In the Black Liberation Army’s first-ever phone call to the press, a caller to United Press International took credit in the name of the Attica Brigade of the “Afro-American Liberation Army’’-exiled Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver’s name for the BLA-saying, “We have more grenades, and we will be back.” The NYPD immediately issued a 13-state alarm calling for her arrest. Later, the man identified Joanne Chesimard, who had been with the BLA since its foundation that spring and had taken part in its training camp outside Atlanta, as one of his assailants. As the officers leaped unhurt from the burning cruiser, the Pontiac roared off toward Brooklyn, where a few minutes later its occupants jumped out, rushed toward a man at a Sunoco gas station and stole his car. To the officers’ amazement, it exploded beside the car, wrecking it. It was, of all things, a hand grenade-an M-26 fragmentation grenade to be exact, the kind used by the U.S. As the chase continued, someone in the Pontiac rolled down a window and lobbed something toward the cruiser. When the cruiser lit its rolling lights, the Pontiac took off, racing to the corner of Flushing Avenue and 57th Street, where it turned southwest, toward Brooklyn.
#POLICE OFFICERS AMBUSHED LICENSE#
Following at a safe distance, the officers checked its license plate and discovered the car was stolen. When the cruiser approached, the Pontiac pulled from the curb. This is the untold story behind them.Īt 9:30 in the morning on December 20, 1971, in Queens, two patrolmen spied four people in a green Pontiac-one woman and three men-parked in front of a Bankers Trust branch on Grand Avenue at 49th Street, acting suspiciously. The BLA’s most notorious attack, however, came in 1972, when it carried out perhaps the most gruesome assassination of police officers in the history of New York, killing two patrolmen, Greg Foster and Rocco Laurie, on an East Village sidewalk. Loosely led by the Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, then in exile in Algeria, the group emerged in May 1971 with a pair of attacks on New York policemen that left two cops dead there were later ambush attacks on police in San Francisco and Atlanta as well. The Weather Underground did so with bombs, until one went off accidentally, killing three of its members, leading the group to disavow murderous violence.īut it was the Black Liberation Army, known as the BLA and a violent offshoot of the Black Panther Party, that posed the greatest threat to police. The underground groups of the ‘70s thus made police their first and most frequent targets. It was a time when police brutality was rampant-far worse than today, by most measures-and white police officers rarely were prosecuted when they killed black civilians. While groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army were vehemently anti-war, their core motivation was rallying the black community toward open revolt. Copyright (c) 2015 by Bryan Burrough.Ī fter the social upheavals of the 1960s failed to trigger the vast systemic changes many protesters sought, the early 1970s saw a number of militant groups form secret underground cells that pledged to use violence in an attempt to fight for civil rights, end the Vietnam War and, in the minds of the hard core, trigger a violent revolution in the streets of America.
This article has been adapted from his recent book, DAYS OF RAGE, which published April 7, and reprinted by arrangement of Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House, Inc. “ were acting as the first line of defense for community members when they were essentially ambushed.Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of six books. “Heartbroken doesn’t begin to express the loss that we feel,” El Monte Mayor Jessica Ancona said.
The gunman, Justin Flores, was on probation for a gun offense at the time, according to court records. Michael Paredes, who had been on the force for two decades, and a rookie officer Joseph Santana. They were murdered by a coward.” The victims were identified as Cpl. “These two heroes paid the ultimate sacrifice today. Ben Lowry, the acting chief of the El Monte Police Department. Somewhere amid the crossfire, police said both the officers and the suspect were killed. When the officers arrived at the hotel around 4:47 p.m., they were fired upon, the Los Angeles Times reported, and a shootout ensued in a parking lot. Two police officers from El Monte, a suburb of Los Angeles, were shot and killed while responding to a stabbing at a motel Tuesday afternoon, police and local officials said.
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