By Marisa Lagos, Jim Herron Zamora and Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
The San Francisco Chronicle
Seven alleged former members of the Black Liberation Army, including one San Francisco man, have been charged in connection with the 1971 shotgun murder of Sgt. John V. Young at the Ingleside Station, police said.
Richard Brown, 65, was arrested today at a home on the 1000 block of Fillmore Street, charged with one count of conspiracy and one count of murder and is being held on $3 million bail, said San Francisco sheriff’s spokeswoman Eileen Hirst.
Also arrested in San Francisco today was Richard O’Neal, 57, who was charged with one count of conspiracy to murder police officers. However, O’Neal was not charged as an active participant in Young’s murder, police said.
Both arrests occurred around 6 a.m.
Also charged in Young’s murder were Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64, and Henry Watson Jones, 71, both of Altadena (Los Angeles County); Herman Bell, 59, and Anthony Bottom, 55, both currently incarcerated in New York; Francisco Torres, 58, of Queens, N.Y.; and Harold Taylor, 58, of Panama City, Fla.
A ninth man, 62-year-old Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, whose whereabouts are unknown, also is wanted in connection with the Young’s murder.
Authorities allege that the suspects were members of the Black Liberation Army, a militant group that operated from about 1971 to 1981, made up largely of former Black Panthers. Deputy Police Chief Morris Tabak said authorities plan to extradite the suspects to California.
There is no statute of limitation for conspiracy to commit murder, but the death penalty will not be involved because it did not exist in California at the time of the crime, said state Deputy Attorney General Maggie Krell.
San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon, who worked on the defense of both Brown and O’Neal when the case was reopened in 1999, said he doubted authorities had new evidence.
“I don’t think they have anything new. I don’t think they have a case. If they have a case, we’ll deal with it,” Hanlon said. “But I’m afraid that this is just more vindictiveness against the Black Panthers and other groups who were active in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“To my knowledge, they’ve got absolutely nothing new in this case. If they do, let’s see it.”
Tabak would not say whether investigators had DNA evidence, but, he said, “Forensics across the board played a part in the case.
“We never stopped working on this case. We never stop working on homicides,” he said. “Any group that targets law enforcement for ... cold-blooded assassination really strikes the core of society. There is a great sense of relief, a victory for law enforcement and for all of the United States.”
At a press conference this morning, Krell said the suspects were “motivated to kill any law enforcement officer they could. In this case, they ambushed an innocent person merely because of the uniform he wore.”
The attorney general’s office is prosecuting Young’s murder, she said, because the investigation involved a number of agencies in several jurisdictions that together were known as the Phoenix Task Force.
Young was killed on Aug. 29, 1971, when two men burst into Ingleside Station and fired a shotgun through an opening in a bulletproof glass window. A civilian clerk was also wounded in the incident.
Authorities have long believed that the attackers had links to radical groups and that the murder was connected to a Feb. 16, 1970, attack in which a bomb was planted at Park Station. Sgt. Brian McDonnell, 44, was killed in that bombing, and eight other officers were injured.
Several people have been arrested over the years in connection with the attacks, but the investigation subsequently stalled.
In 1974, a court ruled that police in both San Francisco and New Orleans had engaged in what amounted to torture to extract a confession from one of several men arrested in New Orleans in connection with Young’s death.
In 1975, three men were charged with the 1971 attack at Ingleside Station, but a San Francisco judge dismissed the charges the next year, based on the 1974 ruling that police had tortured one of the men.
Then, two years ago, a grand jury convened in San Francisco to reopen the probe the killings of both Young and McDonnell.
At least a dozen people -- including former political activists and members of black radical groups -- were subpoenaed by the grand jury in 2005 and offered limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony.
Four people, including two self-described former Black Panthers, were jailed for contempt of court for refusing to testify in front of the grand jury.
According to San Francisco police, the men arrested this week were involved in a conspiracy to kill police officers that began Oct. 21, 1968, and lasted through 1973.
Attacks included the bombing of a police officer’s funeral at St. Brendan’s church in San Francisco; the killing of two New York City police officers; an attempted bombing of Mission Station; and three armed bank robberies.
Chronicle staff writer Leslie Fulbright contributed to this report.
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