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Donald Defreeze aka Cinque on April 15, 1974 robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco along with Patty Hearst and other members of the SLA.
Donald David DeFreeze (November 15, 1943 – May 17, 1974), also known as Cinque Mtume and "Field Marshal Cinque", was the leader of the American far-left militia group Symbionese Liberation Army, a group operating in the mid-1970s. Stephen King has stated that DeFreeze was one of the people who were the inspiration for Randall Flagg.
Early Years[]
DeFreeze was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to African-American parents Louis and Mary DeFreeze, the eldest of eight children. His mother was a registered nurse at a convalescent home. His father was a violent man who punished him three times as a child by breaking both of his arms. He 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.
Hibernia bank robbery.
Between his juvenile years and the early seventies DeFreeze would be in and out of jail and prison. He was arrested several times for various offenses ranging from robbery to kidnapping.
On November 17, 1969, DeFreeze was injured in a gun battle with police outside a bank in Los Angeles. He was convicted of having stolen a $1,000 negotiable cashier's check and sent to Vacaville Prison.
While incarcerated at Vacaville Prison, DeFreeze joined the Black Cultural Association (BCA). The BCA had contact with professor Colston Westbrook at the University of California, Berkley. Through this group, Berkeley students were allowed to visit the prison to help prisoners with educational and political discussions. People outside of the university also attended. Through this organization, DeFreeze met with left wing radicals who were working as volunteers in the prison and was converted to the political ideology.
FBI Poster
DeFreeze diverged from the BCA in order to set up his own group, Unisight. Two of the ethnically white American radicals who joined Unisight were Willie Wolfe and Russ Little. In addition, an inmate by the name of Thero Wheeler, a former member of the Black Panthers, was also in the group. This is believed to have been the beginnings of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).
Prison Escape[]
DeFreeze escaped from Soledad Prison on March 5, 1973. He made his way to Oakland, California, where he was hidden by white friends from the Vacaville BCA. He was taken to the house of Patricia "Mizmoon" Soltysik, with whom he then lived for several months. Through Soltysik, DeFreeze met Camilla Hall, a Berkeley artist.
Police SWAT surrounds the house where DeFreeze and the SLA (minus Patty Hearst and a few others) barricaded themselves on May 17. 1974
SLA[]
DeFreeze, along with Patricia Soltysik, founded the Symbionese Liberation Army and soon recruited members for his group. The group perpetrated a number of crimes, the most infamous being the murder of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster and the abduction of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. DeFreeze is primarily suspected of having murdered Foster and shooting Assistant Superintendent Robert Blackburn.
The famous photo of Patty Hearst posing in front of the SLA flag in 1974. By this time she had taken the moniker of "Tania".
Defreeze (standing,center,second row) and other members of the SLA.
Death[]
On May 17, 1974, the Los Angeles Police Department surrounded a house where DeFreeze and five other SLA members were staying. The stand-off quickly escalated into an all-out battle with both sides trading fire using automatic weapons. The house caught fire during the shootout (possibly from a smoke grenade). DeFreeze and others crawled through a hole in the floor into a crawlspace beneath the house, where they continued to fire at police until the crawlspace likely caught fire. Apparently burning alive, DeFreeze committed suicide by shooting himself in the right side of his head with a pistol. He was the final fatality during the shootout. His corpse was so severely burned that his family did not initially believe the remains belonged to DeFreeze.DeFreeze is buried in Highland Park Cemetery in Highland Hills, Ohio.
SLA emblem
References in media[]
As stated by Stephen King in his book Danse Macabre, he was one of the sources of the recurrent character Randall Flagg:
I sat there for another fifteen minutes or so, listening to the Eagles on my little cassette player, and then I wrote: Donald DeFreeze is a dark man. I did not mean that DeFreeze was black; it had suddenly occurred to me that, in the photos taken during the bank robbery in which Patty Hearst participated, you could barely see DeFreeze's face.He was wearing a big badass hat, and what he looked like was mostly guesswork. I wrote, "A dark man with no face," and then glanced up and saw that grisly little motto again: Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. And that was that. I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called The Stand.
In Chapter 23 of The Stand ,when Flagg first appears, the reader learns that Flagg spent time with DeFreeze and the SLA - leaving the group's hideoutshortly before the police surround the revolutionaries on May 17, 1974. After the few surviving members (among them Patty Hearst) are rounded up they are only able to give a vague description of Flagg.