Original subtitles

and said, where's Patty, where's Patty?

They said they took her.

Mom, Dad, I'm okay.

We want to see how far we can motivate them to do what we want.

Do what they say, Dad, and just do it quickly.

In this case, it became a media frenzy.

Hearst was truly afraid that his daughter was going to get killed. They

interested in re -educating me.

She desperately did not want to go home. You want to do this, you're probably

going to die.

I've chosen to stay and fight.

It completely changed everything.

The granddaughter of William Randolph Peirce was abducted by two men and a

in a bizarre kidnapping.

No ransom note, no phone calls, no word, nothing.

The SLA is the people's army and we fight in their interest.

The FBI said the girl on the wave with the automatic rifle was Patricia Hurst.

Rich college girl turned armed terrorist in a matter of weeks.

Southern California's largest manhunt continues.

For someone my age, I've been through an awful lot.

We don't know where she is.

Mom, Dad, I'm okay.

Regardless of whether Patricia Hearst meant what she said or was forced to say

it, there does seem to have been a profound change in her since the

Watching talking heads report on this, they were stunned.

Was she forced to say it? Or as Patricia Hearst has hinted in previous messages,

has she begun to be converted by the revolutionary education her kidnappers

been giving her all these weeks?

Propaganda effect was...

It was almost hilarious, you know what I mean? It was amazing.

No one expected that.

We've had her 20 years. They've had her 60 days.

And I don't believe that she's going to change her philosophy that quickly.

It was a novel that was being told every day.

Part of it was a ragtag group of radicals and someone from American

nobility. It was...

poverty, which they were showing, and great wealth.

It was also about young people fighting against the establishment. It was an

ongoing drama, and it was unresolved.

The story of the SLA, especially the beginning, is tactical victories,

strategic incoherence. Because they successfully kidnapped Patty Hearst.

They successfully

organize the food delivery they successfully recruit her to be one of

those are all real victories but to what end

we've already stunned everybody by her claiming that you know

now she's on our side we had to prove that thinking about it now we were broke

we didn't have any money we were down to the nubs Now we had another mouth to

feed forever. We had to plan some type of an expropriation. We decided we'd

it all into one, and we would find a bank with video cameras recording

everything.

Back then, video security systems were new, so we found a bank that had video

cameras.

Hibernia Bank.

It was nerve -wracking.

I wish we didn't have to rob banks. I would rather not rob banks. It was not

that much fun.

But it was necessary.

And Patricia wanted this too. She insisted on being in the assault team.

means that's the crew that's going in the bank doing the actual robbery.

She was carrying an M1 carbine that was not adapted for fully automatic fire.

She was trained enough in it to be able to use it effectively.

Me, Emily, and Willie, we were situated across the street in case anything went

down that we had to respond to.

Most of the comrades were in the bank.

St. Q disarmed the security guard.

Ms. Moon hit the tills. Everybody else was just making sure everybody kept

heads down.

Hattie was front and center.

It looked like she was ready to shoot. She was ready to shoot anything that got

in the way or moved.

She just said that anybody that put their head up, they would...

If they had blown off... She said that herself? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Did you get the

impression that she would have used that gun? Absolutely.

Who would have thought that Patricia Hearst, a few months after she was

kidnapped, would be robbing a bank as a revolutionary act?

That bank robbery surveillance photograph was pretty indicative of what

happened, and that was that Patty Hearst had participated in an armed bank

robbery of the Hibernia Bank.

At that moment, this one -line story about an heiress who'd been

kidnapped by crazy revolutionaries from the 60s changed in the blink of an eye

with that photo of Patty with a gun in that bank.

There was initially, in those first couple of days, some debate. She must

been forced to do it.

Seeing Patty in the bank with a gun, if it cemented anything, it was just...

She's being disgraced and manipulated and coerced in a theatrical, cruel way.

Patricia's performance in that bank robbery only solidified what we already

suspected about her.

Somewhat of a revolutionary savant. We kidnapped a freak.

People freeze in certain situations.

Patricia Harris is not the kind of person that freezes ever.

I think she was spectacular.

And I think it was obvious. It was obvious to DeVries.

Everybody had a sidearm, and her performing admirably in a bank robbery

the gun that was originally the sidearm of the security guard at the Ibernia

Bank. Now she has a sidearm as well.

Patricia was a 100 % equal member in this cell. She had the same

responsibilities we did. We weren't making her do anything against her will.

At that point, it was against her will to go home.

She is still a kidnapped victim. She was taken away against her will.

And psychologically, she's a victim of thought control by terrorists.

And all I can do is hope and pray that God will bring her home again.

After observing her mother, Catherine, suggest that she had been a subject or

victim of mind control.

She was offended by it because it was another conflict between her and her

and she wanted to prove her wrong.

Greetings to the people.

This is Tanya.

On April 15th, my comrades and I expropriated $10 ,660

.02 from the Sunset Branch of the Hibernia Bank.

I was positioned so that I could hold customers and bank personnel who were on

the floor.

My gun was loaded, and at no time did any of my comrades intentionally point

their guns at me.

As for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous to the point of being beyond

belief.

For those people who still believe that I am brainwashed or dead, I see no

reason to further defend my position.

I am a soldier in the people's army.

The

Patty

Hearst story was a huge national story from the day of the kidnapping.

But what made it even bigger was that Patty Hearst turned her back on

her life of privilege.

And she became a metaphor for young people in America everywhere.

People given opportunities, given the promise of America, and deciding instead

to turn against it and even overthrow it.

There were posters. People supported her, not just in Berkeley, but

So there was sort of a romance about it.

took on a life of its own.

As embarrassing as the situation was to the FBI after the kidnapping, it was

much worse after the robbery of the Hibernia Bank.

Because here you had a half dozen people showing off for the cameras in broad

daylight.

We've just almost turned that area upside down.

I'm going to make an admission, which hurts.

We don't know where she is.

The robbery was successful.

We're happy that we got some money, but it was a subdued scene in many ways.

With few resources, we had to figure out what we were going to do next. We

couldn't just sustain this for very long if we had to rob banks all the time to

live.

We had the police in every jurisdiction in the Bay Area wanting to be the ones

that caught us or killed us.

Police were mobilized not only to deal with us, but they were dealing with

zebra killers, you know. The zebra killings were some of the most notorious

crimes in American history.

You had a group of black Muslims, and they grabbed people off the street

and not only murdered them, but tortured some of them solely because they were

white. All of this was going on while the kidnapping was happening.

putting San Francisco in something close to complete panic.

The shootings began last night around 7 .30 in the Haight -Ashbury district. By

10 p .m., four persons lay dead, all white.

Cops were doing stop and frisk, and so black males walking down the street, and

if a cop rolled by, they'd stop them and put them on the wall and frisk them to

make sure they didn't have weapons or whatever.

The freaks couldn't go outside at all with this kind of a situation.

The pigs and the fascist media, had by their slick trickery, attempted to link

the SLA with the so -called zebra killings.

The next lie that we expect to hear is that Sin Q is the zebra killer, and this

will be to give even greater pig justification to continue the harassment

disarming of the people.

We realized that we just had to get the hell out of there. That was not a cool

place to be.

Patricia was encouraged.

to reconsider going home. Now, she'd already robbed a bank and burned a

of bridges with that. It wasn't impossible for her to wiggle out of that

You might survive it.

It might be better for us to not have you with us.

She hated that idea.

We couldn't go on living as nine people in a cell.

The only way to really do it was to do it in groups of threes.

I'd hoped it would be me, Emily, and Angela that could do this together, but

didn't work out.

In the end, Emily and I got stuck with Patricia.

And so I think it was DeFreeze, Angela, and Camilla, and Nancy,

Willie, and Ms. Moon.

So we went to L .A.

DeFreeze was familiar with it. He lived there. None of the rest of us had ever

lived there.

Acting on a tip, the FBI raided an apartment in San Francisco and once

found itself a few steps behind the SLA.

Inside, authorities found the keys to one of the getaway cars used in a recent

bank robbery and the clothes supposedly worn in the same holdup.

According to the apartment manager, the group moved out a week ago.

When we went to L .A., we only had time to get in one place so that we could

regroup and then move out to our other parts of the country.

Ms. Moon and Nancy were able to snag a house.

on 84th Street in the ghetto, which is really ridiculous.

It was like six women and one black guy and two white guys, and it just looked

like peculiar.

We decided that we would send one of the teams, and it was decided it would be

me, Emily, and Hurst, and get some gear that we needed before we all split up.

And it just so happened that one of the vans got an illegal parking ticket.

We took the ticket with us to pay.

Patricia and Emily and I had all of our weapons, all of our ammo.

In case something happened while we were gone, we had everything that we needed.

One of the places that we went to get some supplies was a male sporting goods

store in Englewood.

And the plan was that Patricia, she would remain in the van. The keys to the

were in the ignition.

She was under no special controls, and we trusted her.

Emily and I go in the store. We grab a bunch of stuff that we're going to

purchase.

If she had wanted to leave, she could have managed that easily.

She could have escaped if she'd wanted to.

So what happened was this.

At one point, I saw a shotgun bandolier.

And Emily's weapon of choice is a 12 -gauge shotgun, and the shotgun would

like, five or six rounds.

So I thought it would be a good idea to get her this shotgun bandolier where she

could hold about 25 rounds.

And then all of a sudden, I got paranoid.

I was nervous about buying the bandoliers, you know, the combat

so I was nervous about buying it. And I set it back down.

Everything's smooth, and we're getting ready to leave. We pay $30, $40.

And as I'm walking out the door, this young black guy comes up behind me. He

yells, hey, Bill.

And I believe to my very fibers he's referring to me.

And, you know, my heart starts racing. I turn around.

He says, sir, I need you to come back inside.

I need to search you.

Turns out his boss is a guy named Bill Hewitt, I think. And so he's calling his

boss to back him up. He saw me with the bandolier, and he didn't see me put the

bandolier back on the shelf. I ain't going back in the store. No fucking way.

This guy Bill Hewitt and the black kid, they jump on me and we're rolling in the

gutter.

And before I know it, I have one handcuff on my left wrist.

Patricia looks up.

I figured, you know, she's going to lay low. There's nothing she can do.

We're busted.

We're on a pile on the street.

In the few seconds that I'm resisting.

Patricia looks up.

You know, was she going to run over and rescue us?

She's got the keys in the van. I just assumed she'd lay low and then fade and

back to the safe house.

She was decisive.

The first rounds hit right next to my head.

I thought I was going to get shot.

He was aiming really close to us.

She didn't hold the barrel steady.

She fired off the rest of the rounds in that magazine, and then she picked up

her weapon and started firing rounds from a 30 -round clip that she had in

weapon.

The kid is hiding behind me and holding on to me, and I told him, I said, hey,

dude, you better get out of here. He says, right.

As soon as he leaves me, Emily and I get up and haul ass and run across Imperial

Highway and get in the van.

The black kid, he pulls out a .32. He starts shooting at us, and this guy's

insane.

Last thing I ever expected when I'm about to be arrested is that she is

rescue me.

Patricia Hearst had more balls than anybody I've ever known.

She saved my fucking life, and she didn't have to.

We get in the van, and we try to haul ass in a VW bus.

And it's taken forever.

We come upon, almost immediately, like a Pontiac.

Looked like a nice car.

The guy in the driver's seat, he was a large man.

And I say, look, brother, I really hate to do this, but I got to take your car.

And he looks up at me.

He says, you ain't taking my fucking car.

And I'm going, oh, God, what am I going to do here? I can't beat this guy up

because he's too big.

Emily, she racks around in her shotgun and she says, get out of the fucking

please.

We immediately tried to get everything out of the VW van and put it into the

Pontiac and we took off.

We hadn't gone but a block and a half and the car just absolutely stops.

Holy shit.

And right here in front of me, two black men standing in a driveway.

And I say to them, look, I'm really sorry, gentlemen, but I need to take

car. We're with the SLA and the cops are chasing us. We assumed if we revealed

ourselves to be the SLA after the food program and everything, that people

feel calm, that they would realize that, you know, us approaching them was not

an aggressive act.

He looks at me and he goes, oh, sure. And he reaches in and gives me the keys

his car in his pocket, right?

So we get our stuff from the Pontiac and we move that into this car. We left.

We made it out of there, we beat the cops out of there, and we're gone.

The shootout at Mel's is, for me, the single most important piece of

evidence that Patty Hearst had joined the SLA.

Patty Hearst is no longer a captive, but she is a participant in the terrorism

of the SLA.

I know a lot of people made a big thing of...

The fact that she sprayed Mel's sporting goods with bullets when she could have

jumped in the car and gotten away.

I don't think that's as definitive as other people do.

It's not that simple.

But she had changed.

On some level, she thought she was Tanya.

By this time, this is three, four hours since the altercation at Mel's.

And we knew we couldn't go back to the safe house.

We're driving a stolen car. We couldn't keep driving it around, so we had to

figure out another way.

In 1974, I was 18 years old. I was a senior in high school. I had a Ford

Econoline van for sale.

About 7 o 'clock Thursday night, and the door knocked on my front door, and it

was a woman wanting to test drive my van.

So I said, sure. I just tossed her the keys. I got in the passenger seat.

We just drove one block and turned right, and then she stopped.

and she said, can my friends come along?

All I noticed was William Harris getting out of the car, because as he got out,

there was something bulging out of his jacket, and opened up his coat, and sure

enough he had a machine gun, said they were with the SLA and they needed to

borrow my van.

But as soon as he said SLA, I knew who they were.

Patty got in the van behind William Harris, and he pointed to her and he

you know who this is?

I shook my head no.

I didn't recognize her. She had a black curly wig on.

But he said, this is Tanya. And he kind of smiled.

And as soon as he learned she was Patricia Hearst, he couldn't believe

had happened to him. I said, wow, my friends aren't going to believe this

I never really felt that fearful for my life.

We even started talking sports.

And that's when I told them that I had a baseball game the next day.

We were concerned about him. We wanted him to be able to go on his way and play

in his playoff game.

I wanted him to be calm, and so we were very charming and nice to him.

Patricia kind of was flirting with him.

Patricia and Tom are talking.

Patricia takes out her gun and takes the bullets out of it, and she gives him a

gun, and she explains to him why we were robbing banks.

Patty opened up, and she told me that she was a willing participant in the

robbery.

When Patty talked about Mel's Sporting Goods store, she was very proud of how

she freed, she called them her comrades.

She was truly one of them.

Bill had a handcuff on one wrist. They stopped, got a hacksaw, and so I

cut through the pin.

It worked.

I cut the handcuff off of him. He was so relieved. He gave me a big hug, bear

hug, and then Patty actually gave me a kiss on the cheek.

We had already had a system of rendezvous points that were set up just

.A. area.

They had it planned to meet their other comrades at the Century Drive -In.

Their signal was a coffee cup on the top of the vehicle.

We bought food, we fed Tom, and waited.

The SLA suspects entered this sporting goods store and they were caught

stealing. They ran, firing as many as 30 shots from a .30 caliber machine gun.

One suspect dropped this revolver, later traced to Emily Harris, a member of the

SLA. Seeing the news of the Mel's shootout, the six others realize the

LAPD knows they're in town.

So they figure they need to get out of where they had been with Bill, Emily,

Patty, and they start looking for somewhere else to go.

They're on 84th Street, and they drive through.

South Central, and looking for a new place to stay.

And they find a house in the middle of the night of May 16th on 54th Street,

a few miles away.

We realized that they're not coming.

We drove to the hills.

You know, we discussed our next move.

Emily or Patricia possibly tried to imagine what we left behind.

And we realized, we actually realized that we left the parking ticket behind.

We knew that the parking ticket was going to connect it to the street that

house was on.

Big mistake.

Big, horrible mistake.

In May of 1974, I was one of the reporters on the staff of KNXT.

In Los Angeles, we used to call ourselves CBS Channel 2 News.

The morning of May 17th, I just cruise in to the station, and I usually get in

between 7 .30 and 8, sometime like that.

When Mel's Sporting Goods happened and the shootout happened with Patty Hearst,

we figured the SLA is in L .A.

I got on the story that morning.

We got the sense that the LAPD was going to get these guys.

They had a reputation for cracking heads, and unfortunately, not all, but

of the heads deserved cracking.

They were using this new unit called SWAT, and they had, up to that point,

able to pretty much use SWAT very effectively.

In May of 1974, I was a police officer working for the city of Los Angeles and

assigned to the SWAT team.

Special Weapons and Tactics. It was an acronym developed by Darrell Gates, who

was the deputy chief at the time. The first SWAT team was LAPD.

The LAPD started the SWAT team right after the 1965 riots.

And they wanted station defense teams.

And they would respond to their police station in the event of a riot and

that police station.

That was their primary purpose at the time.

So they trained them to be high ground security for patrol cops who were

ground level during violent uprisings, which were happening about every other

day back then.

There was one riot after another.

On May 17, 1974, I was sound asleep in bed. I get a call from Metropolitan

Division, the desk there, and they asked me to respond to 84th and Vermont with

my partner.

We responded, met with the supervisor there, who was Ron McCarthy, and he told

us what our job was going to be.

The FBI, they believed the SLA would be in or around that location because their

getaway vehicle had a parking ticket in it. They were going to try to locate the

SLA, and they were going to go to that address first.

We were called to join the FBI to help them.

be present and if they needed us to be plugged in anywhere we would in 1974

lapd swat was probably the only swat team in the country that

could have handled something like this the fbi swat team was not totally formed

there were wannabes the fbi swat team was

trying to get their act together about how they wanted to do this because These

were dangerous suspects in there. The special agent in charge of the FBI

was there, who was a pain in the neck.

He was yelling at the FBI SWAT guys, just go up and kick the doors, hurry up,

hurry up.

They hurried up, and they ran across the backyard and booted the back door and

ran in.

The SLA, they were gone.

Had there been an SLA member in there with one of those SLA weapons, there

have been a lot of dead FBI agents.

They had still left thousands of rounds of ammunition they couldn't take with

them. Their propaganda, a lot of the stuff that they handed out. There was a

radio in there tuned to police calls in L .A.

Also a watch list that showed that they always had somebody up and about.

24 -7, so that you weren't going to surprise them.

Deputy Chief Gates was there, and I went up to him and said, you know, if that

idiot, meaning the special agent in charge of the FBI, is anywhere, we don't

want anything to do with that idiot.

He said, don't worry, you won't have to. The FBI had been playing the heavy role

in San Francisco, but by the time they got to L .A., It was LAPD's turf. The

LAPD prevailed and basically took the lead in it.

When I woke up Friday morning, it was about 7 o 'clock in the morning, and the

two girls, they were standing up in the van, and they knew that their next step

was they needed another mode of transportation.

That's when I was kind of hoping this ordeal would be over, you know, soon.

Emily and Patricia decide to set up as if they're hitchhiking somewhere.

and they're going to take the first car that picks them up.

And sure enough, here comes a Cadillac. When they get in the car and they take

them hostage.

They tossed me my keys, told me to stay there for about 10 minutes, so that's

what I did.

Got in the Cadillac and we took off.

LAPD, they were absolutely energized and engaged.

I mean, they were mobilized. They were determined, and they were closing in,

they were doing a good job of getting information.

People began to come up to us and say, hey, I saw this, I saw that. I saw this

black person and this white person. Two white brothers went out to the blue van

and left in it and came back. And one was in the blue and one was in the red

white one. That's all I've seen. As the day progressed, we literally felt a

tightening noose.

The target got smaller and smaller and smaller and more defined, and they

finally had it narrowed down to a few houses.

We looked at each other and we said, I wouldn't want the LAPD after me.

Police and FBI agents used tear gas earlier today when they thought they had

suspect surrounded in a South Los Angeles home. But when police entered,

found the structure deserted.

With the incident that happened earlier in the morning, LAPD did not want the

SLA to get away.

We flooded the area with police cars, hoping to keep them wherever they were

they were still in the area.

That day, like any given day in the city of Los Angeles, there was probably 500

police officers working the street. At least 150 of those officers were

around the perimeter of that location.

A patrol perimeter unit.

was approached by an elderly lady.

The woman said, are you looking for those white folks with guns?

And they said, yes, since they're in my daughter -in -law's house. And she said,

it's five houses from the corner.

I was approaching the fourth house, and as I got to the front door, I heard a

voice. And the voice was that, I believe, to be of St. Q.

I was right up against the house.

I was right up against the house and he was ordering people to do things inside

of the house, like to move the furniture, to barricade the front door.

immediately contacted the team at the rear and I said, the fourth house is the

suspect's house.

That ironed it for us.

We knew we were at the right place.

So we deployed right away. We would not have done it that way originally.

But because they had eluded the FBI earlier in the morning, we decided to go

ahead and go and evacuate houses as we approached them.

We were scrambling to evacuate the people that hadn't evacuated yet.

Five square blocks of the city that were contained and the homes were evacuated.

My snipers were up in front. I had snipers at the rear.

We had 19 SWAT officers that were actually surrounding the house.

The media was every place.

This is Bill Diaz of 55 and Compton. We're going to move down the street and

to get a better picture for you. Back in 1974, most TV stations in the United

States were using film.

And we'd go out with film canisters.

And then the film would have to be run back to the station and processed and

hope that it... I mean, you really couldn't cover breaking news with film.

We were experimenting with a brand new form of camera.

We kind of dubbed it the minicam. It was a portable camera that allowed you to

do videotape and live coverage of news stories from the scene. Right where we

are now.

as well as the other location.

I haven't been able to confirm that report as yet. So we were basically

this whole new technique of covering news.

Why is anyone in the vicinity of 55th and Compton to stay the heck away from

here? Because it's not a place you want to be tonight. I'll tell you that,

ladies and gentlemen.

We're trying to figure out what our next move is.

And on the radio, we learned that the last safe house that we had together had

been hit by the police.

We didn't know where to go. We know the cops are, like, now closing in, and

we've got to hole up somewhere. We can't be driving around.

So we decide the place where we would be least conspicuous would be in a heavily

touristed place.

And so we choose Disneyland.

And as soon as we get our stuff in the motel, we turn on the TV, they've

surrounded the house on 54th Street.

It's not a place you want to be tonight, I can tell you that, ladies and

gentlemen. I was at the corner of the house, and I was kind of on my knees,

kneeling down up against the house.

And I notified my lieutenant of what I heard and the fact that they were

barricading themselves.

Jerry Brackley, he was the sergeant in front, and he gave an announcement 23

separate times.

To the people in the house at 1466 East 54th Street, you're surrounded.

We want you to surrender and walk out.

Basically, that was repeated over.

And over and over.

And eventually, two people came out. A little boy, about eight, nine years old,

and an elderly man.

When he was asked, hey, who's in there?

He lied and said, there's only an old black lady in there.

Then they interviewed the little boy.

And they asked him, who's inside the house? He says, a bunch of white people

with guns.

Several people in there, white people and black people, and they have bullets

across their chest like this.

And a radio transmission comes off for the team to deploy tear gas.

One round goes into the side of that house.

LAPD did not fire first.

We fired the tear gas round.

That was to cause them to surrender.

That the gunfire erupted.

It was amazing.

It basically scared the hell out of me.

And I dropped to the ground.

I mean, I tried to dig a hole in the cement.

The guys that were out in front thought that I was hit. I get up on my knee and

I put my thumb up saying, I'm okay.

Swear to God on my grandchildren's life, none of them made any effort to

surrender in any way.

You know, make our day. If that's what you want, then confrontation is

the police will do.

It was all on.

The weapons that we're using were

M1 carbines. An M1 carbine is capable of firing 900 rounds a minute.

They had converted it to fire 1 ,300 rounds per minute.

We were outgunned. They had better weaponry. It was so many rounds going

fast that it sounded, I described it as like hearing a bedsheet tear. It was

buzz.

We heard the first barrage of gunfire from the SLA house.

and we're about a block away.

Well, there's an alleyway that runs parallel to Compton all the way down to

54th. And I grab the microphone, and I grab my cameraman, and we start running

down the alleyway, unspooling the cable, you know, in this bulky minicam.

Okay, we're right here in the corner of 54th and Compton now.

We're about across the street and two houses away from where all the shooting

has been going on. We go straight through to Compton, and I can see the

the SLA house.

Now, if you look close, you'll see fire going both in and out. See that rag

bobbing up and down in the gunfire?

Okay, there's an enormous amount of fire being concentrated on that yellow

house. We were too energized yet to be scared.

At one point, there's a policeman standing by a telephone pole. Bob

of our other reporters, joined me at the scene.

He came up with the craziest stunt of the day.

Can you indicate to us which side is the police target? Are they aiming to go

this way or that direction? Which way is it?

They're going this way.

Are we in that direction?

All right. And then all of a sudden, we hit.

Close as I have.

Look out there. Literally, I could feel the breeze from the bullet go right by

my ear, and it whacked into the building right behind us.

Look out there. That's bad. That's bad.

We just got missed by a bullet.

It went to the house right beside us here.

That's when we got scared.

We better get out of here, you guys. This is incredible.

This shootout was incredibly dramatic, but what made it even...

crazier and even more of a national obsession was that everyone thought

Hearst was inside the house.

So this fight was being watched around the world with everyone thinking that

this era is about to be murdered on live television.

We don't want to kill everybody in the house.

We don't shoot at a house because we want to kill the people there. We want

stop the gunfire.

The gunfire that's going indiscriminately throughout the

other people outside that are not involved, that are trying to get away

This was urban guerrilla warfare.

There was this sense of, like, we've got to suppress this. We've got to make

this stop. That day, I knew that the whole focus of the police was to stop

shooting.

These were people intent on killing as many people as they could, and they

didn't care how many innocent people got killed.

We hand through tear gas grenades.

They had chemical agents' masks, and they withstood all of the chemical

we put in there, and we put in a bunch.

Then the house caught on fire.

They just shooed the people away.

We're trying to bring you...

A shot of the burning building.

There's still an exchange of fire.

And Jerry made announcements again and said, hey, the house is on fire.

You need to surrender.

I saw the door open and I took my weapon and I aimed at the doorway.

And then I saw Christine Johnson, I believe her name was. And she came out

her hands up.

And I ordered a ceasefire.

And it stopped.

And then she walked out to safety.

And she moved across and was taken into custody by the detectives there.

I didn't know who she was. You don't shoot at a person that's surrendering.

Everybody in that house had the same opportunity she did.

And then there was black smoke and it was obviously the place was on fire.

And, you know, and it was basically time for them to stop and they wouldn't

stop. There is still fire coming from inside the Target house, which is across

the street, as I said before.

Patty Hearst was not in my mind at all.

My safety and the safety of my officers was more important to me than whether

she was in there or not. If she's in there, that's her problem, not mine.

I did what I had to do.

If she was in there, God willed it.

May 17, 1974 is the worst day of my life. The house is burning and they're

shooting. I think they were that committed or that crazy.

When they recovered that body, everybody thought that was Patty Hearst. We had

hundreds of agents covering leads. It's as though they'd disappear.

Greetings to the people. This is Tanya. I know what I have to do.

She was on a mission.

How can you not love someone like that?

Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.