Introduction Movements Eras Organizations Index Contributions
About Organizations
Black Panther Party Black Liberation Army American Indian Movement FALN Weather Underground Earth Liberation Front Animal Liberation Front MOVE Republic of New Afrika Symbionese Liberation Army Los Macheteros United Freedom Front May 19th Communist Organization Young Lords George Jackson Brigade Students for a Democratic Society Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Industrial Workers of the World Communist Party USA Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Brown Berets Socialist Workers Party African People's Socialist Party Nation of Islam
About Symbionese Liberation Army
Out of the Prison Movement: the SLA Forms (1973) The Marcus Foster Assassination & the Remiro–Little Case (1973–1981) The Hearst Kidnapping & the Hibernia Bank Robbery (1974) The Los Angeles Shootout (May 17, 1974) The Hearst Trial, Commutation & Pardon (1975–2001) The Long Reckoning: Sara Jane Olson & the Opsahl Case (1999–2009)
THE LOS ANGELES SHOOTOUT (MAY 17, 1974)
The Los Angeles Shootout (May 17, 1974)

After a botched shoplifting incident exposed the group's Los Angeles refuge, more than 400 LAPD officers, including the department's new SWAT teams, surrounded a small house at 1466 East 54th Street on May 17, 1974. In a two-hour gun battle broadcast live on television — the first such spectacle in American history — police fired thousands of rounds and the house burned to the ground with the SLA's core inside.

Six members died: Donald DeFreeze, Nancy Ling Perry, Angela Atwood, Patricia Soltysik, Camilla Hall, and Willie Wolfe, several of gunshots, others of smoke and burns as the house collapsed. The Harrises and Hearst, watching on a motel television, survived as the remnant. The shootout hardened debate that continues: a necessary confrontation with an armed cell, or a deliberate incineration that stood in for trial.