Weather Underground members under investigation in 30 year old murder cases:
30-Y.O. Unsolved SF Murders Reopen
Part III: Survivor of Old Murder Case Speaks Out
Posted: November 10, 2003 at 6:34 p.m.
BAY AREA (KRON) -- The unsolved murder of two San Francisco police officers has languished as cold cases for 30 years until now. A federal grand jury has been looking into the murders. Many of the people now under investigation both as potential targets and witnesses in this case are scattered across the country. Many of them are now in their 50s and 60s. Investigators believe the crimes were politically motivated and committed by militant radical groups.
On August 29, 1971, sergeant John Young is killed in a barrage of gunfire when two men walk into the Ingleside police station and begin shooting at officers sitting behind the glass partition. It is the second unsolved police killing in 18 months.
On February 16, 1970, officer Brian McDonnell is killed when a bomb explodes at Park Police Station. Attorney Joe O'Sullivan, at the time was a young police officer. "It was just bedlam. I don't think we were able to get into the station. I think it was cordoned off. Nobody really knew the exact nature of the devastation," he says.
For three decades, the police murders remained unsolved. Evidence from the two crime scenes sat in the police property room.
KRON 4 News has learned that three years ago, San Francisco police secretly re-opened the case. Armed with new forensic technology and with State and Federal agencies helping, SFPD investigators began to work full-time on the murders.
And now, sources tell us, those investigators have identified potential suspects: former members of two militant groups in the '60s and '70s -- the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army, people who've been out of the spotlight for decades. The most prominent among them is Bernadine Dohrn, a former leader of the Weather Underground and now a law professor at Northwestern University in Illinois.
They started as the Weathermen during the latter half of the turbulent '60s. As they became more militant, they changed their name to the Weather Underground. It was a homegrown guerilla movement against the war in Vietnam and injustices at home. Its objective was to wage an armed struggle against the government.
The Weather Underground battled police at anti-war rallies. Members even broke LSD guru Timothy Leary out of prison. They bombed at least two dozen buildings across the country, including the Capitol and the Pentagon. Their targets: military and government offices and police departments.
In the early '70s, some of of the group led by Bernadine Dorhn escaped to the west coast. Dohrn was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. J. Edgar Hoover called her "the most dangerous woman in America."
For a time, according to law enforcement sources, Dohrn and her group lived in the Bay Area on a houseboat in Sausalito. Testimony before a federal grand jury in 1970 allegedly linked Dohrn to a February bombing attack of the Berkeley police department in which two officers were injured. And now, 30 years later, law enforcement sources tell KRON 4 News they believe Dohrn and members of the Weather Underground may have been responsible for the bombing of Park Police Station in San Francisco three days later, a bombing that killed officer Brian McDonnell. But police never had the evidence to prove it.
Dohrn remained a fugitive until 1980, when she and her husband Bill Ayers turned themselves in. Dohrn, who pleaded guilty to battery and jumping bail, was fined and placed on probation.
Last fall, according to law enforcement sources, San Francisco police turned over its evidence to the US attorney, who took over the investigation. The government quietly convened a federal grand jury which subpoenaed former members of not only the Weather Underground but the Black Panthers and the more militant Black Liberation Army, which investigators believe was responsible for the Ingleside shooting.
"There have been to our knowledge 20 to 30 people contacted around the country," says San Francisco attorney Chuck Bourdon who represents one of those subpoenaed. "I put a call into the US attorney's office and was asked if my client would present fingerprints, palm prints and I told the US attorney I would be more than happy to comply with any lawful order from a grand jury if there were to be a subpoeana issued and there was one."
And remember attorney Joe O'Sullivan, the former cop who was at Park station the day of the bombing? He's now ironically representing a former Black Panther who's also been subpoeanaed.
"The federal prosecutor handling the case told me to my face he was going to indict my client for the murder of the San Francisco police officer at Park station. And our conversation ended when I said, 'prove it.'"
(Copyright 2003, KRON 4. All rights reserved.) |
