Emily Harris | |
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Born | |
Other names | Yolanda Emily Montague Schwartz |
Movement | Symbionese Liberation Army |
Emily Harris (born February 11, 1947, as Emily Montague Schwartz) was, along with her husband William Harris (b. 1945), a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an American left-wing terrorist group involved in murder, kidnapping, and bank robberies. In the 1970s, she was convicted of kidnapping Patty Hearst.
In 2003, she was convicted of murder in the second degree for being the shooter in a 1975 slaying that occurred while she and other SLA members were robbing a bank in California. She was sentenced to eight years in prison for the murder.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, [1] and raised in Clarendon Hills, Illinois, [2] Emily Montague Schwartz was the daughter of Frederick Schwartz, an engineer, and his wife, and had a middle-class upbringing. She graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a bachelor's degree in language arts.
She married William Harris, whom she had met at Indiana University in Bloomington. They moved to Berkeley, California, in 1973, traveling with friends Gary Atwood and Angela Atwood. They soon joined a left-wing group organized through the university in Berkeley that, among other things, visited inmates in prisons in northern California to tutor them and prepare them for life outside. Late that year the Harrises met an escaped prisoner, Donald DeFreeze, who was staying with white leftist activists in Berkeley.
He and Patricia Soltysik, a white woman also called Mizmoon, co-founded what became the Symbionese Liberation Army, a leftist group that promoted joining all the progressive causes. Other founding members were Nancy Ling Perry, Joe Remiro, Russ Little, Willie Wolfe, Angela Atwood, Thero Wheeler, and Camilla Hall. Rejecting the group's plans for armed confrontations, Wheeler left in the fall. DeFreeze was the only remaining Black member. Remiro was Latino; all the others were white. The Harrises, also white, joined the group.
Emily Harris and the others took noms de guerre as SLA soldiers: hers was 'Yolanda'. [3] On November 6, the SLA committed its first public act, the assassination of Marcus Foster, Oakland, California, school superintendent and the first black superintendent of any major public school system. SLA activists mistakenly thought Foster had approved a plan to require student identification cards for Oakland high schools, which they denounced as fascist, thinking they could recruit followers by their action. But Foster was popular in the black community, and people were outraged at his murder.
In February 1974 SLA members kidnapped Patty Hearst, a college student and one of the heirs to the Hearst newspaper empire. This action attracted much more media attention, as did the group's demands that Hearst's family provide compensation to the poor in California as a kind of ransom. [4]
Emily and Bill Harris and Hearst, who had joined the SLA, were involved in other activities on May 17, 1974, when six core SLA members were confronted at their safe house in South Central Los Angeles. In the shootout with police that followed and a subsequent house fire, all six were killed, including erstwhile leader DeFreeze.
Emily and Bill Harris claimed the leadership of the SLA, and fled the city with Hearst. They spent more than a year eluding the authorities with Hearst, including some time in hiding on the East Coast. After their return to California, they acquired new members Wendy Yoshimura, a California radical who had assisted the trio in the East, and several Soliah family members and relations: Kathleen Soliah and her boyfriend Jim Kilgore, her sister Josephine and her husband Mike Bortin, and their brother Steven Soliah. [ citation needed ]
Hearst had become a participant in SLA crimes. Yoshimura, Patty's closest friend while underground, was a fugitive because explosives had been stored in a garage she rented. During that year on the run the SLA committed a string of crimes, including an April 21, 1975, armed robbery of Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California.[ citation needed ]
During the robbery, customer 42-year-old Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four, was fatally shot. Opsahl was depositing a church collection at the time. Hearst stated in her autobiography Every Secret Thing (1982) that Emily Harris was the shooter. Hearst wrote that Harris had said, "Oh, she's dead, but it doesn't really matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor." Reportedly other SLA members had urged Harris against bringing the shotgun to the robbery, as it had accidentally discharged twice during preparations.[ citation needed ]
The Harrises were eventually arrested, convicted of their part in the Hearst kidnapping, and served eight years in prison. They were represented by attorney Leonard Weinglass. Imprisoned at the California Institution for Women in Corona, California, Emily Harris spent the first half of her term in solitary confinement. Emily learned computer programming in prison.[ citation needed ]
After her release from prison in 1983, Harris became a computer programmer. She began a successful computer consulting company. [5] She worked at MGM Studios (and The Walt Disney Company) until her second conviction. She and her husband divorced.
For over 25 years no one was charged in the Opsahl murder. The SLA wore wigs and masks during the Crocker Bank robbery, and left little evidence behind. [6]
However, with new forensics techniques, the FBI was eventually able to link shotgun pellets removed from Opsahl's body to shotgun shells found in an SLA hideout. [7] Additional evidence mounted. In January 2002 Harris and three other SLA members were charged with the Opsahl murder. Harris's bail was set at $1,000,000, which her supporters quickly gathered.[ citation needed ]
Three former SLA members who had been granted immunity – Hearst, Steven Soliah, and Wendy Yoshimura – were set to testify for the prosecution in the Opsahl case.[ citation needed ]
Facing a possible conviction, Harris and the others pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in November 2002. [8] Emily Harris was sentenced to eight additional years in prison; Bill Harris was sentenced to seven years, and Kathleen Soliah and Michael Bortin were each sentenced to six years for their roles.[ citation needed ]
Emily Harris was paroled in February 2007 after having served four years in prison. [9]
Camilla Christine Hall was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small, far-left militant group that committed violent acts between 1973 and 1975. They assassinated Marcus Foster, Superintendent of the Oakland Public Schools and the first black superintendent of any major school system, kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, and committed armed robbery of banks.
Sara Jane Olson is an American far-left activist who was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1975. The group disbanded and she was a fugitive for decades before being arrested. In 2001, she pleaded guilty to attempted murder related to a failed bombing plot. In 2003 she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder related to the death of a customer during a botched bank robbery the SLA committed in California. Known then as Soliah, she was also accused of helping a group hide Patty Hearst, a kidnapped newspaper heiress, in 1974. After being federally indicted in 1976, Soliah was a wanted fugitive for several decades. She lived for periods in Zimbabwe and the U.S. states of Washington and Minnesota.
Patricia Monique Soltysik was an American woman who was best known as a co-founder and activist in the Symbionese Liberation Army, a far-left militant group based in Berkeley and Oakland, California. She participated in the group's violent activities, including armed bank robbery.
The United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army was a small, American militant far-left organization active between 1973 and 1975; it claimed to be a vanguard movement. The FBI and wider American law enforcement considered the SLA to be the first terrorist organization to rise from the American left. Six members died in a May 1974 shootout with police in Los Angeles. The three surviving fugitives recruited new members, but nearly all of them were apprehended in 1975 and prosecuted.
Patricia Campbell Hearst is an American actress and member of the Hearst family. She is the granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst.
William Lawton Wolfe was one of the founding members in 1972 of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an American radical group based near Oakland, California. While in the group, he adopted the name "Kahjoh", though the media misspelled this as "Cujo".
The Black Cultural Association (BCA) was an African-American inmate group founded in 1968 at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, a California state prison, and formally recognized by prison officials in 1969. The primary purpose of the BCA was to provide educational tutoring to inmates, which it did in conjunction with graduate college students from the nearby San Francisco Bay Area. Outsiders were allowed to attend meetings of the BCA, and tutors provided remedial and advanced courses in mathematics, reading, writing, art, history, political science, and sociology. In time, radical political organizations such as Venceremos infiltrated the BCA, giving rise to BCA factions such as Unisight, which eventually gave birth to the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Donald David DeFreeze, also known as Cinque Mtume and using the nom de guerre "General Field Marshal Cinque", was an American man involved with the far-left radical group Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and convicted criminal.
Nancy Ling Perry was also known as Nancy Devoto, Lynn Ledworth, and Fahizah while a founding member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small leftist terrorist group based in northern California. Considered one of its chief theorists and activists, she died in a shootout with the Los Angeles Police Department at an SLA safehouse in that city.
Wendy Masako Yoshimura is an American still life watercolor painter. She was a member of the leftist terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army during the mid-1970s. She was born in Manzanar, one of numerous World War II-era internment camps for Japanese Americans who were forced out of their homes and businesses along the West Coast. She was raised both in Japan and California's Central Valley.
Marcus Albert Foster was an American educator who gained a national reputation for educational excellence while serving as principal of Simon Gratz High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1966–1969), as Associate Superintendent of Schools in Philadelphia (1969–1970), and as the first black superintendent of a large city school district. He was appointed in 1970 as Superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District in Oakland, California. Foster was assassinated in 1973 by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a newly founded leftist terrorist group.
Angela DeAngelis Atwood, also known as General Gelina, was a founding member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an American far-left urban guerrilla group which kidnapped Patricia Hearst and robbed banks. She was killed, along with five other SLA members, in a nationally televised shootout with the Los Angeles Police Department.
Patty Hearst is a 1988 American biographical crime drama film directed by Paul Schrader. The film stars Natasha Richardson as Hearst Corporation heiress Patricia Hearst and Ving Rhames as Symbionese Liberation Army leader Cinque. It is based on Hearst's 1982 autobiography Every Secret Thing, which was later rereleased as Patty Hearst – Her Own Story.
Stuart Hanlon is an attorney based in San Francisco, California who represented San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr, Geronimo Pratt and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst is a 2004 PBS documentary film about the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army left-wing revolutionary group. It was directed by Robert Stone, and features interviews with Timothy Findley and SLA members Russ Little and Michael Bortin.
James William Kilgore is a convicted American felon and former fugitive for his activities in the 1970s with the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing terrorist organization in California. After years of research and writing, he later became a research scholar and ultimately worked at the University of Illinois' Center for African Studies in Champaign–Urbana.
Thero Lavon Wheeler (1945–2009), aka Bruce Bradley while a fugitive (1973–1975), was a founding member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, an American left-wing organization in the San Francisco Bay area. He left the group in October 1973 as he objected to its plans to undertake violent acts. Law enforcement later classified the SLA as a terrorist group.
Mary Alice Siem was a student at the University of California, Berkeley when she became involved in 1973 with a prisoner outreach program at Vacaville Prison. She became the girlfriend of Thero Wheeler, an inmate who escaped in August 1973. He was a founding member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an extremist group based in Oakland that was classified as terrorist by law enforcement. It was known for murders, armed robberies and the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst after Wheeler and Siem left the group in October 1973.
Joseph Michael Remiro is an American convicted murderer and one of the founding members of the Symbionese Liberation Army in the early fall of 1973. It was an American leftist terrorist group based in the Bay Area of California. He used the pseudonym or nom de guerre "Bo" while he was a member of the group.
Colston Richard Westbrook was an American teacher and linguist who worked in the fields of minority education and literacy. At the University of California, Berkeley, he established a program of prison outreach and approved students from the Bay Area to serve as volunteers. Some of the participants from Berkeley and two former prisoners at Vacaville Prison were among the founding members in 1973 of the radical leftist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.