|
Forty-eight hours after the April 15th
bank robbery, black police officer Rodney Williams received a
communication from the SLA. Once again, it was a tape of Patty's
voice and she sounded enraged.
She explained that she and her
"comrades" had robbed the bank. "My gun was
loaded," she claimed, "and at no time did any of my comrades
intentionally point their guns at me." Their actions were
justified to finance "the revolution." She called her
parents "pigs," dismissed her fiancé, and then said,
"As for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous to the point of
being beyond belief." She ended by declaring that "I
am a soldier of the people's army."
Even so, there was good reason to
believe that Patty's sudden membership in the SLA was insincere.
This was a girl who had broken off with her first boyfriend after he'd
smoked some pot. In letters to him, she'd expressed extreme
distaste for hippies and the filth in which they lived. Before
being kidnapped, she had a good relationship with her parents, was
excited about getting married, and lived on an allowance that financed
her expensive apartment.
There are theories that she fell in
love with one of the men in the group—and in fact she said as much
in one of her tapes. There was also talk that she'd had some
association with the SLA before her kidnap---and possibly helped to
arrange it (although the brutal beating of her fiancé belies this).
Yet whether her involvement was out of fear or sympathy, there are
certainly some unanswered questions.
For the year she was on the run, she
never contacted her family. Why not? Even in her own book
on her experience, Every Secret Thing, she fails to address
this issue, 'though she claims that she was in fear for her life
throughout her ordeal.
Yet a month after the bank robbery,
Tania sat alone in a van outside a Los Angeles sporting goods store
where two other SLA members, Emily and Bill Harris, were shoplifting.
When they were apprehended, she fired a series of warning shots that
barely missed killing the storeowner but allowed the thieves to
escape. "Let them go, you motherfuckers," she shouted,
"or you're all dead." They then stole one car after
another to elude capture, and one kidnapped victim claimed that Patty
appeared to be very much in league with the SLA. There was no
indication that he could see that she was afraid or coerced. In
fact, she had volunteered negative opinions of her family and former
life that sounded sincere.
When news spread, everyone wondered
why Patty not only had remained in the van but also assisted in an
illegal act. This did not appear to be the behavior of someone
forced into submission. (Patty later claimed that it was
automatic, the result of her "training.")
 |
The
fire at SLA hideout after shoot-out
(CORBIS) |
The next day, May 17th, 1974, a
two-hour gun battle between the SLA and the LA police ignited a fire
that fatally trapped six "soldiers" in their cramped East
54th Street hideout. Nine thousand rounds were fired when 500
cops descended on the house, and the drama was televised, similar to
the Waco fiasco in which the David Koresh cult would be killed two
decades later. Eighteen requests to surrender were issued and
ignored before the first tear gas canister was thrown. Three
members were shot as they tried to escape, two succumbed to carbon
monoxide poisoning, and DeFreeze shot himself in the head. Since
the "army" was not very large to begin with, this pretty
much wiped them out. While America feared that Patty would be
found among the dead, in fact, along with Bill and Emily Harris, she
was alive and well and now a fugitive. |
