Patty Hearst SLA what does SLA stand for The SLA was formed through contacts made by a study group, coordinated by a University of California, Does it show dates  SLA was formed? I don't know. Are there names listed of the group SLA Radical penal activists and future SLA members Russell Little and William Wolfe took DeFreeze to Patricia Soltysik's house.
What happened they took DeFreeze to Patricias' house?
What happened Radical penal activists and future SLA members Russell Little and William Wolfe  took DeFreeze to Patricias' house?
The SLA was formed through contacts made by a study group, coordinated by a University of California, Berkeley professor. Its purpose was the tutelage of black inmates, and over time the ethos became increasingly radicalized. Eventually, black convicts came to be viewed as heroic political prisoners, victimized by a racist American society. On March 5, 1973, Donald DeFreeze escaped from prison. Radical penal activists and future SLA members Russell Little and William Wolfe took DeFreeze to Patricia Soltysik's house. The SLA was led by DeFreeze, who, after a prison acquaintance named Wheeler left, was the only African American in the group. By the time the group became active, most of the members of the tiny group were women, some of whom have, like Soltysik and her roommate Nancy Ling Perry, been described as in lesbian relationships. The members included William and Emily Harris and Angela Atwood. DeFreeze was suspected by many of being a government provocateur, but his race and prison time gave him unquestioned authority in the SLA. He also had sexual dominion over women in the group. They acquired resources by robbing homes in the Bay Area. The first proposed operation, assassinating the head of the state penitentiaries, was cancelled because of possible repercussions for inmates; instead, Marcus Foster, a black educator regarded by the SLA as a fascist who had brought police onto school campuses, was targeted and killed. DeFreeze's estimation of the military strength of the then dozen-strong SLA group was hyperbolic, and he gave himself a concomitantly grandiose title of 'field marshal'. Soltysik is believed to have created much of the SLA ideological material, which stated the organization was opposed to "racism, sexism, agism [sic], fascism, individualism, competitiveness, possessiveness and all other institutions that have made or sustained capitalism". CANNOTANSWER
By the time the group became active, most of the members of the tiny group were women, some of whom have, like Soltysik
Patricia Campbell Hearst (born February 20, 1954) is an American author and actress, and granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. She first became known for the events following her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was found and arrested 19 months after being abducted, by which time she was a fugitive wanted for serious crimes committed with members of the group. She was held in custody, and there was speculation before trial that her family's resources would enable her to avoid time in prison.

At her trial, the prosecution suggested that Hearst had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army of her own volition. However, she testified that she had been raped and threatened with death while held captive. In 1976, she was convicted for the crime of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years in prison, later reduced to 7 years. Her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and she was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

Background

Family
Hearst's grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, created the largest newspaper, magazine, newsreel, and movie business in the world. Her great-grandmother was philanthropist Phoebe Hearst. The family was associated with immense political influence and a position of anti-Communism since before World War II.

Early life and education
Patricia Hearst, who prefers to be called "Patricia" rather than "Patty", was born on February 20, 1954, in San Francisco, California, the third of five daughters of Randolph Apperson Hearst and Catherine Wood Campbell. She grew up primarily in Hillsborough, and attended its Crystal Springs School for Girls and the Santa Catalina School in Monterey. She attended Menlo College in Atherton, California, before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley.

Hearst's father was only one of a number of heirs, and did not have control of the Hearst interests, so her parents did not consider it necessary to take measures for their children's personal security. At the time of her abduction, Hearst was a sophomore at Berkeley, studying art history. She lived with her fiancé, Steven Weed, in an apartment in Berkeley.

Kidnapping
On February 4, 1974, 19-year-old Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment. An urban guerrilla left-wing group, called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), claimed responsibility for the abduction.

Motives
Hearst's kidnapping was partly opportunistic, as she happened to live near the SLA hideout. According to testimony at trial, the group's main intention was to leverage the Hearst family's political influence to free two SLA members who had been arrested for Marcus Foster's killing. Faced with the failure to free the imprisoned men, the SLA demanded that the captive's family distribute $70 worth of food to every needy Californian – an operation that would cost an estimated $400 million. In response, Hearst's father took out a loan and arranged the immediate donation of $2 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area, in an operation called "People in Need." After the distribution descended into chaos, the SLA refused to release Hearst.

Hearst's account
According to Hearst's later testimony, she was held for a week in a closet, blindfolded and with her hands tied, during which time SLA founder and leader Cinque (Donald DeFreeze) repeatedly threatened her with death. She was let out for meals and blindfolded, and subsequently began to join in the political discussions. She was given a flashlight for reading and SLA political tracts to memorize. Hearst was confined in the closet for weeks, after which she said, "DeFreeze told me that the war council had decided or was thinking about killing me or me staying with them, and that I better start thinking about that as a possibility." Hearst said, "I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs." In a different account, Hearst said she had been offered the choice of being released or joining the SLA.

When asked for her decision, Hearst said she wanted to stay and fight with the SLA. The blindfold was removed, allowing her to see her captors for the first time. After this she was given daily lessons on her duties, especially weapon drills. Angela Atwood told Hearst that the others thought she should know what sexual freedom was like in the unit; according to her lawyer, Hearst was allegedly raped by William "Willie" Wolfe and later by DeFreeze.

Announcement
On April 3, 1974, two months after she was abducted, Hearst announced on an audiotape that she had joined the SLA and taken the name "Tania" (inspired by the nom de guerre of Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, Che Guevara's comrade).

SLA member

Bank robbery

On April 15, 1974, Hearst was recorded on surveillance video wielding an M1 carbine while robbing the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank at 1450 Noriega Street in San Francisco. Hearst identified under her pseudonym of "Tania", yelling, "I'm Tania. Up, up, up against the wall, mother fuckers". Two men entered the bank while the robbery was occurring and were shot and wounded. According to testimony at her trial, a witness thought that Hearst had been several paces behind the others when running to the getaway car.

Attorney General William B. Saxbe said that Hearst was a "common criminal" and "not a reluctant participant" in the bank robbery. James L. Browning Jr. said that her participation in the robbery may have been voluntary, contrasting with an earlier comment in which he said that she might have been coerced into taking part. The FBI agent heading the investigation said that SLA members were photographed pointing guns at Hearst during the robbery. A grand jury indicted her in June 1974 for the robbery.

Rescue of Harris
On May 16, 1974, the manager at Mel's Sporting Goods in Inglewood, California observed a minor theft by William Harris, who had been shopping with his wife Emily while Hearst waited across the road in a van. The manager and an employee followed Harris out and confronted him. There was a scuffle and the manager restrained Harris, when a pistol fell out of Harris' waistband. Hearst discharged the entire magazine of an automatic carbine into the overhead storefront, causing the manager to dive behind a lightpost. He tried to shoot back, but Hearst began aiming closer.

Fugitive
Hearst and the Harris couple hijacked two cars and abducted the owners. One was a young man who found Hearst so personable that he was reluctant to report the incident. He testified at the trial to her discussing the effectiveness of cyanide-tipped bullets and repeatedly asking if he was okay. Police had surrounded the main base of the SLA before the three returned, so they hid elsewhere. The six SLA members inside the hideout died, some in a gunfight with police and others in a resulting fire. It was initially thought that Hearst had also died during the confrontation. A warrant was then issued for Hearst's arrest for several felonies, including two counts of kidnapping.

Emily Harris went to a Berkeley rally to commemorate the deaths of Angela Atwood and other founding members of the SLA who had died during the police siege. Harris recognized Atwood's acquaintance Kathy Soliah among the radicals whom she'd known from civil rights groups. Soliah introduced the three fugitives to Jack Scott, an athletics reformer and radical, and he agreed to provide help and money.

Involvement in later SLA crimes
Hearst helped make improvised explosive devices. These were used in two unsuccessful attempts to kill police officers during August 1975, and one of the devices failed to detonate. Marked money found in the apartment when she was arrested linked Hearst to the SLA armed robbery of Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California; she was the getaway car driver for the robbery. Myrna Opsahl, who was at the bank making a deposit, was shot dead by a masked Emily Harris. Hearst was potentially at risk for felony murder charges and could testify as a witness against Harris for a capital offense.

Legal consequences

On September 18, 1975, Hearst was arrested in a San Francisco apartment with Wendy Yoshimura, another SLA member, by San Francisco Police Inspector Timothy F. Casey and his partner, Police Officer Laurence R. Pasero, and FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Padden and his partners, FBI agents Jason Moulton, Frank Doyle, Jr., Larry Lawler, Monte Hall, Dick Vitamonte, Leo Brenneissen, and Ray Campos. While being booked into jail, Hearst listed her occupation as "Urban Guerilla" and asked her attorney to relay the following message: "Tell everybody that I'm smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there."

Brainwashing claims
At the time of her arrest, Hearst's weight had dropped to 87 pounds (40 kg), and she was described by psychologist Margaret Singer in October 1975 as "a low-IQ, low-affect zombie". Shortly after her arrest, signs of trauma were recorded: her IQ was measured as 112, whereas it had previously been 130; there were huge gaps in her memory regarding her pre-Tania life; she was smoking heavily and had nightmares. Without a mental illness or defect, a person is considered to be fully responsible for any criminal action not done under duress, which is defined as a clear and present threat of death or serious injury. For Hearst to secure an acquittal on the grounds of having been brainwashed would have been completely unprecedented.

Psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, a professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was appointed by the court in his capacity as a brainwashing expert and worked without a fee. After the trial, he wrote a newspaper article asking President Carter to release Hearst from prison.
 
Hearst wrote in her memoir, Every Secret Thing (1982), "I spent fifteen hours going over my SLA experiences with Robert Jay Lifton of Yale University. Lifton, author of several books on coercive persuasion and thought reform, [...] pronounced me a 'classic case' which met all the psychological criteria of a coerced prisoner of war. [...] If I had reacted differently, that would have been suspect, he said."
 
After some weeks, Hearst repudiated her SLA allegiance.

Her first lawyer, Terence Hallinan, had advised Hearst not to talk to anyone, including psychiatrists. He advocated a defense of involuntary intoxication: that the SLA had given her drugs that affected her judgment and recollection.

He was replaced by attorney F. Lee Bailey, who asserted a defense of coercion or duress affecting intent at the time of the offense. This was similar to the brainwashing defense which Hallinan had warned was not a defense in law. Hearst gave long interviews to various psychiatrists.

Trial
Hearst alone was arraigned for the Hibernia Bank robbery; the trial commenced on January 15, 1976. Judge Oliver Jesse Carter ruled that Hearst's taped and written statements after the bank robbery, while she was a fugitive with the SLA members, were voluntary. He did not allow expert testimony that stylistic analysis indicated the "Tania" statements and writing were not wholly composed by Hearst. He permitted the prosecution to introduce statements and actions Hearst made long after the Hibernia robbery, as evidence of her state of mind at the time of the robbery. Judge Carter also allowed into evidence a recording made by jail authorities of a friend's jail visit with Hearst, in which Hearst used profanities and spoke of her radical and feminist beliefs, but he did not allow tapes of psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West's interviews of Hearst to be heard by the jury. Judge Carter was described as "resting his eyes" during testimony favorable to the defense by West and others.

According to Hearst's testimony, her captors had demanded she appear enthusiastic during the robbery and warned she would pay with her life for any mistake. Her defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey provided photographs showing that SLA members, including Camilla Hall, had pointed guns at Hearst during the robbery. In reference to the shooting at Mel's Sporting Goods Store and her decision to not escape, Hearst testified that she was instructed throughout her captivity on what to do in an emergency. She said one class in particular had a situation similar to the store manager's detention of the Harrises. Hearst testified that "when it happened I didn't even think. I just did it, and if I had not done it and if they had been able to get away they would have killed me."

Testifying for the prosecution, Dr. Harry Kozol said Hearst had been "a rebel in search of a cause", and her participation in the Hibernia robbery had been "an act of free will." Prosecutor James L. Browning Jr. asked the other psychiatrist testifying for the prosecution, Dr. Joel Fort, if Hearst was in fear of death or great bodily injury during the robbery, to which he answered, "No", but Bailey angrily objected. Fort assessed Hearst as amoral, and said she had voluntarily had sex with Wolfe and DeFreeze, which Hearst denied both in court and outside. Prosecutor Browning tried to show that writings by Hearst indicated her testimony had misrepresented her interactions with Wolfe. She said she had been writing the SLA version of events and had been punched in the face by William Harris when she refused to be more effusive about what she regarded as sexual abuse by Wolfe. Judge Carter allowed testimony from the prosecution psychiatrists about Hearst's early sexual experiences, although these had occurred years before her kidnapping and the bank robbery.

In court, Hearst made a poor impression and appeared lethargic. An Associated Press report attributed this state to drugs she was given by jail doctors. Bailey was strongly criticized for his decision to put Hearst on the stand, then having her repeatedly decline to answer questions. According to Alan Dershowitz, Bailey was wrong-footed by the judge, who had appeared to indicate she would have Fifth Amendment privilege: the jury would not be present for some of her testimony, or would be instructed not to draw inferences, on matters subsequent to the Hibernian Bank charges for which she was being tried, but he changed his mind.

After a few months, Hearst provided information to the authorities, not under oath (sworn testimony could have been used to convict her) of SLA activities. A bomb exploded at Hearst Castle in February 1976. After Hearst testified that Wolfe had raped her, Emily Harris gave a magazine interview from jail alleging that Hearst's keeping a trinket given to her by Wolfe was an indication that she had been in a romantic relationship with him. Hearst said she had kept the stone carving because she thought it was a Pre-Columbian artifact of archeological significance. The prosecutor James L. Browning Jr. used Harris' interpretation of the item, and some jurors later said they regarded the carving, which Browning waved in front of them, as powerful evidence that Hearst was lying.

Closing arguments
In a closing prosecution statement that hardly acknowledged that Hearst had been kidnapped and held captive, prosecutor Browning suggested that Hearst had taken part in the bank robbery without coercion. Browning, who later became a judge, also suggested to the jury that as the female SLA members were feminists, they would not have allowed Hearst to be raped.

In her autobiography, Hearst expressed disappointment with what she saw as Bailey's lack of focus in the crucial end stage of her trial; she described him as having the appearance of someone with a hangover, and spilling water down the front of his pants while making a "disjointed" closing argument. Bailey's final statement to the court was, "But simple application of the rules, I think, will yield one decent result, and, that is, there is not anything close to proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Patty Hearst wanted to be a bank robber. What you know, and you know in your hearts to be true is beyond dispute. There was talk about her dying, and she wanted to survive."

Conviction and sentencing

On March 20, 1976, Hearst was convicted of bank robbery and using a firearm during the commission of a felony. She was given the maximum sentence possible of 35 years' imprisonment, pending a reduction at final sentence hearing, which Carter declined to specify.

Because Judge Carter had died, Judge William Horsley Orrick Jr. determined Hearst's sentence. He gave her seven years imprisonment, commenting that "rebellious young people who, for whatever reason become revolutionaries, and voluntarily commit criminal acts will be punished".

Prison life
Hearst suffered a collapsed lung in prison, the beginning of a series of medical problems, and she underwent emergency surgery. This prevented her from appearing to testify against the Harrises on 11 charges, including robbery, kidnapping, and assault; she was also arraigned for those charges. She was held in solitary confinement for security reasons; she was granted bail for an appeal hearing in November 1976 on the condition that she was protected on bond. Her father hired dozens of bodyguards.

Superior Court judge Talbot Callister gave her probation on the sporting goods store charge when she pleaded no contest, saying that he believed that she had been subject to coercion amounting to torture. California Attorney General Evelle J. Younger said that, if there was a double standard for the wealthy, it was the opposite of what was generally believed and that Hearst had received a stiffer sentence than a person of lesser means might have. He said that she had no legal brainwashing defense, but pointed out that the events had started with her being kidnapped.

Hearst's bail was revoked in May 1978 when appeals failed, and the Supreme Court declined to hear her case. The prison took no special security measures for her safety until she found a dead rat on her bunk on the day when William and Emily Harris were arraigned for her abduction. The Harrises were convicted on a simple kidnapping charge, as opposed to the more serious kidnapping for ransom or kidnapping with bodily injury, and they were released after serving a total of eight years each.

Representative Leo Ryan was collecting signatures on a petition for Hearst's release several weeks before he was murdered while visiting the Jonestown settlement in Guyana. Actor John Wayne spoke after the Jonestown cult deaths, pointing out that people had accepted that Jim Jones had brainwashed 900 individuals into mass suicide but would not accept that the Symbionese Liberation Army could have brainwashed a kidnapped teenage girl.

Commutation, release, and pardon
President Jimmy Carter commuted Hearst's federal sentence to the 22 months served, freeing her eight months before she was eligible for her first parole hearing. Her release (on February 1, 1979) was under stringent conditions, and she remained on probation for the state sentence on the sporting goods store plea. She recovered full civil rights when President Bill Clinton granted her a pardon on January 20, 2001, his last day in office.

Life after release
Two months after her release from prison, Hearst married Bernard Lee Shaw (1945–2013), a policeman who was part of her security detail during her time on bail. They had two children, Gillian and Lydia Hearst-Shaw. Hearst became involved in a foundation helping children with AIDS, and is active in other charities and fund-raising activities.

Media and other activities
Hearst published the memoir Every Secret Thing, co-written with Alvin Moscow, in 1981. Her accounts resulted in authorities considering bringing new charges against her. She was interviewed in 2009 on NBC and said that the prosecutor had suggested that she had been in a consensual relationship with Wolfe. She described that as "outrageous" and an insult to rape victims.

Hearst produced a special for the Travel Channel titled Secrets of San Simeon with Patricia Hearst, in which she took viewers inside her grandfather's mansion Hearst Castle, providing unprecedented access to the property.

She has appeared in feature films for director John Waters, who cast her in Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), Cecil B. DeMented (2000) and A Dirty Shame (2004). She collaborated with Cordelia Frances Biddle on writing the novel Murder at San Simeon (Scribner, 1996), based upon the death of Thomas H. Ince on her grandfather's yacht. She also appeared in the episode "Lord of the Pi's" in season 3 of Veronica Mars. The character was the heiress of a fictionalized Hearst family, loosely based on aspects of her life. Hearst also made a cameo in Pauly Shore's film Bio-Dome (1996).  She was also a guest caller on the TV series Frasier on season 1 episode 23 Frasier Crane's Day Off (1994), as Janice.

Hearst has participated with her dogs in dog shows, and her Shih Tzu Rocket won the "Toy" group at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden on February 16, 2015. At the 2017 show, Hearst's French bulldog Tuggy won Best of Breed, and Rubi won Best of Opposite Sex.

Films about Hearst's SLA period

 Abduction (1975)
 Patty (1976)
 Tanya (1976)
The Ordeal of Patty Hearst (1979)
 Captive (1986)
Patty Hearst (1988)
Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004)
The Radical Story of Patty Hearst (2018)
Drunk History: The Kidnapping of Patty Hearst (2019)
American Woman (2019)

In popular culture 
 American singer-songwriter Patti Smith's re-imagined 1974 cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe" is a meditation on Patty Hearst's involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army. The single was Smith's first appearance on a record.
 American singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon, mentions Patty Hearst in a song he co-wrote with David Lindell, "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner" which was included on Zevon's 1978 album "Excitable Boy".
 American author Stephen King states, in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (1981), that Patty Hearst's case was among the sources of inspiration for his novel The Stand (1978).
 The title of the American band Camper van Beethoven's album Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (1988) is taken from the lyrics to the album's penultimate song, 'Tania,' a "darkly witty paean to Patty Hearst."
American singer songwriter Jimmy Urine of the band Mindless Self Indulgence wrote the electronic song "Patty Hearst" as the 7th song on his 2017 solo album "The Secret Cinematic Sounds of Jimmy Urine".
 The Law & Order episode "Hot Pursuit" is based on the Patty Hearst case.
In Marvel Television's Jessica Jones, a reference to Patty's conviction is made in reference to another character committing crimes whilst abducted.

See also
 American Woman
 Brainwashing
 List of kidnappings
 List of solved missing person cases
 Stockholm syndrome
 List of people pardoned or granted clemency by the president of the United States

Notes

References

Cited texts

External links

View from inside car of Mel's Sporting Goods where a robbery involving Patty Hearst took place, Inglewood, California, 1976. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

1954 births
20th-century American trials
Actresses from San Francisco
American film actresses
American memoirists
American people taken hostage
American television actresses
Dog breeders
Formerly missing people
Patty
Hostage taking in the United States
Kidnapped American people
Kidnappings in the United States
Living people
Menlo College alumni
Missing person cases in California
People from Hillsborough, California
Recipients of American presidential pardons
Symbionese Liberation Army
University of California, Berkeley alumni
American women memoirists
On January 26, 2017, Alianna DeFreeze, a fourteen-year-old girl from Cleveland, Ohio, was kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered by Christopher Whitaker. Whitaker, who had a criminal history involving grand theft, burglary, aggravated robbery, felonious assault, and sexual assault, took DeFreeze to an abandoned house where he raped her, and stabbed and beat her to death using a hammer,  a screwdriver, a nut driver, a box cutter, and a drill. DeFreeze, who attended school at E Prep & Village Prep Woodland Hills, was reported missing, causing a city-wide search.  Her body was discovered three days later.

Whitaker’s murder trial occurred in February 2018. Defense attorneys argued that Whitaker's drug use impaired his ability to control impulses and obey the law while prosecutors disagreed, saying that he knew what he was doing. The jury convicted Whitaker on February 13, 2018. Later, the jury recommended that Whitaker receive the death penalty and the judge upheld it. Whitaker is currently on death row.

In 2019 DeFreeze’s parents filed a lawsuit against several people and entities arguing that the school's failure to notify them about DeFreeze’s absence and the failure to monitor abandoned properties led to her death. In 2019 Governor John Kasich signed a law named after DeFreeze which requires schools to notify parents of unexcused absences within two hours.

Background

Alianna DeFreeze

Alianna DeFreeze, the daughter of Damon DeFreeze and Donnesha Cooper,  was a seventh-grader at E Prep & Village Prep Woodland Hills.  She was fourteen years old and had a developmental disability.  She would take the RTA bus to school, which her mother and grandmother did not like, though the fact that one stop was in front of a police station made them feel better about her means of transportation.

Christopher Whitaker
Christopher Whitaker (born 1973)  was a native of Fayetteville, Tennessee with a long criminal record.  His crimes and alleged crimes include:
 In 1998 he was charged with grand theft and burglary. He was also charged with aggravated robbery and felonious assault, though the case was dismissed.
 On April 8, 2005, he committed sexual battery and felonious assault against a woman in her home after she let him in so that he could use the bathroom. According to the victim, he came out of the bathroom with a pair of scissors and began choking her.  He proceeded to stab her in the neck with the scissors. She passed out and woke up on the floor with neck pain and with her pants and underwear removed. An evaluation determined that she had been sexually assaulted. Whitaker was sentenced to four years in prison for third-degree felony sexual battery and second-degree felonious assault. He was released in 2009 and was registered as a sex offender.
 In 2012 he was charged with aggravated theft.

Crime 

RTA surveillance footage recorded on the morning of January 26, 2017, shows DeFreeze exiting a bus while surveillance video from a business shows her crossing East 93rd Street. She was then stopped outside the True Gospel Missionary Baptist Church by Whitaker, who, according to video recorded from the church, had been pacing around the area for several hours. DeFreeze took a step back from Whitaker, who then followed her. According to a witness, Whitaker grabbed her as she walked along East 93rd Avenue. The witness did not contact the police because he was unsure of the relationship between DeFreeze and Whitaker. Surveillance video then shows Whitaker leading DeFreeze through a field to Fuller Avenue.

Whitaker took DeFreeze to an abandoned house.  There, he raped her.  Whitaker then used a Black and Decker drill, a Phillips-head screwdriver, a nut driver, a box cutter, and a hammer to stab and beat her to death. DeFreeze died as a result of the stab wounds and blunt force injuries which were numerous and severe.

Whitaker claimed that he was high on cocaine and blacked out during the crime. After murdering DeFreeze, in the late morning hours, Whitaker assisted a pastor at the Golgatha Missionary Baptist Church to unload food pantry items from a truck. The pastor described Whitaker's demeanor as calm.

Criminal proceedings

Investigation
At 4:00 pm when DeFreeze had still not returned home from school her mother became concerned. She called E Prep and was informed that DeFreeze never arrived at school. DeFreeze was reported missing, prompting a city-wide search.

On January 29, DeFreeze's body was found at the house where Whitaker had murdered her by three Cleveland police officers. The officers entered the house after noticing that the back door was open and found a trail of blood leading from the dining room into a room behind a closed door. After kicking open the door, they found DeFreeze's deceased body crumpled in a corner in a pool of blood. She was naked except for her socks and had wounds to her head.

The boxcutter was used to slash DeFreeze's neck while the drill had been used to put four puncture wounds into her cheek, as well as a wound on her forehead that dislodged her right eyeball from the socket. Because many of the wounds showed signs that they had started healing, they were inflicted on her several hours before she died. DeFreeze appeared as if she had been dragged and thrown into the room. DeFreeze’s clothing, including a tie soaked with blood and a sweater that was torn open down the front, were found strewn about the house.

Along with DeFreeze's clothing, police also found her backpack, and tools including a drill, box cutter,  a screwdriver, and a hammer, all of which had blood on them.  The tools were laid out on a built-in bench in the dining room, which prosecutors described as a makeshift workstation.

DeFreeze’s body was identified using dental records by the medical examiner's office. An autopsy performed by Cuyahoga County Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. David Dolinak revealed that she suffered wounds caused by tools found in the house including a drill, a screwdriver, and a box cutter. She had so many injuries and her injuries were so severe that Dolinak could not identify which one caused her death. Forensics analysts also found Whitaker's DNA on DeFreeze's body. Whitaker was identified using the DNA and was arrested at 7:00 pm on February 2 at the Villa Serena Apartments in Mayfield Heights with the assistance of U.S. Marshalls.

Whitaker was interrogated by Cleveland Police, and changed his story several times, initially denying any involvement in the murder and then going on to admit his involvement, but still denying responsibility by blaming his actions on crack-cocaine use. Whitaker said that he had blacked out after punching DeFreeze and that he would not have committed the crime if he were sober. "People are going to look at me like a monster. I'm not a monster” he told investigators, adding that he was “just an addict who made a mistake that shouldn't have happened." Whitaker also told investigators that he did not want his face in the news.

Trial and death sentence
DeFreeze's murder trial began on February 1, 2018.  Whitaker's defense attorneys acknowledged his crimes but said that his drug use made him less able to control his impulses and follow the law. Prosecutors disagreed, with assistant prosecutor Mahmoud Awadallah saying: “the evidence does not point to a drug-induced frenzy, does not point to a blackout. It points to that he knows what he was doing.”   On February 13, 2018, Whitaker was found guilty  of ten counts.

After convicting Whitaker jurors had to decide whether or not he should be sentenced to death or life in prison. On February 23 the jury recommended that he be put to death  and Judge Carolyn Friedland agreed and formally sentenced him on March 26, saying that the mitigating circumstances "pale in comparison to the barbarity of the evidence."

DeFreeze's mother told the court that “death is too good for him and I won’t believe he has any remorse until he suffers like my daughter suffered.” DeFreeze’s father told Whitaker “when you get where you’re going, you’re going to get what you got coming, before you get to the gas, lethal injection chamber, and that “my baby didn’t have a chance.” The woman Whitaker had attacked in 2005 supported his death sentence. Along with his death sentence, Whitaker was sentenced to forty-eight years in prison for aggravated burglary, felonious assault, rape, obstruction of justice, and gross abuse of a corpse.

Whitaker is currently imprisoned on death row at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, Ohio for aggravated burglary, kidnapping, rape, aggravated murder, tampering with evidence, and abuse of a corpse.

Aftermath 
Hundreds of people attended DeFreeze’s funeral on February 11.

Shortly after the murder, DeFreeze's mother became homeless.

DeFreeze’s family began a nonprofit foundation in her name called the Alianna DeFreeze Let’s Make A Change Foundation. The foundation works to address the issues of abandoned homes, help children obtain safe routes to school, and address domestic violence, homelessness, and police-community relations.

In January 2019, DeFreeze's parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas naming the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, E Prep and Village Prep Woodland Hills, Friends of Breakthrough Schools, the City of Cleveland, the man who owned the abandoned house where the crime occurred, murderer Christopher Whittaker, and others as defendants. The lawsuit claims that there was a system in place in which administrators at E Prep would send an automated message notification to parents to alert them about news involving their children, including unexcused absences. DeFreeze's parents were signed up to receive text messages in the case of their daughter's unexcused absence but did not receive any such notification, only finding out about her absence at 4:00 pm after she did not make it home. The lawsuit alleges that the school was aware of DeFreeze’s absence, but did not contact her parents and that if DeFreeze's parents had been notified immediately or within a reasonable amount of time, she may have been located before being raped, tortured, and murdered. The lawsuit also alleges that the school lied when they said they tried to send an alert but failed, and that they should have been immediately concerned about DeFreeze's absence because of her developmental disability and because it was uncharacteristic of her to miss school. The lawsuit states that because of the defendants' negligence DeFreeze’s last hours "were spent in excruciating, paralyzing, debilitating and unthinkable physical and mental pain." The lawsuit also claims that the City of Cleveland and city employees failed to monitor abandoned properties and prevent illicit activities from occurring in them and names the owner of the house where the murder occurred, saying that he failed to maintain, operate and monitor it. DeFreeze’s family is seeking fifteen million in damages. In March 2019, the DeFreezes filed an amended complaint, which E Prep moved to dismiss. E Prep argued that it is immune from liability due to its status as a political subdivision. The motion was denied by the trial court and E Prep appealed to Ohio's Court of Appeals for the Eighth District, which ruled in their favor.

In January 2019, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed into law the Alianna Alert bill after it passed the House of Representatives 85-4. The law requires schools to call parents within 120 minutes of the start of the school day if their child is absent without the parents having previously notified the school. It went into effect in April 2019. DeFreeze's mother also expressed an interest in having more police protect the streets.

See also
List of kidnappings
List of solved missing person cases

References 

2017 murders in the United States
January 2017 crimes in the United States
2010s in Cleveland
2010s missing person cases
Crimes in Cleveland
Incidents of violence against girls
Murdered American children
Female murder victims
Deaths by stabbing in Ohio
Deaths by beating in the United States
Deaths by person in the United States
People murdered in Ohio
History of women in Ohio Donald David DeFreeze (November 16, 1943 – May 17, 1974), also known as Cinque Mtume and using the nom de guerre "Field Marshal Cinque," was the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army, an American far-left group.

Early life
DeFreeze was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to African-American parents Louis and Mary DeFreeze, the eldest of eight children. His mother was a registered nurse at a convalescent home. His father was a violent man who punished him three times as a child by breaking both of his arms. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade at age 14 and ran away from home. He moved to Buffalo, New York, where he lived with the Rev. William L. Foster, a fundamentalist minister, and his family. He became a street gang member in Buffalo. The Rev. Foster would say of him later:

He was a get up and go kid... he had a heart that was as big as a house. But some of the boys he used to hang around with, I didn't care for. You just knew they were 99 and 44/100 percent bad.

He was arrested for stealing from parking meters and stealing a car. He was sent to the state reformatory in Elmira, New York. In 1970, DeFreeze wrote of his time there, which he called a prison or a mental institution:

Life in the prison, as we called it, was nothing, but fear and hate, day in and day out... I would not be part of any of the gangs, black or white... I didn't hate anyone, black or white, and they hated me for it.

Following his release from prison, DeFreeze moved to the Newark area. In 1963, he married Gloria Thomas, who had three children from a previous marriage. DeFreeze and Thomas had three children together. In 1964 his wife had him arrested for desertion. In 1965 DeFreeze moved with his family to California, where they settled in Los Angeles. He said that the worries of trying to support the children engulfed him. He wrote, "I just couldn't take it anymore. I was slowly becoming a nothing".

Prior arrests, warnings and probations
In 1964, police stopped DeFreeze while he was hitchhiking on the San Bernardino Freeway near West Covina, California, and found a tear-gas pencil bomb, a sharpened butter knife, and a sawed-off rifle in his suitcase.

In 1965, DeFreeze was arrested for firing a gun in the basement of his home. "I started playing with guns and fireworks," he would later write. "Just anything to get away from life and how unhappy I was". The charges were dropped and DeFreeze took his family to California.

In 1967, the police stopped DeFreeze for running a red light on his bicycle. The police said that when he was searched, they found a homemade bomb in his pocket, and in the basket of the bicycle, another bomb and a pistol. DeFreeze said he had found them and was trying to sell them because of his family's needs. He was given three years of probation. The probation officer who interviewed DeFreeze wrote that the youth was "deeply troubled by this case". He said, in recommending probation:

...The difficulties which the defendant has encountered in his life are real and serious. He feels his responsibilities deeply and is overcome when he cannot meet them. He appears to have a warm relationship with his wife and children... The type of behaviour encountered in the present offence appears to be the defendant's way of compensating for feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness... The defendant is potentially dangerous if he again encounters such severely threatening circumstances as he was encountering at the time of the offense.

An early probation report described DeFreeze as, "a schizoid personality with strong schizophrenic potential" who had "a fascination with firearms and explosives." Psychiatric officials at the prison testing center where he was briefly sent recommended that he be jailed "because his fascination with firearms and explosives made him dangerous". Despite these recommendations, he was given a further five years probation.

In 1969, DeFreeze and an accomplice were arrested for the kidnapping of a caretaker of a synagogue. His accomplice was tried and acquitted. A memorandum from the prosecutor's office said that it was decided to drop charges against DeFreeze since by then he was jailed in California.

On October 11, 1969, Cleveland, Ohio, police spotted DeFreeze on the roof of a bank carrying two pistols and an 8-inch dagger. Police said they found a burglar's tool kit and a hand grenade nearby. He was able to pay the $5,000 bond money and then left for Los Angeles.

Imprisonment and the Black Cultural Association
On November 17, 1969, DeFreeze was injured in a gun battle with police outside a bank in Los Angeles. He was convicted of having stolen a $1,000 negotiable cashier's check and sent to Vacaville Prison.

While incarcerated at Vacaville Prison, DeFreeze joined the Black Cultural Association, a group with contact at the University of California, Berkeley through professor Colston Westbrook. Through this group, Berkeley students were allowed to visit the prison to help prisoners with educational and political discussions. People outside of the university also attended. Through this organization, DeFreeze met with some far-left radicals who were working as volunteers in the prison and was converted to their political ideology.

DeFreeze diverged from the Black Cultural Association in order to set up his own small group, Unisight. Two of the ethnically white American radical visitors who joined this group were Willie Wolfe and Russ Little. In addition, a former Black Panther, an inmate by the name of Thero Wheeler, was also in the group. This is believed to have been the beginnings of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

He was transferred to Soledad Prison in Soledad, California in December 1972.

Escape

DeFreeze escaped from Soledad Prison on March 5, 1973. He made his way to Oakland, California, where he was hidden by white friends from the Vacaville BCA. He was taken to the house of Patricia "Mizmoon" Soltysik, with whom he then lived for several months. Through Soltysik, DeFreeze met Camilla Hall, a Berkeley artist.

SLA

DeFreeze, along with Patricia Soltysik, founded the Symbionese Liberation Army, and soon recruited members for his group, which he was the leader of. DeFreeze adopted the name Field Marshal Cinque (pronounced "SINK-you", though this is not how the name is historically pronounced), having taken this name from Joseph Cinqué, the reported leader of the slave rebellion that took over the Spanish slave ship Amistad in 1839. He adopted the surname Mtume from the Swahili word for "prophet". By late summer the SLA roster also included Joe Remiro, a Vietnam veteran activist who was a friend of Little and Wolfe. As DeFreeze's circle of politically aware friends widened, he also came to know Angela Atwood, 25, who had been a friend of William and Emily Harris (later members of The SLA) in Indiana. The group perpetrated a number of crimes, the most infamous being the murder of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster and the abduction of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. DeFreeze is the primary suspect in the murder of Foster and the shooting of Assistant Superintendent Robert Blackburn.

Informant allegations
At an earlier probation hearing, Morgan M. Morten, the attorney representing DeFreeze, said that it had been "indicated that [DeFreeze] had been cooperating with the police".

When Willie Wolfe's father, Dr. Wolfe, learned of his son's involvement in the SLA, he hired private detective Lake Headley, to provide him with more information. On May 4, 1974, thirteen days before the younger Wolfe's death in a shootout and fire, Headley, along with freelance writer Donald Freed, held a press conference in San Francisco. They presented 400 pages of documentation of their findings, some of which included evidence that, a year before the kidnapping, Patty Hearst had visited DeFreeze. He provided evidence for the following:

DeFreeze's arrest records
Records showed that DeFreeze had set up the arrest of an associate in a case involving a stolen gun. The Los Angeles Police Department officer who handled the case became a key intelligence officer who handled informants involving black militants.

Police records also showed, according to Lake Headley's research, that between 1967 and 1969, DeFreeze had remained on probation despite a series of encounters with the police. These included arrest for possession of weapons, a kidnapping charge in New Jersey, an attempted bank robbery in Cleveland, and a gunfight with Los Angeles police and bank guards.

On March 10, 1968, DeFreeze was charged with burglary in Inglewood, California. There was no disposition of the charges. On August 16, 1968, he was charged with stealing a motorcycle. There was no disposition. On March 20, 1969, he was picked up with a loaded 9-millimeter semiautomatic rifle with 32 rounds in the magazine. There was no disposition, although his probation had been modified, on December 13, 1968, to forbid possession of firearms or bombs.

BCA contact worked with LAPD unit targeting radicals while DeFreeze was a possible LAPD informant
Evidence showed that Colston Westbrook, BCA's main contact at UC Berkeley, had worked closely with Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS) and the State of California's Sacramento-based CII (Criminal Identification and Investigation) unit., during the same period when DeFreeze was receiving unusually lenient treatment from the Los Angeles County criminal justice system.  The implication is that leniency towards DeFreeze arose from his agreeing to be an informant.

On May 17, 1974, The New York Times ran the story with some of this information. However, the story may have been overlooked due to this being the day of the shootout and conflagration that killed DeFreeze and five other members of the SLA.

In the 1993 book Vegas P.I.: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Detective which he co-wrote with freelance writer William Hoffman, Lake Headley also presented evidence that Donald DeFreeze was a police informant and an agent provocateur, and that the Black Cultural Association was used to monitor radicals among students and prison inmates. Upon meeting radicals after his prison escape, DeFreeze was known for his eagerness to sell firearms, explosives, and related items, raising suspicions that he was trying to set up sting operations. His means of acquiring weaponry has remained unexplained.

CIA assassination squad theories 

Building on the work of Headley, some authors in alternative media developed theories that the SLA was a fully controlled CIA assassination squad with the Black Panther Party as its main target.  Under that narrative, the SLA originated within California prisons with active recruitment by authorities, the assassination of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster was approved by the squad's handlers, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst was a cover operation, and the squad was eliminated in the Los Angeles shootout because their operation security had been compromised.

Death

On May 17, 1974, the Los Angeles Police Department surrounded a house at 1466 East 54th Street where DeFreeze and five other SLA members were staying, and demanded that occupants surrender.  Following the exit of an elderly man and a child, a tear gas canister was fired through a window and answered with bursts of automatic weapons fire. During the shootout the police were outgunned by the SLA's automatic weapons and the SLA's gas masks rendered the tear gas ineffective. The house caught fire during the shootout, possibly from an outdoor-type combusting tear gas canister. DeFreeze and others crawled through a hole in the floor into a crawlspace beneath the house, where they continued to fire at police until the crawlspace likely caught fire. Apparently burning alive, DeFreeze committed suicide by shooting himself in the right side of his head with a pistol. He was the final fatality during the shootout. His corpse was so severely burned that his family did not initially believe the remains were his.

DeFreeze is buried in Highland Park Cemetery in Highland Hills, Ohio.

References in media
As stated by Stephen King in his book Danse Macabre, DeFreeze was one of the inspirations for recurring character Randall Flagg:

I sat there for another fifteen minutes or so, listening to the Eagles on my little cassette player, and then I wrote: Donald DeFreeze is a dark man. I did not mean that DeFreeze was black; it had suddenly occurred to me that, in the photos taken during the bank robbery in which Patty Hearst participated, you could barely see DeFreeze's face.

He was wearing a big badass hat, and what he looked like was mostly guesswork. I wrote, "A dark man with no face," and then glanced up and saw that grisly little motto again: Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. And that was that. I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called The Stand.

The Stand contains a reference to DeFreeze, where it is implied that Randall Flagg was the driving force behind the radicalisation of DeFreeze and gave him the idea to kidnap Patty Hearst and to indoctrinate her rather than to kill her or receive a cash ransom for her.

There is also a reference to DeFreeze and the SLA in the 1976 film Network in which a television show is created using the members of the fictional version of the SLA as the stars.

In Paul Schrader's 1988 film Patty Hearst, DeFreeze is played by Ving Rhames.

The Camper Van Beethoven song "Tania" from Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart references DeFreeze by his nom de guerre "Field Marshal Cinque" in the lyrics "A Polaroid of you, Cinque/With a seven-headed dragon/In a house in Daly City".

References 

1943 births
1974 suicides
American bank robbers
American kidnappers
American male criminals
African-American people
Fugitives
People from Cleveland
Suicides by firearm in California
Symbionese Liberation Army
Terrorism in the United States