The 1974 SLA Shootout: Patty Hearst, Live TV, and SWAT’s Rise

The 1974 SLA shootout was a two-hour gun battle on May 17, 1974, between the Los Angeles Police Department and six members of the Symbionese Liberation Army barricaded in a small yellow stucco house at 1466 East 54th Street in South Los Angeles. All six radicals inside were killed. No officers died. The confrontation was the first police gun battle broadcast live on American television, and it became a founding moment for modern SWAT policing.¹²

Patricia Hearst, the kidnapped newspaper heiress the group had turned into its most famous recruit, was not inside the house.

Why Police Were Hunting the SLA

The Symbionese Liberation Army was a small militant leftist group that formed in the Berkeley, California, area in 1973. Its membership never exceeded about a dozen people. The group’s leader, Donald DeFreeze, was an escaped convict who had taken the title “General Field Marshal Cinque.”³

By May 1974, the SLA was wanted for a string of high-profile crimes. On November 6, 1973, members ambushed Marcus Foster, the first Black superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District, and shot him eight times with cyanide-tipped hollow-point bullets as he left a school board meeting.⁴ On February 4, 1974, three SLA members kidnapped 19-year-old Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, from her Berkeley apartment.⁵ On April 15, 1974, surveillance cameras captured Hearst herself carrying an assault weapon during the group’s $10,000 robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco.⁶

How Police Found the House

In mid-May 1974, the SLA relocated to Los Angeles. On May 16, Bill and Emily Harris were caught shoplifting at a Los Angeles sporting-goods store. A woman waiting in a Volkswagen van across the street sprayed the storefront with machine-gun fire to help them escape. The group abandoned the van, and inside it police found a parking ticket that led them to a Culver City hideout the SLA had already left.⁷

That same day, a 52-year-old woman named Mary Carr visited her daughter Minnie Lewis at 1466 East 54th Street. Lewis told her mother she had let a group of strangers stay the night for $100. During the visit, Carr saw a white woman wearing a pistol belt who “patted her gun and smiled” at her. Carr tipped off police, and the LAPD moved on the address the next afternoon.⁷

The Gun Battle

On the afternoon of May 17, LAPD officers surrounded the house at East 54th Street and Compton Avenue. Nineteen SWAT members engaged directly in the firefight, with hundreds of additional officers deployed primarily to control a crowd that swelled to more than 10,000 people. Contemporary press accounts described a “500-man siege,” though later reviews clarified that only the SWAT contingent exchanged fire.¹⁸

Officers used a bullhorn to order the occupants out with their hands up roughly 25 to 26 times. The only answer was a pistol shot from inside, and the battle was on.¹ Over the next two hours, the SLA fired back with fully automatic weapons drawn from a cache of more than 6,000 rounds. Estimates of the total rounds exchanged ran as high as 9,000. The LAPD’s own ammunition supply ran out at one point.⁸

Police fired an overpowering volume of tear gas into the structure. The canisters ignited the ammunition stored inside, and the building burst into flames. Even as the fire spread, the SLA members refused to surrender. According to Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi, some retreated into a crawl space beneath the house and kept shooting until the fire overwhelmed them. Noguchi also noted a “preliminary suggestion” that DeFreeze may have taken his own life in the final moments.⁹

One occupant, Christine Johnson, who told police she had been held by the SLA, escaped during the firefight. SWAT officers rescued three people during the confrontation, including a child.¹⁰

The Six Who Died

All six SLA members inside the house were killed:

Donald DeFreeze (“Cinque”), the group’s leader and an escaped convict.
Nancy Ling Perry (“Fahizah”), an early member who had helped shelter DeFreeze after his prison escape.
Angela Atwood (“Gelina”), a recruit from Bloomington, Indiana.
Camilla Hall (“Gabi”).
William “Willie” Wolfe (“Cujo”), a former Vacaville prison tutor.
Patricia Soltysik (“Zoya”).

No LAPD officers were killed.⁶¹¹

Where Patty Hearst and the Harrises Were

Patty Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris were not in the house. One account places the three at a motel in Anaheim at the time of the siege.³ Another places them at a nearby hotel, watching the events on television along with the rest of the country.⁶ Hearst later said she had been “reborn” out of the ashes of the fire and remained a fugitive until her arrest in San Francisco on September 18, 1975.⁵

The First Live-Televised Police Shootout

The battle was the first police gun battle captured on live television. A newly hired cameraman named Ray Hernandez at the local CBS station KNXT shot the footage with a portable camera while dodging bullets.¹² KNXT shared its feed with the local NBC and ABC affiliates. The coverage preempted regularly scheduled programming for nearly two hours and reached millions of Los Angeles homes. The New York Times called it “a gruesome drama of a real police story.”¹³

What the Shootout Meant for SWAT

The LAPD’s SWAT unit had been created in 1966 by then-Inspector Daryl Gates after officers were outgunned by snipers during the 1965 Watts riots. The SLA shootout was its most visible operation to date and cemented the perceived need for SWAT as a permanent fixture of American policing. Gates himself called the operation “a failure” from the standpoint of what SWAT was supposed to achieve, because there had been “no way to bring the people out” alive.¹⁴

Police departments across the country and around the world established their own SWAT units in the years that followed.¹¹ SWAT doctrine also shifted toward a philosophy often summarized as “time, talk, and tear gas,” emphasizing hostage negotiation and containment over the overwhelming force used at East 54th Street.¹⁰ Randolph Hearst, Patty’s father, observed that the scale of the police assault had turned “dingbats into martyrs.”¹⁵

What Happened to the SLA Members Who Weren’t There

Patty Hearst

After her September 1975 arrest, Hearst was tried for armed bank robbery. Her defense argued she had been brainwashed, but a jury convicted her on March 20, 1976, and she was sentenced to seven years in prison.¹⁶ She served nearly two years before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979. On January 20, 2001, President Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon.¹⁷ According to one account, she is the only person in American history to receive both a presidential commutation and a presidential pardon.¹⁸

Bill and Emily Harris

Arrested with Hearst in September 1975, the Harrises pleaded guilty to kidnapping her and served roughly seven and a half years each.¹⁹ In November 2002, both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for their roles in a 1975 robbery of a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, California, during which a 42-year-old customer named Myrna Opsahl was killed with a sawed-off shotgun held by Emily Harris. In February 2003, a judge sentenced William Harris to seven years and Emily Harris, by then known as Emily Montague, to eight years.²⁰

Kathleen Soliah, Michael Bortin, and James Kilgore

Kathleen Soliah, who had joined the SLA’s remnants after the shootout, spent 25 years as a fugitive under the name Sara Jane Olson, living as a housewife in Minnesota until her June 1999 capture following an America’s Most Wanted broadcast tied to the 25th anniversary of the Carmichael robbery.²¹²²²³

Michael Bortin also pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the Opsahl case in November 2002 and received six years.²⁰²⁴²⁵

1
Los Angeles Times. SLA Shootout Retrospective
2
KCRW. Warren Olney Recalls the 1974 Symbionese Liberation Army Shootout
3
Britannica. Symbionese Liberation Army
4
BlackPast. Marcus Foster (1923-1973)
5
FBI. Patty Hearst
6
PBS. Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army
7
Time. Fiery End for Five of Patty’s Captors
8
CBS News Los Angeles. SWAT Officers Talk About Biggest Shootout in LA’s History
9
New York Times. Coroner Reconstructs Terrorists’ Deaths
10
Police1. Police History: How SWAT Got Its Start
11
Fox LA. A Look Back in LAPD History at the 1974 SLA Shootout
12
The South Pasadenan. How a South Pasadena Resident Filmed L.A.’s Biggest Shootout and Changed the News Industry
13
New York Times. Shootout a Gruesome Drama on Los Angeles TV
14
NPR. SWAT History: A Series of Highs, Lows in L.A.
15
History.com. LAPD Raid Leaves Six SLA Members Dead
16
Time. Patty Hearst
17
Clinton Presidential Library. Patricia Hearst Shaw Pardon
18
PBS NewsHour. Victim Becomes Criminal: Fresh Look at the Story of Patty Hearst
19
SF Gate. Ex-SLA Members Want Out of Jail
20
New York Times. Symbionese Liberation Army: Carmichael Bank Robbery Sentencing
21
Time. Sara Jane Olson: American Housewife, American Terrorist
22
FindLaw. Sentencing the Symbionese Liberation Army
23
New York Times. Symbionese Liberation Army
24
SF Chronicle. Former SLA Member James Kilgore Paroled
25
NBC News. SLA Member James Kilgore Sentenced