Donald DeFreeze

Donald DeFreeze
FBI file photo showing DeFreeze robbing the Hibernia bank.
Born	November 16, 1943(1943-11-16) Cleveland, Ohio
Died	May 17, 1974(1974-05-17) (aged 30) Los Angeles, California
Other names	Field Marshal Cinque, the Californian Che Guevara
Political movement	Symbionese Liberation Army

Donald David DeFreeze (November 16, 1943 – May 17, 1974), also known as Cinque Mtume, was the leader of the American guerilla group Symbionese Liberation Army, a group operating in the mid-1970s, under the nom de guerre "Field Marshal Cinque."

Early life

DeFreeze was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Louis and Mary DeFreeze. He began his criminal career at age 14, after he ran away from home and became a street gang member in Buffalo, New York^[1] before moving to California. In 1972, he was serving a sentence in Soledad Prison in Soledad, California for armed robbery. Those who remember him in prison considered him an unimpressive criminal. He was first arrested for stealing $10 from a prostitute and framed his friend as having committed the crime.^[2]

While incarcerated at Soledad Prison, DeFreeze met with some far-left radicals who were working as volunteers in the prison and was converted to their political ideas. After being transferred to Vacaville Prison, he escaped on March 5, 1973. DeFreeze adopted the name "Field Marshal Cinque", having taken this name from Joseph Cinqué, the reported leader of the slave rebellion which took over the Spanish slave ship Amistad in 1839. He adopted the surname "Mtume" from the Swahili word for "prophet".

SLA

DeFreeze, along with Patricia Soltysik, founded the Symbionese Liberation Army and soon recruited members for his group. The group perpetrated a number of crimes, the most infamous being the murder of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster and the abduction of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. DeFreeze is primarily suspected as having murdered Foster and shooting Assistant Superintendent Robert Blackburn.^[3]

On May 17, 1974, the Los Angeles Police Department surrounded a house where DeFreeze and five other SLA members were staying. The stand-off quickly escalated into all out battle with both sides trading fire using automatic weapons. The house caught fire during the shootout (possibly from a smoke grenade). DeFreeze and others crawled through a hole in the floor into a crawlspace beneath the house. Apparently burning alive, DeFreeze committed suicide by shooting himself in the right side of his head.^[4] His corpse was so severely burned that his family did not initially believe the remains belonged to DeFreeze.

DeFreeze is buried in Highland Park Cemetery in Shaker Heights, Ohio.^[5]

Cultural references

As stated by Stephen King in his book Danse Macabre he was one of the sources of the recurrent character Randall Flagg:

I sat there for another fifteen minutes or so, listening to the Eagles on my little cassette player, and then I wrote: Donald DeFreeze is a dark man. I did not mean that DeFreeze was black; it had suddenly occurred to me that, in the photos taken during the bank robbery in which Patty Hearst participated, you could barely see DeFreeze's face.

He was wearing a big badass hat, and what he looked like was mostly guesswork. I wrote, 'A dark man with no face,' and then glanced up and saw that grisly little motto again: Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. And that was that. I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called The Stand.

References

1. ^ Harvard Crimson, May 29, 1974; http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=148633
2. ^ SLA LOST YEAR
3. ^ Taylor, Michael (November 14, 2002). "Forgotten Footnote: Before Hearst, SLA killed educator". San Francisco Chronicle: pp. A-17. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/11/14/BA85190.DTL&hw=Marcus+Foster&sn=001&sc=1000. Retrieved 2009-03-17. 
4. ^ "ACCOUNT OF MAY 1974 LA SHOOTOUT STARTING WITH MELS SPORTING GOODS". 2007. http://www.presslord.com/bryan829.htm. Retrieved 2007-08-18. 
5. ^ Vigil, Vicki Blum. Cemeteries of Northeast Ohio. Cleveland: Gray & Company, Publishers, 2007

Persondata
Name	DeFreeze, Donald
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	November 16, 1943
Place of birth	Cleveland, Ohio
Date of death	May 17, 1974
Place of death	Los Angeles, California