On November 6, 1973, SLA members shot and killed Marcus Foster, Oakland's first Black superintendent of schools, and gravely wounded his deputy Robert Blackburn, absurdly branding Foster a fascist over a student-ID proposal he had in fact opposed. The killing was denounced across the left, including by imprisoned Black revolutionaries. In January 1974 a traffic stop in Concord netted Joe Remiro and Russell Little, who were convicted of the murder in 1975 and sentenced to life.
Little's conviction was overturned by the California Court of Appeal, and at his 1981 retrial in Monterey County he was acquitted; he has since said Remiro was likewise not a shooter. Remiro remains imprisoned five decades later — among the longest-held prisoners of the 1970s underground — repeatedly denied parole in a case still entangled with the SLA's founding crime.