tuesday: 8 BLA arrests for 1971 police killing in S.F.

8 arrests in 1971 police killing in S.F.
By MARCUS WOHLSEN, Associated Press Writer
Eight men were arrested Tuesday [1/23/2007] in the 1971 killing of a police officer that
authorities say was part of a black power group's five-year effort to
attack and kill law enforcement officers in San Francisco and New York.
Police said seven of the eight are believed to be former members of the
Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party.
The Aug. 29, 1971, shooting death of Sgt. John V. Young, 51, at a San
Francisco police station was one in a series of attacks by BLA members on law
enforcement officials on both coasts, police said.
The attacks, carried out between 1968 and 1973, also included the bombing
of a police funeral in San Francisco and the slayings of two New York City police
officers, as well as three armed bank robberies, police said.
The investigation of the killing spree was reopened in 1999 after
"advances in forensic science led to the discovery of new evidence in one of the unsolved
cases," according to a news release from the San Francisco Police Department.
Police declined to elaborate on the evidence. "It could be fibers. It
could be DNA.
It could be other biological evidence," said Morris Tabak, the
department's deputy
chief of investigations.
Authorities said charges of murder and conspiracy were filed against Ray
Michael
Boudreaux, 64, of Altadena; Richard Brown, 65, of San Francisco; Herman
Bell, 59,
and Anthony Bottom, 55, both currently incarcerated in New York state;
Henry Watson
Jones, 71, of Altadena; Francisco Torres, 58, of New York City; and Harold
Taylor,
58, of Panama City, Fla.
San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon, who represents Bell, called
Tuesday's arrests
a "prosecution based on vengeance and hate from the '60s."
"There's a law enforcement attitude that they hate these people, the
Panthers,"
Hanlon said. "Now they're going after old men."
Richard O'Neal, 57, of San Francisco, was also arrested on conspiracy
charges. He
is not believed to have been a member of the Black Liberation Army.
A ninth suspect, Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, 62, was still being sought
on murder
and conspiracy charges, police said. Police say he could be in France,
Belize or
Tanzania.
The slain officer was killed when two men raided a neighborhood police
station,
firing a shotgun through a hole in a bulletproof window. A civilian clerk was
wounded.
Three men, including Taylor, were charged in the attack in early 1975.
However,
those charges were dismissed by a San Francisco judge because of an
earlier ruling
that evidence was obtained by torture after the suspects were arrested in New
Orleans.
Bell and Bottom are each serving life sentences for the killings of two
New York
police officers.
Another suspect in Young's murder, John Bowman of Oklahoma, died in
December,
according to his lawyer, Ann Moorman of Ukiah.
___
Associated Press Writers Kim Curtis and Juliana Barbassa in San Francisco
and Tom
Hays in New York City contributed to this report.