8 arrests in 1971 police killing in S.F.

bombsandshields.com

Richard O'Neal, Harold Taylor, Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, and Herman Bell

San Fransisco, California, U.S. - Eight veterans of the Black Panther Party (BPP,) seven of whom are accused of belonging to the Black Liberation Army (BLA,) were arrested today on charges stemming from the 1971 shooting death of San Fransisco Police Sgt. John V. Young.

The August 29, 1971 attack on the Ingleside Police Station came only eight days after San Quentin prison guards gunned down BPP Field Marshal "Soledad Brother" George Jackson. The murder of Jackson provoked threats of retaliation and even sparked the Attica Prison rebellion.

Seven of the men arrested, all suspected BLA members, were charged with murder and conspiracy. They are Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64, of Altadena; Richard Brown, 65, of San Francisco; Herman Bell, 59, and Jalil Abdul Muntaqim formerly known as Anthony Bottom, 55, both currently incarcerated in New York state; Henry Watson Jones, 71, of Altadena; Francisco Torres, 58, of Queens, New York; and Harold Taylor, 58, of Panama City, Florida.

Another suspect, Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, 62, was still being sought on murder and conspiracy charges. Authorities believe he could be in France, Belize or Tanzania.

Taylor and two others faced murder charges in 1973, but the case was dismissed after a San Francisco judge that torture was used to extract confessions from the men. San Francisco Police Department Inspectors Frank McCoy and Ed Erdelatz were present for the interrogation and torture which consisted of stripping the men naked and beating them with a lead pipe, blind folding them and throwing wool blankets soaked with boiling water over their bodies, placing electric probes on their genitals and other body parts, inserting an electric cattle prod in their anus, punching and kicking, and slamming them into walls while blindfolded.

McCoy and Erdelatz came out of retirement to lead investigation when the case was reopened sometime in 2002. The decision to re-investigate the incident followed the Department of Justice's expanding prosecution of political crimes in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Bell's attorney Stuart Hanlon called the arrests a "prosecution based on vengeance and hate from the '60s." "There's a law enforcement attitude that they hate these people, the Panthers," Hanlon said. "Now they're going after old men."

By MARCUS WOHLSEN, Associated Press Writer Jan. 23, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO - Eight men were arrested Tuesday in the 1971 slaying of a police officer that authorities say was part of a black power group's five-year campaign to kill law enforcement officers in San Francisco and New York.

Police said seven of the eight are believed to be former members of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party.

The Aug. 29, 1971, shooting death of Sgt. John V. Young, 51, at a San Francisco police station was one in a series of attacks by BLA members on law enforcement officials on both coasts, police said.

The attacks, carried out between 1968 and 1973, also included the bombing of a police funeral in San Francisco and the slayings of two New York City police officers, as well as three armed bank robberies that helped fund their operations, police said.

The arrests were just the latest attempt in recent years to hold antiwar radicals and black-power militants responsible for crimes committed a generation ago.

The investigation of the Black Liberation Army killing spree was reopened in 1999 after "advances in forensic science led to the discovery of new evidence in one of the unsolved cases," the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement.

Morris Tabak, the department's deputy chief of investigations, would not elaborate on the evidence except to say: "It could be fibers. It could be DNA. It could be other biological evidence."

Murder and conspiracy charges were filed against Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64, of Altadena; Richard Brown, 65, of San Francisco; Herman Bell, 59, and Anthony Bottom, 55, both behind bars in New York state; Henry Watson Jones, 71, of Altadena; Francisco Torres, 58, of New York City; and Harold Taylor, 58, of Panama City, Fla.

Bell's lawyer, San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon, called the arrests a "prosecution based on vengeance and hate from the '60s."

"There's a law enforcement attitude that they hate these people, the Panthers," Hanlon said. "Now they're going after old men."

Richard O'Neal, 57, of San Francisco, was also arrested on conspiracy charges.

A ninth suspect, Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, 62, was still being sought. Police said he could be in France, Belize or Tanzania.

It's unclear whether Bridgeforth and O'Neal were members of the Black Liberation Army.

None of the suspects will face the death penalty, said Maggy Krell, deputy state attorney general. The death penalty law in effect at the time of the attack was declared unconstitutional in 1972.

The slain officer was killed when Bell and Torres, armed with guns and dynamite, raided a neighborhood police station, firing a shotgun through a hole in the lobby's bulletproof window, as accomplices were posted outside as lookouts, according to police officials in New York. A civilian clerk was wounded. Torres is accused of trying to ignite the dynamite as the pair fled the station, but the explosives failed.

The station was nearly empty that night as most officers responded to a diversionary bombing of a bank by other conspirators, according to the NYPD.

After his arrest Tuesday in New York, Torres called the case "a frame-up."

Three men, including Taylor, were charged in the attack in 1975. But the charges were thrown out by a San Francisco judge because of a ruling that evidence was obtained by torture after the suspects were arrested in New Orleans.

Bell and Bottom are serving life sentences for the killings of two New York police officers.

Another suspect in Young's slaying, John Bowman of Oklahoma, died in December, according to his lawyer, Ann Moorman of Ukiah.

In some other cases dating to the Vietnam era, Sara Jane Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, was arrested in 1999. A former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army — the radical group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974 — she pleaded guilty and was sent to prison for the 1975 attempted bombings of Los Angeles police cars and a Sacramento-area bank robbery that left a woman dead. Four other former SLA members were also sent to prison in the robbery.

Katherine Ann Power, an antiwar radical implicated in a fatal bank robbery in Boston in 1970, surrendered in 1993 and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

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Associated Press Writers Kim Curtis and Juliana Barbassa in San Francisco and Tom Hays in New York City contributed to this report.