Patty Hearst kidnapped by the SLA
 I remember when the kidnapping occured. I was in Korea, listening to AFKN radio. Then the news was splashed was in the newspaper, then on the front of Newsweek. I followed the story closely, maybe because Patty was about my age. I was intreagued by the re-appearance of Patty as Tanya, then her capture, then her trial as a bank-robber. All very interesting. I even had a dream about meeting Patty (aka Tanya) on the street and deliberating over whether to turn her into the police. |
Patty Hearst’s kidnapping was a violent, bullet-riddled affair still fresh in the mind of a neighbor when I pulled up outside her apartment in Berkeley, Calif., the next morning in 1974. “They fired bullets into the street to keep us down,” said the young man, a fellow student who had rushed outside at the sounds of struggle. Hearst’s kidnappers forced her into a car and drove off into the night. As a young reporter for a Sacramento television station, I had no idea the Hearst story would ultimately wind up on the streets of my own town. That occurred months later, when Hearst joined her kidnappers in robbing a Sacramento-area bank. Surveillance photos captured the Symbionese Liberation Army team at work. They were stealing money to support themselves on the run. They got away to a safe house they had rented near an interstate highway that led to the Bay Area. The fugitives had come to Sacramento to attempt the rescue of two SLA members on trial for the murder of Oakland, Calif., Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster. Courthouse security was so tight that the rescue attempt was never carried out. Both men were convicted.
Surreal End, Unexpected Beginning Covering the murder trial, I wondered — like most of America — where the Hearst story would take us.
Finally, after Hearst was captured, I watched her mother complain outside her arraignment that her daughter deserved to be allowed to post bail — an improbable request, since she had been photographed as the revolutionary “Tania,” carrying a rifle and with SLA symbols in sight. That convinced many people that the kidnapping victim had become a terrorist accomplice. It was years later, after convincing many that she had joined only after being tortured, that was she pardoned.
The deaths of some of her comrades in a shootout with L.A. police made a surreal end to one phase of the story; her trial, conviction, imprisonment and release completed another phase. |