Posted on 02/24/2003 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 ...
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