On January 23, 1976, the Brigade attempted an expropriation of the Pacific National Bank branch in Tukwila, south of Seattle, to fund its work. Police were waiting: in the gun battle Bruce Seidel — a founding member and communist theoretician of the group — was shot dead, Ed Mead was captured at the scene, and John Sherman was wounded and taken. It was the Brigade's catastrophe and its defining sacrifice; communiqués thereafter were signed "in memory of comrade Bruce Seidel."
Mead, charged under Washington's tough-on-crime statutes, drew decades; at trial he turned the courtroom into a seminar on the prison system that had made him. Six weeks later, on March 10, 1976, the Brigade struck back — a member disguised as a guard walked the wounded Sherman out of custody during a hospital transfer, the group's most audacious single action.