DeFreeze's exact role within the Symbionese Liberation Army is unclear, but analysts have suggested he was either a figurehead or an indirect leader.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, DeFreeze dropped out of high school and had a criminal dossier from the age of fourteen.

He and several associates began to make plans for armed action that they believed would rouse the African-American community and attract more recruits.

During a shootout with law enforcement in Los Angeles, DeFreeze died by suicide by gunshot when he and five SLA members resisted a police raid in a burning house.

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

[1] 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.

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

[1] 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.

[1]An early probation report described DeFreeze as, "a schizoid personality with strong schizophrenic potential" who had "a fascination with firearms and explosives.

"[4] Psychiatric officials at the prison testing center where he was briefly sent recommended that he be jailed "because his fascination with firearms and explosives made him dangerous".

A memorandum from the prosecutor's office said that they decided to drop charges against DeFreeze since by the time of trial, he was jailed in California.

In addition, inmate Thero Wheeler, a former Black Panther, jailhouse lawyer, and self-taught Marxist, also joined the group.

[10][11] By late summer SLA members included Joe Remiro, a Vietnam veteran and activist who was a friend of Little and Wolfe.

[5] After acquiring arms, the group perpetrated a number of crimes, the most infamous being the November 1973 murder of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster, a black candidate for mayor of the city.

DeFreeze was a suspect in the shooting of Foster's deputy, Assistant Superintendent Robert Blackburn, who was seriously wounded in the attack.

On May 4, 1974, thirteen days before the younger Wolfe's death with DeFreeze and others in a shootout and fire, Headley and freelance writer Donald Freed held a press conference in San Francisco.

They presented 400 pages of documentation of their findings, some of which included evidence that, a year before the kidnapping, Patty Hearst had visited DeFreeze in prison.

[14] Lake Headley also provided evidence for the following: Records showed that DeFreeze had set up the arrest of an associate in a case involving a stolen gun.

[4] Evidence showed that Colston Westbrook, a professor and the BCA's main contact at UC Berkeley, had worked closely with the Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS) and the State of California's Sacramento-based CII (Criminal Identification and Investigation) unit.

[15] This was during the same period when DeFreeze was receiving unusually lenient treatment and extended probation from the Los Angeles County criminal justice system.

DeFreeze was found to have committed suicide by gunshot; two SLA members were fatally shot by police when they left the house; two others died of smoke and fire.

Investigator Lake Headley presented additional evidence that Donald DeFreeze was a police informant and an agent provocateur in his book Vegas P.I.

He also concluded that the Black Cultural Association was used by law enforcement to monitor radicals among both Berkeley students and prison inmates.

[16] Upon meeting radicals after his prison escape, DeFreeze was known for his eagerness to sell them firearms, explosives, and related items.

[16] Headley's work has been interpreted to suggest that the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was a CIA-controlled assassination squad, with the Black Panther Party as its main target.

[17] On May 17, 1974, the Los Angeles Police Department tracked DeFreeze and five other SLA members to a house at 1466 East 54th Street; they surrounded it and demanded that occupants surrender.

[citation needed] But the house caught fire during the shootout, possibly from an outdoor-type combusting tear gas canister.

As it burned, Nancy Ling Perry and Camilla Hall left the house, brandishing pistols according to police, and were fatally shot.

The Camper Van Beethoven song "Tania" from Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart refers to DeFreeze by his nom de guerre "Field Marshal Cinque" in the lyrics "A Polaroid of you, Cinque/With a seven-headed dragon/In a house in Daly City".