Sara Jane Olson
Sara Jane Olson (born Kathleen Ann Soliah on January 16, 1947) is an American far-left activist who was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1975.
In 2003 she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder related to the death of a customer during a botched bank robbery the SLA committed in California.
[4] Kathleen Soliah was born on January 16, 1947, in Fargo, North Dakota, while her family was living in Barnesville, Minnesota.
Atwood tried to sponsor Soliah as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a leftist group she had joined.
[8] Atwood and five other core members of the SLA, including leader Donald DeFreeze, were killed in May 1974 during a standoff and shootout with police at a house near Watts, Los Angeles.
They were being pursued for armed robbery of banks, the November 1973 murder of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster, and the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.
[12]Soliah asserted that Atwood "was a truly revolutionary woman ... among the first white women to fight so righteously for their beliefs and to die for what they believed in".
[8] Founding SLA member and fugitive Emily Harris visited Soliah, who was working at a bookstore.
[8] She assisted them by procuring supplies for their San Francisco hideout, and birth certificates of dead infants that could be reused for false identification.
[13][8] Patty Hearst, who had acted as getaway driver during the crime, later provided the information that led police to implicate the SLA in the robbery and murder.
[14] Police later searched Soliah's room at the SLA safehouse on Precita Avenue in San Francisco.
[15][8] In 2002, new forensics technology allowed police to link these shells definitively to those found at Crocker Bank; they charged former members of SLA, including Soliah, with the crime.
[13] Prosecutor Michael Latin said that Soliah was tied to the crime through fingerprints, a palm print, and handwriting evidence.
[16] On August 21, 1975, a bomb that came close to detonating was discovered where a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car had been parked earlier in front of an International House of Pancakes restaurant.
[9] Soliah was accused of planting the bombs in an attempt to avenge the SLA members who had died in 1974 in the shootout with LA police.
[9] Two witnesses who testified in the 1976 grand jury indictment had died by the time Soliah (now known as Sara Jane Olson) was tried.
Components matching those used in the police car bombs were found in a locked closet at the Precita Avenue house where Soliah lived with the other remaining members of the SLA.
[20][21] On October 31, 2001, she accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder.
"[24] On November 13, Olson filed a motion requesting to withdraw her guilty plea, acknowledging that she understood the judge when he read the charges against her.
[15] At Soliah's 2002 sentencing hearing on the bombing, police officer John Hall,[16] who had been in the car parked over the bomb, talked about a little girl who stood feet away with her family: Your honor, it horrifies me to think that the lives of dozens of innocent people, like that child in the window [would have ended] in an instant had the defendant and her co conspirators successfully carried out their terrorist acts.
[15] On January 16, 2002, first-degree murder charges for the killing of Myrna Opsahl were filed against Olson and four other SLA members: Emily Harris, Bill Harris, Michael Bortin (who had married Olson's sister Josephine), and James Kilgore, who remained a fugitive.
[13] Judge Fidler arraigned Olson on the murder charges immediately following her sentencing hearing on January 18 for the explosives case.
She appealed, and in July 2004, a judge said there was "no analysis" of how the state Board of Prison Terms had decided 14 years was appropriate and threw the sentence out.
David Nickerson, Olson's attorney, said that her status reflected the Department of Corrections' view that she was a potential flight risk.
[28] In a 2007 interview with Marie Claire magazine (published by Hearst Corporation), Olson's 23-year-old daughter Emily Peterson dismissed her mother's radical past with the SLA.
[34] On March 21, 2008, she was rearrested when it was decided that she had been mistakenly released a year early from prison due to a miscalculation by the parole board.
[38] Years after her return to Minnesota, on November 4, 2020, Olson participated in a protest in Minneapolis called by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression after the U.S. presidential election.
Olson and several others marched onto Interstate 94, where they were met with a response from the Minneapolis Police Department and Minnesota State Patrol.
Olson appealed the conviction on the grounds that the state lacked evidence to find her guilty of using a controlled-access highway as a pedestrian.
