Jailbreak!

In which Brown, Cook and free Sherman,

and shoot a police officer in the process

“Is Seattle in for a Northern Ireland episode? To have something like this is a real cancer in our midst. I feel sorry for Seattle.”

            - Tukwila Police Chief John Sheets, upon being read the Brigade’s “International Women’s Day” communiqué[1] 

            Bruce’s death came as a shock. Brigade members had made personal commitments to die for the cause, if necessary, but they had not foreseen one of their own being killed—and certainly not so quickly!

            Holly Near, the popular performer, came to Seattle in the wake of Bruce’s death.  Rita and Tammy attended the concert (‘We’ve already got tickets,’ Rita justified to her guilty conscience). They recognized many others in mourning in the audience. When Near played “It Could Have Been Me But It Was You”, Bruce was obviously on a number of people’s minds: 

            It could have been me, but instead it was you.

            So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two.

            I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs,

            A farmer of food and a righter of wrongs.

            It could have been me, but instead it was you.

            And it may be, my dear sisters and brothers, before we are through.

            But if you can fight for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom,

            If you can fight for freedom, I can too.

            Ed and John were initially charged with Bruce’s murder, but the charge was soon dropped. Dual counts of “assault with intent to kill” against two police officers, however, did not go away.

            At 9:30 am on Thursday, Feb. 19, 1976, an inquest into the legality of Bruce’s death opened before King County Judge William Lewis. The inquest jury was instructed that they could declare the death “justifiable homicide” if Detective Joseph L. Mathews and Officer Robert W. Abbott were either in reasonable fear of serious body harm or death, or acting in the lawful course of their duties to prevent a felony in progress.

            Bruce’s family had the right to represent his interests in the inquest, but declined to do so. Ed and John requested to speak on behalf of their fallen comrade, and had that permission granted, an unprecedented move on the part of the court. The two men entered the courtroom with clenched fist salutes.

            “Do you understand anything you say could be used against you in state and federal trials?” Judge Lewis asked, once they were seated.

            “I do, but I feel obliged to bring out the facts about Seidel’s death,” Ed responded. John repeated the statement.

            Ed and John contended that Bruce attempted to surrender, leapt into a doorway area and was hit in the left buttock when Mathews fired the first shot. John said Bruce fell to the floor and was immediately hit by another bullet. A ballistics expert testified that this bullet was a .38 caliber short, quite different from the hollow point bullets used by the Tukwila Police Department: the implication was that it had been fired by the robbers’ accomplice, who had been shooting at Mathews from across the street.

            Detective Mathews testified that he saw a man in an orange poncho, later identified as Seidel, come out of the bank with a gun. The officer yelled, “Hold it, police!”; Seidel turned and fired once or twice. Mathews yelled again, and Seidel turned and pointed his gun at him again. It was only at this point, Mathews asserted, that he fired once.
            Officer Abbott, who arrived on the crime scene after Mathews, apparently fired the shot which fatally penetrated Bruce’s right breast.
            Ed and John acknowledged that they began firing after the police began firing. John was convinced that if he and Ed hadn’t returned fire after Bruce had been hit the second time “we’d be dead.”
            The statements by two witnesses, bank manager Mark Wallbom, and 17 year old Donald J. Gorman Jr., supported Ed and John’s claim that the first shots were fired from outside the bank. Wallbom claimed that he heard two shots fired at a 3-5 second interval outside the bank. Gorman Jr., who was sitting outside the bank in a parked car, “heard one shot from outside and saw the man in the orange coat turn and grab his lower left buttock.” Other witnesses supported the police’s account of the shooting. Gorman’s father, for one, was sure that the shooting started at the south end of the bank, as was a female bank employee in the bank’s southernmost room.

            Gorman Jr.’s testimony was not in complete accord with that of Ed and John. The window of his car was blasted out by two shots from the bank within seconds of the first shot, indicating that, despite their claims, at least one of the robbers had fired before Bruce was hit the second time.

            The jury of four men and two women had the right to ask questions, but, for the most part, chose not to. They did not ask Ed or John, for example, about their assertion that Bruce was left handed and could not have fired with his right hand, as Mathews testified. After forty minutes’ deliberation, the jury found that Abbott had had reasonable grounds to fire when he shot and killed Bruce Seidel.[2]

            In response to the inquest ruling Ed and John composed an angry document entitled “On the Death of Bruce.” Casting Bruce in a heroic light and the police in a menacing one, they asserted that “Our comrade Bruce” had been “murdered by police hoodlums as he was trying to surrender.” They continued:

Bruce, always conscious of the need to safe-guard the well-being of innocent people, gave the signal to surrender… As soon as he was exposed the police opened fire. They did so without warning or provocation and in complete disregard for the safety of workers inside the bank.

            Police chief John Sheets subsequently told the media that police “arrived at the bank to a fusillade of gun shots from the men in the bank.” Police reports claim they killed Bruce in self-defense. This is an outright lie!

“None of us were prepared,” they concluded, “for the sudden transition from the orderly and controlled violence of the expropriation to the savage attack by police.”

            In a preview of their defense strategy Ed and John cited recent police assaults on civilians—the massacres of prisoners in Attica and of SLA members in Compton, as well as the Seattle Police Department’s recent killing of an unarmed young black man named Joe Herbert—as the source of their own fear of the officers. It was thus as a protective measure that “We opened fire on police.” As to the inquest: “Police lawlessness receives another pat on the back…!” The two felons included the home addresses of the guilty officers, in case any of their readers felt inclined to met out some “people’s justice.”[3]

            John obtained access to an unmonitored telephone in the jail infirmary. He contacted his outside comrades and let them know that he was being taken regularly to Harborview Hospital for reconstructive surgery on his damaged jaw. Implicit in this information was a conspiratorial understanding.

The three free Brigaders scoped the place—a modern-day castle on a promontory overlooking downtown—to see if it would be possible to deliver John from police custody. They found no major impediments. Though jail staff were warned, after an earlier successful escape, not to tell inmates the date and time of their next appointment, one health care provider—a hopeless civilian—did so anyway. John notified his comrades of the details of his fourth and final visit on March 10^th.. They formulated a plan to free him.

            Rita carried a florist’s box into the hospital lobby. Instead of long-stemmed roses to lift the spirits of a patient, it held a shotgun to lift those of a convict. She waited patiently for John to appear, and saw him as soon as the elevator door opened, cuffed and chatting amiably with a white, baby-faced uniformed officer. John and Rita did not acknowledge one another.

Outside, it was raining heavily. Virgil Johnson, John’s police escort, had parked the van at the far end of the lot. “Do you wanna run for it?” he offered companionably.  

            “No!” John replied emphatically, aware that such consideration would complicate the planned interception.

            As they exited the building, Rita trailed the pair while Mark, dressed in a doctor’s smock, waited closer to the police van. Tammy circled in a white and green van, pretending to look for parking. Johnson left John at the passenger side door. As he went to open the driver’s side, he felt a gun in his back. Mark calmly informed him, “I’m taking your prisoner.”

            Confused, but attempting to comply, Johnson asked “What?” as he reached for his keys and turned to proffer them to his assailant. Unfortunately, the keys were next to his gun, and Mark misread the officer’s intentions. He fired into Johnson’s stomach; the officer fell to the ground. John rushed around to the opposite side of the van, screaming “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” as Johnson rolled under a parked to protect himself from further assault.

Rita grabbed John and pushed him into the car Tammy was driving. “Get his gun!” she shouted at Mark, referring to the fallen officer. Mark obliged; Johnson, fearing that he would be killed, played dead while he was disarmed.[4] Rita hopped in the car with John and they sped off. Mark climbed into a dark blue Chevrolet Vega. He and his driver split in the opposite direction.

            With an immense wire cutter Rita clipped off John’s handcuffs. She then put a trenchcoat and hat on him. At the car drop, the three diverged. John, with surgical wire still in his mouth, was set to assume the identity of an injured worker. Tammy had been designated his “wife,” for the sake of cover. The couple drove off to their safehouse in the suburbs. Rita, in the fifth car of the day, parted separately. In just ten minutes the breakout was complete. In an hour John was completely free­­—if being one of the most wanted men in the country could be called “freedom”.

            The escape created an immediate news splash. “’Radical’ Wounds Officer to Help Inmate Escape” was the top story on the front page of the next day’s Post-Intelligencer (PI). A portrait of the cherubic Johnson was featured prominently next to a shot of a shackled Sherman smiling under correctional escort. Press accounts revealed that, after he had pulled himself from under the van, Johnson had struggled to his feet and walked towards the hospital emergency room. He flagged down the car of a Seattle Fire Department paramedic, announcing “I’ve been shot in the stomach.” The paramedic then helped Johnson, bleeding heavily from the exit wound in his back, into the emergency room. The bullet had passed through Johnson’s stomach and small intestine, damaging his pancreas and liver. After receiving eight units of blood following surgery, Johnson remained in serious condition. Police flashed him photos of suspects that night, but he was all but worthless. A doctor told the press that the young man was expected to recover.

Johnson’s assailant was described as “a black man, about thirty, with a moustache and an ‘afro’ haircut.’ Illustrating the peculiar propensity of black men to multiply in the paranoid white imagination, the story continued: “The other suspect, at first described possibly as a woman, later was also described as a black man.” “The other suspect” was Rita. Investigators believed that the man who shot Johnson might be the “mysterious fourth participant in the Tukwila robbery attempt, the one who shot at police and accidentally wounded Sherman in the jaw in a wild gun battle before fleeing in a getaway car.”

The PI stated “the complex planning apparent in both yesterday’s escape and the robbery attempt indicate both may be the work of an ‘urban guerrilla’ force like those who have claimed responsibility for a number of unsolved bombings in Washington…Police said the escape raid was believed to be the work of  armed and dangerous political radicals.” King County Police Lieutenant Kraske said the persons responsible were “definitely a revolutionary group.”[5]

With one of their own a casualty the police were furious. Criticism from the press, pointing out inadequate security measures, rubbed salt in their wounds. In a final insult to their competency, the FBI, citing federal charges relating to the bank robbery, claimed jurisdiction over the case and began to order about the locals.

            The police knew they were looking for a black man.  The SPD Intelligence Unit kept a “crazy nigger” list, and Mark, along with every other Panther they’d ever had the opportunity to log, was on it.

Around 7 pm on the evening of the breakout, Mark was arrested while coming out of a laundromat. He was held incommunicado and photographed. Police questioned him about Harborview and released him after a couple hours.[6]

            Rita called shortly thereafter. “Can you meet me at 3^rd and Jackson?” she inquired. Concern was evident in her voice.

            “I’ll be there in an hour.”

            Rita wove them through the alleys of Pioneer Square as they talked.

            “Disappear,” she urged, painfully apprehensive. “We’ll send you over to where John is. If worse comes to worse, we’ll just send you guys out of the state, we’ll just smuggle you out.” If a black man was one of their party, they would have had to go directly to a city because he would have been too noticeable anywhere else in the blindingly white Pacific Northwest. But this was a minor concern: Mark’s continued liberty was the primary one.

Mark politely declined the offer. “I’m spending time with my son, which I was never able to do when he was a child.  I have Sandra.  I have a life.  I’ve only been out a couple years.  I’m not willing to give this up.”

Seeing the consternation in his comrade’s face he tried to reassure her with teasing levity.  “It’s okay, they let me go.  They don’t know anything!”

            What Mark didn’t know was that the police had picked up his old buddy Autrey Sturgis, a convict he mentored in his Walla Walla days, in the same sweep that drew him in. He also didn’t know that Sturgis, whom he only ran into occasionally, was once again a heroin addict. As “Scat”, the name by which he had been known in the joint, began exhibiting signs of withdrawal in custody, police began their interrogation. Like any old convict, Sturgis could read the cues police gave him to let him know what they wanted to hear. In this case, it was that Cook was the shooter at Tukwila and Harborview. Cook was a prime suspect because of his record of armed robbery and more recent prison activism. Sturgis told the officers that Cook had confessed to him. This became the central irony in Cook’s case: even though he was guilty of the charges against him, he was framed and railroaded due to improper police conduct.[7]

            After a couple of days, the police picked Mark up again at his Capitol Hill apartment.[8] They didn’t let him go for 23 years.

            Wires sealed John’s mouth; he couldn’t eat solid food. The best Rita and Tammy could do for him was to prepare gruel. Rita began clipping the wires and pulling them out with pliers. This contrasted with the image police were painting of the organization. As an explanation as to why dentists were not being told to be on the lookout for the fugitive, one police spokesperson asserted: “If these people really are members of a revolutionary group, they’ll have access to their own medical care.”[9] In a similar vein, an anonymous investigator observed that groups such as the Brigade “have numerous safehouses up and down the coast.”[10]—a circumstance for which Brigade members could only wish.

            The extraction process was incredibly painful for John. As he reached the limit of his endurance, the thought occurred to Rita: ‘Janine would have some pills.’

            Janine picked up the phone around noon on Tuesday the 23rd. She was babysitting Robin, the child of Lois and Patrick, who was being raised by a parenting collective.

            The caller declared: “You have to meet me right away.”

            Janine, recognizing Rita’s voice immediately, was flustered. “I can’t, I’m babysitting Robin.”

            “How soon can you come?”

            “A couple hours.”

            Rita dictated a complicated set of directions, including bus lines and transfer patterns zigzagging throughout the south of the city. Janine wasn’t in a security mindset: “I can just drive there, if you like,” she offered.

            “No, you can’t,” Rita corrected.

            The circuitous route ended at the Safeway on Rainier Ave. Rita picked Janine up and drove her in an appropriately disorienting manner through the curving, one-block streets of Renton and Skyway. If forced, Janine would not have been able to find her way back to the house.

            They pulled up to a bland single-family structure perched on a bluff overlooking the sea. Once inside, Janine was stunned to be greeted by John Sherman. She had known that he’d been liberated by the Brigade—Rita had briefed her on the situation in the car—but it didn’t quite click until he was sitting in front of her. She was also delighted to see Tammy, whom she had admired from their first meeting.

            Janine indeed had painkillers to offer John. The Brigade asked her about other business as well: “Can you clean out this house once we go?...We could also use some movement papers.”

            “I might be able to clean the place up for you. I can certainly pick up some papers for you.”

            Janine stayed the night. The three Brigaders had just completed the “International Women’s Day” communiqué. Janine and Rita composed a poem that Rita convinced the others to tack onto it. The poem contrasted the media’s presentation of the Brigade with what they themselves considered it to be:

We’re not all white and we’re not all men

said a white male member

of our collective

to a liberal masked media man

Turning their criticism to the above ground white Left, the pair wrote:

        why struggle with

arms, tools, commie Q’s

dykes niggers cons

when you could slip away with

left support action

of vague mass movement construction

They rebuffed the oft-stated assertion in both the mainstream and the countercultural press that the Brigade was a self-appointed vanguardist formation:

        Not the vague vanguard

We are a collection

of oppressed people turning

inside out with action

this united few breaks

barriers of

race class sex

workers and lumpen

all going together

combating dull sameness

corporations, government

and the established rule of

straight white cocks

            “[A]in’t no turning back now,” they continued. “[N]o more mass meetings stalemating action.” They conflated their path with that of contemporary revolutionary icons—“joining you sistah brother/is freedom, Sue [Saxe], Assata [Shakur]/George [Jackson], Jill [Raymond], Martin [Sostre].”[11] “[N]ew family being sane/small, not like charlie’s/ leader ship”; the last was a jab at dominant misinformation contending that any efforts to radically reconceptualize “family” inevitably resulted in the psychopathology that clustered around Manson.

            They closed with a playful mix of a popular lyric by the local gay balladeers Lavender Country and Rita’s own incorrigibly dirty mouth:

            We are cozy cuddly

armed and dangerous

and we will

raze the fucking prisons

to the ground

The group gave Janine the communiqué and asked her to stash it somewhere and notify Walt Wright at the PI of its whereabouts. She placed it behind a dumpster on Capitol Hill and called from the airport as she prepared to depart on a family bonding foray to Hawaii with her mother and aunt.

Recovered Saturday the 27^th, the communiqué claimed credit for the attempted robbery at Tukwila and the liberation of Sherman. It was unrepentantly martial:

We have so far identified the following tactical criticisms of the Tukwila action: 1) We were unprepared for the level of violence that the pigs were willing to bring down on us and the innocent people in the bank. We should have had better combat training. 2) We waited too long to open fire on the pigs. We should have fired without hesitation on the first pig to arrive. Failure to do this allowed the police to murder our comrade while he was trying to surrender, and endangered everyone in the bank.

Third, the Brigade members inside the bank “should have split immediately with whatever they had in their hands” as soon as the phone started to ring to authenticate the silent alarm. “4) Our comrades[12] across the street should have had more firepower than they did. We had an enormous tactical advantage which we were unable to exploit because it took so long to bring [the] superior firepower that we did have into action.”

Finally, the Brigade complimented itself on its escape plans: “5) Our getaway route was excellent. Comrades were able to remain in the area, firing on the pigs until the three comrades inside the bank were taken into custody, and still get away clean.” The conclusion was a vow to up the stakes: “Over all, this action failed because we were not prepared to meet police terrorism with a sufficient level of revolutionary violence.”

The Brigade then turned to the Sherman liberation, in which the mistake of too little revolutionary violence had not been repeated. The organization was careful to spell out, however, that they didn’t desire to begin a blood revenge game: “In the course of the escape raid it became necessary to shoot the police officer guarding Sherman. We did not shoot officer Johnson in retaliation for Bruce’s murder. In fact, it was our intention to avoid shooting him. He was shot because he failed to cooperate as fully as possible with the comrade who was assigned to him.”

The shooting of Virgil Johnson was a direct result of the hard lessons of Tukwila, according to the communiqué: “One of the many lessons we learned from Tukwila is that we cannot afford to give the police any slack when confronting them. While we don’t particularly want to shoot police, we don’t particularly care either. We will shoot without hesitation any police officer who endangers us.” (emphasis added.)

The Brigade then proceeded to vow personal revenge: “[W]e fully intend to get justice for Bruce’s murder, but we prefer to retaliate against the murderers themselves: officers Abbot and Matthews.”

Enclosed with the communiqué was a .38 caliber slug fired from the same gun used to pin down the cops at Tukwila. On March 30^th a jaw brace—technically termed a “torsion arch bar”—worn by John Sherman arrived at KZAM radio station in Bellevue, also for the purposes of authentication.[13]

The Brigade also sent a copy of the communiqué to the Left Bank Collective. After reading, the collective revised its opinion of the Brigade upward. Paul Zilsel, the collective’s eminence gris, told press that the Brigade was a group of “serious revolutionaries who have the right to be respected as such.” Theirs were not simply crimes, but revolutionary acts against the ruling class.[14] Dragon opined: “The freeing of a comrade is a truly exemplary act, one to inspire sisters and brothers engaged in all struggle everywhere… We believe the ability of the Brigade to liberate Sherman so soon after three comrades were put out of commission demonstrates both the dedication of the Brigade and a depth of organization and support.”[15] 

The FBI, however, was less than charmed. To them, the audacity of the communiqué was an insufferable insult. Special Agent in Charge John Reed declared that the Brigade had thrown down “a gauntlet” and vowed: “we will pick it up and ram it down their throats.” The Brigade had become one of only a handful of radical groups in the country to which FBI Director Clarence Kelley had assigned a high investigative priority. When new Justice Department guidelines were formulated for the FBI in the wake of revelations of its counterintelligence program against Martin Luther King, Jr., Director Kelley told a House Judiciary subcommittee that the Brigade was one of eight groups which might carry out new acts of violence unchecked if the Bureau was hampered by excessive restrictions. The proposed guidelines would have prohibited the FBI from: committing or instigating criminal acts; disseminating information for the purpose of holding an individual or group up to scorn, ridicule, or disgrace; disseminating information anonymously or under a false identity; and inciting violence.[16]

            Police Chief Robert Hanson, freshly returned from a conference of other major metropolitan police chiefs, was convinced that urban guerrilla groups were one of the hardest targets law enforcement had ever faced and applauded the tough talk of SAC Reed. “We can’t infiltrate them, they don’t respond to financial rewards, and their dedication reminds me of Kamikaze pilots,” Hanson complained. An unprecedented fear of crime and concomitant support of police by the American people, however, would prove the undoing of groups such as the Brigade. “These hard-core crazies are like ten thousand ants on a log floating down the river. They all form their little cells, and their little groups, and each cell thinks it controls wherever the log goes. But these crazies are not the people, and they are not going to have any impact on where the log goes. The log will follow the river, no matter what the ants do.”[17]

The silver lining in the communiqué, from the perspective of law enforcement, was that it revealed conclusively that the Brigade was not the white, middle class, post-college student organization which portions of the SPD and the media had insisted that it was. Several voices in the political community complained about this. The editors of Dragon wrote: “we think that it was a mistake to give the cops information that they may well not have had.”[18]

It was now clear that the Brigade included one or more blacks, lesbians, and ex-convicts. Despite this insight, Seattle’s prosecutors, and the FBI, chose instead to focus their investigative energies on a more familiar target: the city’s above-ground Left community.