Freed SLA Member Olson Rearrested to Finish Prison Sentence
By Todd Milbourn, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Mar. 23–Former Symbionese Liberation Army radical Sara Jane Olson went back to prison Saturday after just five days as a free woman.
State corrections officials said they released Olson early because of a “clerical error.” They said she must now return to a women’s prison in Chowchilla to serve as many as two more years for her role in crimes including the 1975 murder of a Carmichael woman during a bank robbery.
“We understand how sensitive the impact of such an error has on all involved in this case and regret the mistake,” said Scott Kernan, chief of adult operations for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, at an afternoon news conference in Sacramento.
Authorities arrested Olson — known as Kathleen Soliah during her SLA days — just before midnight Friday at Los Angeles International Airport. Olson, 61, had spent her brief freedom with relatives in Palmdale. She was minutes away from boarding a plane with her husband to return to family in Minnesota when eight corrections officers stopped her.
Olson’s attorney, David Nickerson of San Rafael, said corrections officials “blew it” and had no right to arrest his client, whom they had given permission to serve a year of parole in Minnesota. He said he will mount a legal challenge as soon as court offices open Monday.
“They seem to be saying, ‘We were massively incompetent: We gave her the wrong release date,’ ” Nickerson said. “Well, if they are so incompetent, how should we believe the new release date?”
Alberto Roldan, general counsel for the corrections agency, said Olson’s sentencing is “extremely complicated” because of all the changes to California sentencing law since the crimes were committed in the mid-1970s. He said time was wrongly shaved off Olson’s sentence in 2004 but not noticed until media coverage heated up following her release on Monday.
Roldan said corrections officials examined Olson’s sentence, reassessed her time credits and determined that she still had two more years to serve. Olson could get out as early as March 17, 2009, however, for good behavior. Roldan said corrections officials have launched an investigation into the error.
Olson’s arrest on Saturday is the latest wrinkle in a high-profile case spanning three decades. Olson was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the infamous band of radicals that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and later hid out in a midtown Sacramento Victorian on W Street.
She spent most of the past 20 years on the lam, living an unassuming life in Minnesota under an assumed name. She married a doctor and reared three children. The FBI tracked her down in 1999, after she was featured on the television show “America’s Most Wanted.”
Olson pleaded guilty in 2001 of attempting to bomb Los Angeles police cruisers in 1975 as retaliation for an earlier shoot-out that left six SLA members dead. Olson also pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for her role in the death of Myrna Lee Opsahl, a 42-year-old suburban mother of four who was gunned down in the lobby of Crocker National Bank in Carmichael.
A judge sentenced Olson to a total of 14 years, but she served only six because of good behavior. She also received public sympathy during the high-profile trial because she claimed to have left her radical days behind and reinvented herself as a Midwestern homemaker.
Jon Opsahl of Riverside, Myrna Opsahl’s son, said Saturday he’s thankful Olson will have to serve at least one more year, but it’s still not enough.
“The judge, on her release, said ‘For Sara Jane Olson to spend another day in prison would be an injustice: She’s no threat to society.’ It was my mother who was no threat to society,” Opsahl said.
Retired LAPD Officer John Hall, who was among the officers the SLA targeted in 1975, urged officials to keep Olson behind bars after her release on Monday. He wrote a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown, arguing that she had not paid her debt to society.
Myrna’s Opsahl’s widower, Trygve Opsahl of Sonora, said Saturday that he’s spent the past three decades trying to put the tragedy out of his mind. He said he was surprised to learn of Olson’s rearrest.
“Bringing it up is just like opening old wounds,” said Opsahl, 82.
He still vividly recalls working as a surgeon at the now-defunct American River Hospital when he got a call that his wife had been involved in a shooting at the bank.
“I rushed down there, but on the way an ambulance was going in other direction,” he recalled. “Of course, I didn’t know it was carrying my wife.”
He saw splattered blood and chaos outside the bank, so he returned to the hospital, where he joined doctors trying to save her.
“She was a very good wife and mother, very dedicated and capable and dependable and loving,” Trygve Opsahl said. “Of course, I like to see people who commit crimes brought to justice. … But I feel the thing is over with and life has to go on.”
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