Biography
Henry "Sha Sha" Brown was a member of the Black Liberation Army. Two weeks after the January 27, 1972 killing of NYPD Officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie in Manhattan's East Village, Brown and fellow BLA members were pulled over in Brooklyn on February 14, 1972; after a high-speed crash and a shootout with the NYPD, Brown fled on foot but was tracked down and captured a few blocks away. Held for trial on the officers' murders, he tried to saw through his cell bars with a smuggled hacksaw blade on July 27, 1973, and then on September 27, 1973 escaped by feigning a peptic ulcer to be taken to the Kings County Hospital clinic for X-rays — inside an isolated changing booth he scaled an eight-foot partition wall and slipped past his guards. He was recaptured exactly a week later, on October 3, 1973, in a raid on a tenement in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, arrested alongside four others and identified by a fingerprint match after he refused to give his name. On March 21, 1974 he was acquitted of the murders. He remained a target of the state thereafter: he was later charged with bank expropriation and weapons offenses, was briefly liberated from the Manhattan House of Detention (the Tombs) in 1976 and recaptured, and was eventually held at FCI Lewisburg as a North American political prisoner. He was listed in PFOC Breakthrough magazine through the 1980s.
