Donald DeFreeze

Donald David DeFreeze (November 16, 1943 – May 17, 1974), also known as Cinque Mtume and using the nom de guerre "General Field Marshal Cinque", was known as the "spokesman" of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small, American far-left group that formed in Oakland, California in 1973.

Some analysts suggested he was a figurehead; others said he was the leader.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, he dropped out of high school and was involved from the age of 14 in frequent brushes with the criminal justice system.

He received generous probation in the late 1960s, leading some sources to suggest he was serving as a police informant to the Los Angeles Police Department.

He and several white allies began to make plans for armed action that they believed would arouse the black community and attract more recruits.

Three SLA soldiers fatally shot Marcus Foster, the Superintendent of Public Schools in Oakland, the first black superintendent of any major public school system, and wounded his deputy.

They mistakenly believed he supported a program of student IDs, and, by his assassination, alienated the black community.

In 1963, at the age of 20, he married Gloria Thomas, who had three children from a previous marriage.

DeFreeze and Thomas had a total of three children together.

In 1964 his wife had him arrested for desertion.

They reconciled.

During his period away from his family, in 1964, police stopped DeFreeze while he was hitchhiking on the San Bernardino Freeway near West Covina, California.

They found him carrying a tear-gas pencil bomb, a sharpened butter knife, and a sawed-off rifle in his suitcase.

After having some gun charges dropped, in 1965 DeFreeze moved with his family from the Northeast to California, where they settled in Los Angeles.

He said that the worries of trying to support the children engulfed him.

He wrote, "I just couldn't take it anymore. I was slowly becoming a nothing".

In 1965, having returned to Newark, DeFreeze was arrested for firing a gun in the basement of his home.

"I started playing with guns and fireworks," he would later write.

"Just anything to get away from life and how unhappy I was".

The charges were dropped and DeFreeze took his family to California.

In 1967, the police stopped DeFreeze for running a red light on his bicycle.

In 1970, DeFreeze wrote of his time there, which he called a prison or a mental institution:

"Life in the prison, as we called it, was nothing, but fear and hate, day in and day out... I would not be part of any of the gangs, black or white... I didn't hate anyone, black or white, and they hated me for it."

Following his release, DeFreeze moved to the Newark, New Jersey area.

Two members of the SLA were arrested in January 1974, convicted and sentenced to prison for the crimes.

DeFreeze and co-conspirators next kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst February 1974, seeking a ransom and attention.

Police pressure rose.

During a shootout with law enforcement in Los Angeles, DeFreeze committed suicide by gunshot when he and five SLA members made a stand in a burning house.

A private investigation before this last assault suggested that DeFreeze may have been a police informant and agent provocateur from before the founding days of the SLA.

His remains were returned to Cleveland, where the funeral was organized at the family's request by members of the Sunni Orthodox Moslem sect.

DeFreeze was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Louis and Mary DeFreeze; he was the oldest of eight children.

His mother was a registered nurse at a convalescent home.

His father was a violent man who punished DeFreeze frequently; he broke both of the boy's arms three times when he was a child.

DeFreeze dropped out of school in the ninth grade at age 14 and ran away from home.

He moved to Buffalo, New York, where he lived with the Rev. William L. Foster, a fundamentalist minister, and his family.

He became a street gang member in Buffalo.

The Rev. Foster would say of him later:

"He was a get up and go kid... he had a heart that was as big as a house. But some of the boys he used to hang around with, I didn't care for. You just knew they were 99 and 44/100 percent bad."

In his first brush with the law, DeFreeze was arrested for stealing from parking meters and stealing a car.

He was sent to the state reformatory in Elmira, New York, which later became Elmira Correctional Facility.