Biography
Gerald A. “Jerry” Ebner was an itinerant Catholic Worker and anti-nuclear activist. On August 5, 1987, Ebner and Joe Gump entered a Minuteman missile silo site near Butler, Missouri, poured blood in the shape of a cross, and damaged electrical and alarm equipment before waiting to be arrested. Ebner received a 40-month federal sentence and was held at FCI Sandstone. He remained active in anti-nuclear civil resistance after his release.
Separate imprisonment episodes
Art Laffin's movement chronology dates Ebner's sentence to December 11, 1987 and later discharge to April 5, 1991, after parole and a summer 1990 return. The rows distinguish those episodes; unknown initial admission, first parole and later return days remain blank. The sentence length is not time actually served. Existing identified portrait retained.
Laffin chronology, Transfiguration Plowshares West entry. The same account copied on ickevald.net is not independent corroboration. Contemporary December 24, 1987 Niles Bugle indexed text also reports the December court sentencing, but direct PDF retrieval returned 403; no download, visual verification or access workaround is claimed.
Frank Cordaro’s May 2019 account names Gerald "Jerry" Ebner among five people arrested, handcuffed and taken to Polk County Jail following the May 18 Armed Forces Day protest at the Des Moines Drone Command Center. The group spent the night in holding cells and appeared before a judge the following morning. Four pleaded guilty and received fines; the separately named not-guilty participant was Ruth Hart. All five were physically released by 2 p.m. on May 19. This source does not identify the specific charge, judge, fine amount or a jail sentence; the documented overnight detention is separate from the August 2019 action.
The September 4, 2013 report names Gerald “Jerry” Ebner as beginning a six-month prison sentence on September 2 for the December 28, 2012 Offutt Air Force Base line-crossing. The reproduced same-day account by Janice Sevre-Duszynska describes accompanying him to Lexington Federal Medical Center and watching him walk through the opened prison gates. The published register number 24467-045 matches his existing identity. This is a separate imprisonment from his 1987 Transfiguration Plowshares and later parole-return cases. The six months are imposed, not completed; an expected March release is not an actual discharge. No exact sentencing day, formal charge, release endpoint or additional served-day total is inferred. The Nuclear Resister, September 4, 2013.
Frank Cordaro’s participant account identifies Jerry Ebner as the person who crossed the line at Offutt Air Force Base on December 28, 2012. Base security detained him, processed him in a van, issued a ban-and-bar letter, and returned him to supporters within an hour. The participant distinguished this base-security detention from a formal arrest and described a future trespass summons and possible prison term. This account concerns the initial event, not the separate later service of his sentence; it does not establish a new jail admission or a completed whole-day duration.
Contemporary participant report, The Nuclear Resister, December 31, 2012.
The July 2008 Nuclear Resister reports that Jerry Ebner served two days in jail in January after his conviction for the October 10, 2007 die-in at Omaha’s Space Defense Conference. The protest opposed nuclear and space warfare directed by the U.S. Strategic Command. Exact jail admission and release dates are not given. The Nuclear Resister, issue 149.
