Two days after the island rising, on November 1, 1950, New York Nationalists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola attacked Blair House in Washington, where President Truman was living, to force the world to see that Puerto Rico was in revolt. Torresola and White House policeman Leslie Coffelt died in the gunfight; Collazo, wounded, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
A week before the scheduled 1952 execution, Truman himself commuted the sentence to life, unwilling to make a martyr. Collazo served 29 years in Leavenworth, refusing to seek parole because parole implied guilt toward a government he did not recognize. President Carter commuted his sentence in 1979, and he returned to Puerto Rico with the Capitol attackers to a hero's welcome, unrepentant to his death in 1994.