Days of Rage (45 page)

DeFreeze and the others had fled. They drove around for several hours, it appears, before stopping at about 4 a.m. It was then, at a small stucco house at 1466 East Fifty-fourth Street, four miles away, that a hard-partying thirty-five-year-old named Christine Johnson answered a soft knock on her front door. She and a group of friends had been drinking wine and listening to music all night; theirs was the only house on the block with lights still on. Opening the door, Johnson and her friend Minnie Lewis found a stranger: DeFreeze. “I saw your lights, sisters,” he said. “My name is Cinque. I need your help.”

The name meant nothing to the two women. DeFreeze said he and his friends needed a place to stay for a few hours. He admitted, sheepishly, that police were looking for them, not an unusual circumstance in this neighborhood. He pulled out $100 and promised there would be no trouble. Johnson whispered for a moment with her friend, then took the money and said they could stay for a little while.

At that moment there were six people in the house, Johnson and Lewis, a parking lot attendant named Freddie Freeman, seventeen-year-old Brenda Daniels, and two sleeping children. Freeman helped DeFreeze unload the vans, which took twenty minutes. There were boxes packed with documents, a footlocker, sleeping bags, and, to Freeman’s dismay, nineteen guns, including four .30-caliber carbines, a Browning .30-06, and seven sawed-off shotguns. There were also four thousand bullets, some of them in bandoliers. DeFreeze and Freeman lugged it all inside and stacked it in the kitchen.

They hid the vans in an alley around the corner, then went to look at an apartment house where Freeman suggested they could find a permanent home. By the time DeFreeze returned, Johnson was having second thoughts about sharing their home with these odd strangers. Not only were “Cinque’s” friends all white; they were white people with pistols jammed in their belts. They had watched in dismay as one of the girls, apparently Nancy Perry, filled several bottles with gasoline. An hour later, after sending Lewis’s two children to school, Johnson and Lewis popped several pills, swigged a few last beers, and went to sleep.

People, including a stream of preschool children, filed in and out of the house all morning. DeFreeze sent Brenda Daniels for groceries. One of Daniels’s girlfriends came by for what she called “a wake-up beer.” Freeman’s supervisor arrived to pick him up for work, but Freeman waved him off,
figuring to make some money off Cinque and his strange white friends. At midmorning DeFreeze gave Freeman $450 and told him to go buy them a car. Through it all, he and his acolytes stood at the windows in shifts, taking turns grabbing naps. At the top of every hour DeFreeze picked up the telephone and dialed one of the designated pay phones, hoping to find Bill Harris. No one answered.

It was growing hot. By noon, the sky a brilliant blue, the temperature had risen into the eighties. As before, DeFreeze made no effort to hide who they were. He seemed to genuinely believe that, because they were fighting in the name of black people, black people would support them, or at least would not alert the police. When asked, he said he had come to Los Angeles to start a revolution, to kill police. Told that the neighborhood was dominated by a local gang, the Crips, DeFreeze said he hoped to meet some, pledging to make them “right-on revolutionaries.” Each of the visitors scurried back outside to spread the word that the SLA was at Christine Johnson’s house. Up and down the street, people shook their heads in disbelief. Others whispered in their yards. Phones rang. The news spread. A sixty-three-year-old grandfather named James Reed stopped by the house to drop off some collard greens. Two white girls wearing pistols smiled at him and said hi.

The day stretched on. When Johnson finally stirred, beers and joints were passed. Around three, Minnie Lewis’s children returned from school. One, an eleven-year-old named Timmy, marveled at all the guns.

“Who are you?” he asked DeFreeze.

“We’re your mama’s friends.”

“No, you’re not. I know all my mama’s friends.”

DeFreeze told the boy to sit down. Suddenly Timmy, apparently a more avid consumer of mass media than his mother, recognized him.

“Are you Donald DeFreeze?” he asked.

“No.”

Timmy darted out the back door and ran toward his grandmother’s house. DeFreeze kept watching the street. Something wasn’t right. There were too many people around, too many police cruisers driving idly by. Johnson, now awake, still drunk, assured him that police in the neighborhood were nothing new. But DeFreeze didn’t like it. There was still no word from Hearst and the Harrises. He kept glancing at the street, wondering where Freddie Freeman had gone with his $450.

“He ought to be back by now,” he kept saying.

Another police car cruised past.

“We gotta get outta here,” DeFreeze told Mizmoon. “It’s getting too hot.”

“Why?” she replied. “It’s hot everywhere.”

A few minutes later, trouble arrived—but not at all the kind DeFreeze had feared. An angry grandmother, Mary Carr, came storming through the front door and, ignoring DeFreeze and the armed white people for a moment, found her daughter, Minnie Lewis, passed out on a bed. “Is everybody here drunk?” she demanded.

The teenager, Brenda Daniels, took her elbow and whispered that there were two white women in the other bedroom. Making bombs.

This was too much for Mary Carr. She marched into the kitchen, where DeFreeze had wandered, studiously avoiding her.

“You get out of this place right now!” she hollered.

DeFreeze mumbled something about black people sticking together. Mary Carr took two of her grandchildren by the collar, stalked out the front door, and went in search of a policeman. She didn’t have to look far. Hundreds of men in blue were already streaming into the area.

 • • • 

The LAPD knew they were close. A search of the house on West Eighty-fourth Street produced a trove of evidence: gas masks, a radio, three suitcases packed with clothing, a bag of medical supplies, one of Angela Atwood’s poems. “Now is the time—we’re all alive,” one couplet read. “Eat it Pig!” Neighbors described the two vans. Dozens of police cruisers began crisscrossing the area, and at 12:20 p.m. a pair of Metro Squad cops spotted the vans in an alley on East Fifty-third. Black plainclothes detectives began filtering into the surrounding streets.

Neighbors did the rest. At two o’clock one called the FBI to say the SLA was hiding at 1462 East Fifty-fourth Street—next door. A caller to the LAPD phoned in an address on South Compton—around the corner. By
three, when a meeting of senior LAPD and FBI officials convened at the Newton Street Station, the noose was tightening. By four o’clock, when police set up a command post in a tow-truck office a few blocks down East Fifty-fourth, four houses had been pinpointed. At four twenty a perimeter was established. By five, 127 FBI agents and more than two hundred police officers, including two SWAT teams, had surrounded the area. When Mary Carr found her way to the command post, the last piece fell into place.

Inside the house at 1466 East Fifty-fourth, DeFreeze sensed it. The block was slowly draining of people. Minnie Lewis disappeared. Freddie Freeman never returned. The Harrises were nowhere to be found. Christine Johnson, an epileptic, collapsed in the kitchen, and DeFreeze dragged her to a couch. When Brenda Daniels went for more groceries, police took her into custody. By five thirty, besides Johnson, the only occupants of the house other than the SLA were a neighbor named Clarence Ross, taking pulls from a pint bottle of whiskey, and Minnie Lewis’s eight-year-old son, Tony, who was watching cartoons.

At one point, a neighbor girl—curious to “see the SLA”—wandered into the house and told DeFreeze police were in the area. She followed him into the kitchen, where he drank from a jug of Boone’s Farm wine. The end was near, DeFreeze said. He was ready. “But we’re gonna take a lot of motherfucking pigs with us,” he promised.

Everyone knew what was coming. Even news reporters had arrived on the scene; one tried to interview a next-door neighbor, Mattie Morrison, who told him to get lost. Detectives crept up to houses up and down the block, warning residents to leave or remain inside; most ignored them, peering from their porches, waiting. By 5:40 p.m. the SWAT teams, eighteen men in all, had hustled into place, one team splayed behind cars and bungalows in front of the house, another on the block behind. At 5:44 their leader raised his bullhorn:

“Occupants of fourteen-sixty-six East Fifty-fourth Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department speaking. Come out with your hands up. Comply immediately and you will not be harmed.”

The house was still. After a pause the announcement was repeated. Down the block television crews raised their cameras, correspondents their microphones. The evening news was just minutes away. All three networks went to the scene live.

The house remained silent. Behind it, a SWAT marksman could see a refrigerator being moved to blockade the back door. “People in the yellow frame house with the stone porch, address fourteen-sixty-six East Fifty-fourth Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department. . . .”

Suddenly there was movement on the front porch.

“The front door,” one of the police walkie-talkies squawked. “Somebody’s coming out.”

It was the eight-year-old, Tony, curious what all the noise was about. He hopped down the front steps, drifted toward the sidewalk, and froze, wide-eyed. Everywhere he looked were men with guns.

“Come this way, over here,” a SWAT team member called.

Tony was a statue.

A policeman scurried up, grabbed the boy, and carried him away in his arms. Tony began screaming, “Mama! Mama!”

A minute later Clarence Ross stepped onto the front porch, hands clasped behind his head. He and Tony were led around the corner, where SWAT leaders fired questions at them. Ross said little. But Tony gave a good description of DeFreeze, his people, and their weapons. As he did, the SWAT team at the front of the house endlessly repeated its bullhorn announcements, eventually eighteen times in all.

With nightfall barely two hours away, the LAPD wanted to avoid an all-night siege in a tough neighborhood. They decided to bring matters to a head. At 5:53, nine minutes after the first warning, a pair of Flite-Rite rockets streaked from the street, shattering a front window and exploding in Christine Johnson’s living room. Wisps of tear gas could be seen wafting through the windows. From inside came the SLA’s reply: a burst of machine-gun fire from an M1. Bullets chattered against the side of an apartment house across the street. Up and down the block, officers rose and fired their weapons into the house.

The entire neighborhood seemed to explode in gunfire. For five full
minutes bullets whizzed and ricocheted everywhere, all of it broadcast live on television. Policemen ran to and fro. Everywhere residents ducked, climbed out windows, and sprinted for cover. Dozens more tear gas canisters were fired into the house, one hundred in all. Clouds of gas enveloped the house and front yard.

Then, at 6:40, after almost an hour of confusing gunfire, black smoke could be seen pouring from a rear window. Police would later theorize that one of their tear gas canisters had ignited the gasoline Nancy Perry had been seen pouring into bottles. Then Christine Johnson wobbled into the front yard, where police whisked her away. By then the first flames could be seen.

“Cease fire!” a SWAT leader barked. “Cease fire!”

Another officer lifted his bullhorn. “Come on out, the house is on fire,” he announced. “You will not be harmed.”

The only reply was a sustained burst of automatic-weapon fire. The police again opened fire. Then, at 6:47, came a lull in the shooting. Police would later discover that DeFreeze and his soldiers had chopped a hole in the kitchen floor and wriggled into the eighteen-inch crawlspace beneath the house. It was then, as the firing continued, that officers behind the house saw a tiny woman in combat fatigues emerge from a hole in the crawlspace. It was Nancy Ling Perry, “Fahizah.” She took a step forward and, spying SWAT officers in the alley, raised a pistol and fired. Police fired back. Two bullets struck her in the back, severing her spinal cord, and she fell dead. Camilla Hall—“Gabi”—emerged from the crawlspace firing a pistol. A bullet struck her flush in the forehead, killing her. Officers watched as a pair of hands grabbed her ankles and dragged her back inside.

By then the house was engulfed in flames. Even then the SLA kept firing from the crawlspace. Finally, at 6:58, the roof began to collapse. The walls caved in. All that was left was an inferno, black smoke billowing into the early-evening sky, visible for miles. Three neighboring houses caught fire as well. All around, the police, the reporters, all of Los Angeles, were spellbound. For several minutes bullets and a pipe bomb or two could be heard exploding inside. A few minutes later the first fire engines began to move in.

The deadliest single day in the short history of America’s radical underground was over. Six people were dead; not a single lawman had been hurt. Later that night, when police began sifting through the rubble, they found DeFreeze, Mizmoon Soltysik, and Willie Wolfe in a rear corner of the crawlspace, burned to cinders, crushed, gas masks melted to their faces. Angela Atwood lay nearby. Nancy Perry had been buried beneath a falling wall. Camilla Hall’s body wasn’t found for two days. But that was it. The one person the LAPD, and all of America, most wanted to find, Patty Hearst, was nowhere to be found.

For days police cars cruised the neighborhood, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. What the police never learned was that others were searching as well: a team from the Weather Underground led by Bill Ayers’s brother Rick. “We really thought groups like the SLA were nuts and horrible, and yet we felt some responsibility,” Ayers recalls. “We could recognize that level of craziness, and that someone needed to get a hold of them and say, ‘Just chill.’ We just tried to find them, just drove around looking for them. We felt it was bad for everyone, and we thought, I don’t know, that we could save them.”

But Patty Hearst was gone.