented the vehicle that same day in the Bronx. Gilbert was a long time member of the Weather Underground and a fugitive from the state of Colorado where he faced charges of assault and possession of explosives. The passenger in the front seat of the U Haul was Kathy Boudin [another former Weather Underground member], on the run from the law since the townhouse explosion in 1970. The couple had dropped off their one-year old child with a babysitter in the morning and was waiting for the return of the red van."
"In the back of the red van were Cecilio 'Chui' Ferguson, 35, Samuel Brown AKA Solomon Bouines, 41, Samuel Smith AKA Mtayari Sundiata, 37, and Donald Weems AKA Kuwasi Balagoon, 35. There were others present, but it has never been proven who, or how many. All the men in back of the van were members of a group they called 'The Family.' Most of them had ties to the Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army, radical political groups that had many violent confrontations with police during the 1970s."
"At approximately 3:55 p.m., Paige, a 24-year Brink's veteran and his partner, Joe Trombino, 48, exited the doors to the Mall rolling out the moneybags on a hand truck. They walked over to the Brink's truck and began to load up the bags onto the rear deck. Simultaneously, the red van pulled up and the rear doors swung open. One of the suspects, armed with a shotgun, ran to the front of the truck and immediately fired two blasts directly at the bulletproof windshield. The guard in the front seat ducked just in time and was unhurt.
Another suspect, wearing a ski mask, opened up with his M-16 automatic rifle before his feet even hit the pavement, striking Paige in the neck, arm and chest. He was killed instantly.
Joe Trombino fired just one shot before he was hit several times in his upper arm and shoulder. The bullets all but severed his arm off his shoulder. "I've got no arm!" he screamed. But Trombino would survive that day, only to perish years later in another terrorist attack at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001."
http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/terrorists/brinks/4.html
David Gilbert (mugshot)
and Kathy Boudin (right)
"Their founding document [the Weather Underground's] called for the establishment of a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "anti-colonial" movements[1] to achieve "the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism."..."-Berger, Dan (2006). Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. AK Press, 95.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_Underground#cite_ref-Berger_0-0
Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Paperback) by Dan Berger
http://www.amazon.com/Outlaws-America-Underground-Politics-Solidarity/dp/1904859410
The Investigation
The suspects were often described as "urban terrorists" in the press and cops everywhere were deeply worried about the role of the Black Liberation Army.
The B.L.A. was a notorious and violent group of extremists who planned and carried out unprovoked shootings of uniformed police officers. During the 1970s and early 1980s, there were several of these types of killings of which the B.L.A. were suspect. On May 20, 1971, New York City Police Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones were shot and killed in an ambush in Harlem. The following year, on January 28, 1972, officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie were murdered outside a restaurant in Manhattan. Another such shooting occurred on the night of April 16, 1981 when uniform cops pulled over a suspicious van in the St. Alban's section of Queens. Without any warning, two men jumped out of the rear of the van with machine guns and opened up on the unsuspecting cops. Both were immediately killed. This cold-blooded killing enraged cops everywhere. A later investigation indicated that an escaped radical, Joannne Chesimard, one of the most sought after individuals in America, may have been in that van. She was serving a life sentence for her role in the murder of a New Jersey State trooper in 1973 when she escaped from custody in 1979. This theory was never proven, but to this day, many of the investigators who worked on that case believed it to be true.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/terrorists/brinks/10.html
"[Bernardine] Dohrn [Bill Ayers' co-terrorist wife] once was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List. She served seven months in prison for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating a 1981 armored truck robbery in Nyack, N.Y., in which two police officers [and 1 Brinks guard] were killed."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011101/aponline190504_000.htm
"They [Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn] later became legal guardians of Chesa Boudin, the son of former Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, after his parents were arrested for their part in the Brinks Robbery of 1981.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
Marcia Froelke Coburn of ChicagoMag.com reveals the reason for the Ayers' children's names:
"For two radicals once living underground, Ayers and [Bernardine] Dohrn have raised three accomplished children: Zayd (named for a fallen Black Liberation soldier and colleague), 24, graduated from Brown University and has an M.F.A. degree in writing from Boston University, where he now teaches; Malik (for Malcolm X), 21, is attending the University of California at San Diego; and Chesa, 20, their adopted son, just finished his sophomore year at Yale University."
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/08/obamas-benefact.html
"Officer Waverly Brown and Sergeant Edward O'Grady were shot and killed by heavily armed members of the Black Liberation Army who had just robbed a bank and were attempting to escape. The suspects had just murdered an armored car guard and wounded two other guards before loading themselves into the back of a rental truck to be driven away by accomplices. The truck was stopped at a roadblock manned by several Nyack officers."
Sergeant Edward O'Grady
http://www.odmp.org/officer/10136-sergeant-edward-j.-ogrady-jr.
Officer Waverly Brown
http://www.odmp.org/officer/2372-police-officer-waverly-l.-brown
BRINKS KIN RIP JUDGE
By MARSHA KRANES
September 27, 2006 -- Outraged relatives of the two cops and a security guard slain in the 1981 Brinks armored-car heist blasted a federal judge yesterday for ordering that the woman convicted of driving the getaway car get a new trial.
"It defies comprehension. It defies logic," the son of slain Brinks guard Peter Paige said of the decision handed down by Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin.
Meet the Newest Member of the Faculty
Clinton pardons a terrorist, and now she's teaching in Clinton, N.Y.
BY ROGER KIMBALL
Friday, December 3, 2004
At Hamilton College--an elite liberal arts institution in Clinton, N.Y.--you can take courses in Roman civilization, Shakespeare and the "Emergence of Modern Western Europe, 1500-1815." All well and good. You can also take something called "Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change." That last course--a month-long, half-credit seminar--is scheduled to begin next month. Its teacher is Susan Rosenberg, formerly of the Weather Underground.
Remember the Weather Underground? Its self-described revolutionaries, mostly middle-class, dedicated themselves to supporting radical black causes and tearing apart American society in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1970, they blew up a townhouse when a bomb detonated prematurely and killed a few of their troops. Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and other high-profile members of the group spent the next decade or so running from the police and, some of them, continuing to pursue careers in criminal violence.
Ms. Rosenberg did her part. In October 1981, in an operation code-named "The Big Dance," several black radicals and members of the Weather Underground held up a Brinks armored car in Nanuet, N.Y. In the course of that act of domestic terrorism, they murdered Peter Paige, a Brinks guard, and police officers Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown, the only black officer on the Nyack, N.Y., force. Ms. Rosenberg, then still at large, was indicted as an accessory.
According to John Castellucci's "The Big Dance," an account of the Brinks robbery, Ms. Rosenberg's role in the Brinks job was performing surveillance, driving a getaway car and transmitting orders. "Any white who had taken part in the robbery," Mr. Castellucci writes, "would have received orders from her."
Mr. Castellucci reports that the Brinks robbery was only one of several violent episodes that Ms. Rosenberg was involved with in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was finally apprehended in November 1984 while unloading a cache of weapons--including 740 pounds of explosives--at a storage facility in Cherry Hill, N.J. ..."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110005979
_________________________________________________________
"Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work for a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment. In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review."
http://obama.senate.gov/about/
_________________________________________________________
Bill Ayers' education:
1987 - Ed.D, Columbia University, Curriculum & Instruction
1987 - M.Ed, Teachers College, Columbia University, Early Childhood Education
1984 - M.Ed, Bank Street College, Early Childhood Education
1968 - B.A., University of Michigan, American Studies
http://education.uic.edu/directory/faculty_info.cfm?netid=bayers
_________________________________________________________
Bank Street College
Where We Are and How to Get Here:
Bank Street College is located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 610 West 112th Street, between Broadway and Riverside Drive.
Bank Street College is located in a bustling family and university neighborhood four blocks from Columbia University
http://www.bankstreet.edu/aboutbsc/visiting.html
Did some looking around about Ayers and Nixon, and found out the left is outraged about a guy named Arnie Webber, who apparently worked for Nixon sat on the Annenberg Challenge with Bill Ayers and gave McCain $1,500. One site calls far left site calls Webber a terrorist.
The whole thing is stupid, if they want to call Webber a terrorist for sitting on that board, then they might as well call Barack one too.