P.D. Still Influences OC Life
http://www.ocweekly.com/2009-09-10/news/black-panthers-santa-ana-police-michael-lynem-nelson-sasscer
By Gustavo Arellano, GABRIEL SAN ROMAN
Published on September 09, 2009
Murder was the Case
Forty years later, the clash between the Black Panthers and Santa Ana
police continues to influence county life
--
Louis Martinez Jr. woke as a gunshot echoed through his Santa Ana
neighborhood. It was near midnight on June 4, 1969, and the part-time
ambulance driver peeked through his living-room window, saw a man
down and sprinted outside.
Just minutes earlier, Santa Ana police officer Nelson Sasscer had
alerted his superiors that he was going to stop two pedestrians on
the corner of Third and Raitt streets. Now, Martinez was using
Sasscer's radio to let headquarters know someone had gunned down the officer.
Patrolmen sped to the scene and found Sasscer in front of his car,
weapon still holstered, a single bullet wound in his abdomen. They
rushed him to the hospital, but the 24-year-old died within half an hour.
Detectives couldn't find any witnesses to the murder. Only a few
people in Santa Ana had ever publicly professed their wishes to kill
a cop, and the Santa Ana Police Department (SAPD) knew where to find them.
Squad cars raced toward the home of Daniel Michael Lynem the
following morning. Minutes before, the SAPD had called Lynem to let
him know they were going to arrest him for murdering Sasscer. Lynem
was innocent, but no matter. A cousin offered to help him escape, but
Lynem sent the cousin away.
The 22-year-old head of the Santa Ana chapter of the Black Panther
Party ran to the arsenal. He strapped on two Colt .45 pistols,
wrapped bandoliers across his chest, grabbed a pump-action shotgun
and crept near the front door to wait.
The police finally arrived. They banged on the door and demanded
Lynem's surrender. "Do you have a warrant?" he yelled back.
"We don't need one," an officer sneered.
Ka-chik. Lynem racked his shotgun. The police ran.
As the cops radioed for backup, Lynem arranged tables, chairs and
sofas to form barricades. "I was going for the dramatic," Lynem says
with a laugh 40 years later. "I had my entire escape route thought
out, and if that didn't work, I'd die trying."
Sirens wailed. Tires screeched. At least a dozen officers positioned
themselves outside. And then Lynem thought of his mother, thought of
the struggles their family endured to buy that house and live the
Orange County dream. He thought of the bullet holes and bloodstains
on carpets and walls his parents would find if a shootout ensued.
Lynem surrendered without a shot. Santa Ana's two black officers
entered the house to arrest him. "Good, now I won't be mistreated,"
Lynem thought.
They punched him in the face.
He's now 62, a grandfather, retired and living in Anaheim. Lean, with
gray hair and slightly bald, Lynem still vividly recalls the chaos
that followed Sasscer's death: his arrest and jailing, the subsequent
protests and riots, unlawful police break-ins, the eventual
conviction of his friend Arthur League for murder in a trial that
still raises questions decades later.
But Lynem likes to remember the unlikely good that came from the
tragedy: the remaking of the SAPD, the creation of the Orange County
Human Relations Commission, and his ultimate redemption.
"I think people want to forget this," he says. "If they could wipe it
from the history books, they would. And for the most part, they have."
* * *
In 1969, Orange County seemed under siege. Student protests roiled
Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine. Activists fought police with
bottles and rocks in Huntington Beach and Fullerton's Hillcrest Park,
while high schools staged walkouts to protest the Vietnam War.
Yet few groups terrified county residents more than the Black
Panthers. To have "unruly Negroes," as the then-Santa Ana Register
described them, besmirch conservative Orange County was too much for
law enforcement. Upstanding citizens feared the Panthers, their fiery
rhetoric against seemingly everything white, their constant wielding
of weaponry for the ostensible purpose of self-defense, the violent
yang to the civil-rights movement's yin. And by that year, the
paramilitary organization had grown so much nationally, with chapters
in every major city possessing a significant African-American
population, that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover designated it "the most
dangerous threat to the internal security of the country." He
followed that warning by enlisting the infamous Counter Intelligence
Program (COINTELPRO) to destroy the Panthers.
The Santa Ana branch was tiny, never more than five to six committed
members and about 20 to 30 associates. That didn't stop the FBI and
Santa Ana police from aggressively monitoring them, so when Sasscer
was murdered, they didn't think twice about a suspect.
Lynem was born in Santa Ana in 1947, a time when black World War II
veterans were moving into the city just like their white
counterparts. But the natives didn't take kindly to these dark
newcomers. While attending Wilson Elementary School, Lynem got in a
fight with a classmate. "When I stepped into the principal's office,
he gave me a dirty look and asked why was I there," he recalls. "When
I told him that a number of students had been calling me a nigger, he
looked at me and said, 'Well, you are a nigger,' then grabbed me
behind the neck, lifted me up in the air, and carried me from his
office across the playground and slammed me on a bench." The
principal warned Lynem never to cross his path again.
Lynem's parents noticed bloody scratches on the back of their son's
neck. His father, an Army veteran who worked at the post office,
barged into the principal's office the next day. "When the principal
saw my dad, I thought he would piss and shit on himself," Lynem says.
"He broke out in a sweat and jumped behind his chair as my dad came
behind his desk. My dad told him that if he ever put his hands on me
again, he was going to shove his foot so far up his ass that major
surgery wouldn't get it out."
Racism plagued the Lynems through the 1950s and 1960s. They had to
sue for the right to move into an all-white Santa Ana neighborhood;
within a year, the area turned nearly all black and Mexican. By the
time Lynem entered Santa Ana High School, he was a prime Black
Panther recruit. "I have always had a real strong sense of justice
and fairness and want to fight for what's right," Lynem says. "The
Party was something I wanted to be involved in."
He began hanging out with Tommy Crockett, who ran a record store and
claimed that the Southern California chapter of the Panthers had
authorized him to create a Santa Ana branch. The group opened a
storefront in 1968 on First and Raitt streets, where they held
classes on Marxism and black history. But a problem arose: Crockett
lied. Black Panther leadership never authorized him to establish anything.
"One day, some Panthers came to Santa Ana," Lynem recalls. In the
group was Geronimo Pratt, the SoCal chapter's deputy minister of
defense who later spent nearly 30 years in prison for a murder he
didn't commit. "They took Crockett to breakfast, then ordered the
rest of us to meet at the office." For hours, the Los Angeles
Panthers grilled their Santa Ana counterparts about party activities.
"Finally, they put us in a circle, put Crockett in the middle of it
and pistol-whipped him. After that, they announced I was the official
leader of the Santa Ana chapter."
Under Lynem, the Panthers began patrolling black neighborhoods to
monitor police brutality and created a breakfast program for
children. They moved to larger headquarters on Fourth and Bristol and
marched through neighborhoods dressed in berets, black leather
jackets and gloves. Lynem wrote newsletters and recruited any young
African-American he could find.
They also stockpiled weapons. "I'm not a violent type, but I believed
in self-defense," Lynem says. "If that meant you had to use guns, you
had to use guns."
In May 1969, Lynem drove to a gun store along with two other
Panthers, Nathaniel Odis Grimes and a 20-year-old bank teller named
Arthur Dewitt League. While Lynem filled out paperwork with the store
owner so he could buy two Colt .45 pistols, Grimes stole a new .38 revolver.
"I was furious," Lynem says. "I yelled at himthe gun-store owner was
nice enough to open his store on a Sunday for us, and that's how we
treated him?"
But no one returned the gun.
The night Sasscer was murdered, the Black Panthers gathered at the
garage of member Ernest Bodiford. Lynem taught the group how to
disassemble a gun and also played Malcolm X speeches on a turntable.
League handled the stolen .38 but accidentally discharged it, much to
everyone's mirth. One attendee, 15-year-old Carl Steve Tice (known as
Steve), told everyone he wanted to leave. Lynem offered to accompany
him home, but League volunteered instead.
Lynem stayed the night at the Bodiford garage. At about 3 in the
morning, someone woke him to say an officer had been killed. "I
thought it was Odis" who did it, he says. "He was more of a street
tough. League was middle-class." But the crime didn't surprise Lynem.
About a month before the Sasscer killing, police had arrested him,
Grimes and other Panthers for disturbing the peace. While in jail,
Grimes vowed to Sasscer that he'd kill him one day.
"I'd give speeches all overin front of the Orange County Courthouse,
at Cal State Fullertonand it was always the same chant: 'Off the
pigs! Kill the police!'" Lynem admits. "We created that atmosphere,
and I thought one of us probably did it."
Lynem and Tice's older brother, Ricky, spent the morning of June 5
trying to locate Grimes. Eventually, Lynem returned to his parents'
house. League passed by, and Lynem asked if he knew who did it.
"Arthur didn't answer and said he was leaving [for] Los Angeles."
Soon after, the police called.
* * *
More than a thousand uniformed officers attended Sasscer's funeral at
Garden Grove Community Church, and the Reverend Robert Schuller
presided over the ceremony, remarking that "this death inspires all
citizens to look again at the police who protect them and the
sacrifices they make."
A Santa Ana Register editorial was less diplomatic. "We can't help
but think of all the apologies that will probably come from that
element of society which sees fit to excuse crime and violence on our
streets today as a proper reaction of the 'oppressed,'" it read.
The death of Sasscera Vietnam War veteran who was the SAPD's 1968
rookie of the yearset off a law-enforcement frenzy to find and
prosecute the killers. District Attorney Cecil Hicks charged Grimes,
League and Lynem two days after the murder; a grand jury indicted the
trio on June 16. Officers stormed Santa Ana's African-American
neighborhoods looking for League and Grimes. They pointed shotguns at
grandmothers, interrogated any black man they encountered and kicked
doors in with nary an apology.
The city's emerging black leadership was furious. The Reverend Melvin
Williams, director of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference'sOrange County chapter, told the Los Angeles Times that
"the police have no right to carry their investigation to the point
of intimidating and harassing people just because they're black. This
must stop."
Santa Ana Police Chief Edward Allen dismissed the harassment reports
as Panther propaganda, telling the Times,"They try to divert
attention from the crime itself." And during a town-hall meeting, he
responded to criticism that officers used derogatory terms against
African-Americans by remarking that they should be happy the
department had recently "stop[ped] using another relatively mild term
you object to'boy.'"
But years later, SAPD Captain Joe Brann told the authors of The New
Blue Line: Police Innovation In Six American Cities that his superior
told him in the search for Lynem, "If that's really our man, we don't
bring him back alive."
Racial tension exploded on June 30, when more than 400 Mexican and
black youths rioted after a black girl was kicked out of the Broadway
Theater. She'd complained after a white teen yelled, "Why don't you
black niggers keep quiet?" Teens threw bottles and bricks at police,
set fires, and even took batons away from officers and beat them with
the sticks. A week later, another mob of youths took over a Jack In the Box.
Jail guards put Lynem in isolation but didn't touch him. Hundreds of
supporters attended rallies and organized a Panther defense committee
based at Anaheim's Unitarian Universalist Church. Both the FBI and
the SAPD used sources and infiltrators to track Panthers supporters,
shooting clandestine photos and creating charts with names, addresses
and numbers. In the most hilarious incident, they assigned a Long
Beach police officer to pose as an alt-weekly reporter to interview activists.
In a surprise move on July 1, the DA dropped all charges against
Lynem and Grimes. But Grimes and League were still at large,
eventually arrested at the home of actor Donald Sutherland, whose
wife allowed them refuge. Prosecuting DA Everett Dickey (who became a
Superior Court judge and, in a jaw-dropping coincidence, granted
Pratt his freedom in 1997) wouldn't reveal why he dropped charges
against Lynem and Grimes lest he compromise the case against League.
The Santa Ana Black Panther Party effectively died with Sasscer's
murder, and Lynem moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to help
the Panthers there. Within weeks, he tired of them. "I became
disillusioned," he says. "It was all about violence, setting up
situations and confrontations with the police. I didn't necessarily
mind it, but I cared more about doing community work."
The day after Lynem decided to quit, the LAPD unleashed a SWAT team
to raid Panthers headquarters. Lynem was staying at a cousin's house
in Los Angeles when the raid went down. An uncle called to tell him
that tough-looking black men had surrounded his mother's house. "They
peeked inside the windows and waited for an hour," he says. "I always
wondered if those guys were from the Party and were looking for me,
thinking I gave up info."
* * *
As the DA prepared for trial against League, Lynem discovered why he
was arrested in the first place.
Bodiford had told the grand jury and investigators that Lynem, Grimes
and League had spoken about "offing a pig" the night of Sasscer's
murder. But Bodiford later admitted he made that story up. The Tice
brothers had also assisted the prosecutionRicky told an investigator
League had bragged, "That's one pig for me," while Steve swore he was
present when League shot Sasscer. But before the grand jury, the two
wouldn't confirm their police statements. Superior Court Judge Paul
Mast held them in jail for two months because Dickey claimed the
Black Panthers wanted them dead.
It soon emerged that police had barged into the Tice home without a
warrant, arrested Ricky with a shotgun to the head, then took him
back to the police station, where they beat out a confession that
Tice had hidden under his mattress the .38 used to kill Sasscer. Mast
didn't believe the physical-abuse charge but nevertheless struck
Tice's police statements and disallowed as evidence the murder weapon
police had taken from Tice's bedroom.
From jail, League rallied supporters. "I'm talking about revolution,
insurrection, a change, and this fascist action that's coming down,
we have to put a halt to it, and we can't put a halt to it with
words," he wrote in a letter to supporters, signing off, "All Power
to the People, Signed Arthur League, Political Prisoner." He entered
an innocent plea in late November 1969, but the trial wouldn't begin
until months later.
Two bomb threats delayed the start. A rally outside the Orange County
courthouse before the trial drew hundreds, with Lynem telling them,
"We'll change the courts ourselves. We'll take it into the streets.
If there's no justice, we'll protest and demonstrate." A Panther
newsletter called League a "field warrior" and the Tice brothers
"20th-century house slaves" and referred to Sasscer as "Rookie Pig of
the Year."
A source told the SAPD near the trial's opening statements, "I don't
think [blacks] are going to burn the city down, but I do think
they're going to do something violent." Nothing like that ever
happened, but police and FBI monitoring of county African-Americans
and their supporters intensified.
"I had an FBI agent come out because I was chairing the Fair Housing
Council," says Bob Johnson, author of A Different Shade of Orange:
Voices of Orange County, California, Black Pioneers. "The FBI guy
says to me, 'So, what do you know about the Black Panthers? If you
learn some things about them, give me a phone call.' The last thing I
needed to do was be an informant informing the FBI about the Black Panthers."
Defense attorneys Robert Green (who also became a Superior Court
judge) and Michael Gerbosi tried to declare the trial
unconstitutional before its start, claiming the all-white jury was
biased and that the Register's sensationalistic media coverage (at
one point, it printed a front-page cartoon showing a black family
killing a pig dressed as a cop) guaranteed an unfair trial. Judge
Samuel Dreizen refused, and the trial began on April 1, 1970.
Green's strategy was to cast doubt on the prosecution's three main
witnessesBodiford and the Tice brothers, all of whom were granted
immunity. Bodiford testified he was there when League stole the .38,
even though the original police reports never placed him alongside
Grimes and Lynem. He also revealed that officers beat him. Steve Tice
had said League shot Sasscer only because the officer had reached for
his gun, but under cross-examination, he also admitted that Dickey
threatened him with a 14-year prison sentence if he didn't testify on
behalf of the prosecution. Ricky Tice acknowledged he changed his
story before the grand jury three times, finally going with the
version implicating League after investigators threatened to charge
him with murder.
In a bizarre twist, Ricky filed a lawsuit in federal court against
the SAPD during the trial, accusing them of false imprisonment,
assault and battery, and subornation of perjury. "By reason of fear
of [police] threats, plaintiff did return immediately to the grand
jury, retract and changed his testimony, and testified falsely in
accordance with the officers' demands," the lawsuit read.
Other witnesses testified only that they saw two young black men at
the scene of Sasscer's shooting; none could get a clear look. Green
produced witnesses who said League was in the Bodiford garage when
the slaying occurred. League claimed he left the Bodiford house by
himself after the murder and had given the .38 to Ricky Tice, who
left before him. He confessed to hiding from police but only because
Bodiford told him they would shoot him on sight.
In their closing arguments, Gerbosi and Green called the Tice
brothers and Bodiford "pathological liars," but they also argued that
if League did shoot Sasscer, it wasn't first-degree murder. More than
150 protesters tried to attend the closing statements; most were denied entry.
After deliberating for nine days, the jury reached a verdict: guilty
of second-degree murder, with no premeditation behind League's deed
despite the Panthers' anti-cops beliefs. Dickey expressed his
disappointment, while Allen blasted the decision, asking the
Register, "How . . . can such a vicious crime be anything less than
first-degree murder?" League appealed the decision, but a state court
rejected it in 1972. That same year, a federal judge awarded Ricky
Tice $2,000 in his suit against the SAPD. League served seven years
of a five-years-to-life sentence. He returned to Santa Ana after his
release, met with Lynem once, then moved to the Bay Area and never
lived in Orange County again.
* * *
Paul Walters was still in the Air Force when Sasscer was murdered,
but he entered Santa Ana's police academy during the League trial. He
remembers a department "that was still hurting emotionally" and going
through convulsions as internal and external politics threatened its
ability to serve.
Former Chief Allen "had a motto: 'Be good, or be gone,'" says
Walters, Santa Ana's top cop since 1988. "The policing ideas in those
days were old-school, good-ol'-boy traditionlock 'em up and throw
away the key." That approach "certainly created difficult challenges"
for the department in maintaining a good relationship with Santa
Ana's black and Latino communities.
Community furor over the SAPD's investigation of the Sasscer murder
contributed to Allen's retirement in 1972. Following him was Ray
Davis, who instituted the then-revolutionary concept of community
policing, which encourages officers to maintain close ties to city
residents. Other local departments emulated Santa Ana, and Walters
has earned national praise for continuing and expanding the strategy.
A new police culture wasn't the only positive change that resulted
from Sasscer's death. The 1969 grand jury issued a special report
recommending the county create a Human Relations Commission to
mitigate the bad blood between police and minorities in Santa Ana.
"If no attempt is made to resolve these difference, the potential
danger can have tragic repercussions for all of Orange County," the
report stated.
In February 1971, the Board of Supervisors approved the commission,
but only as a one-year pilot project. "The only staff that we could
have was a meagerly paid executive director," recalls Amin David,
longtime head of the Latino civil-rights group Los Amigos and the
commission's first chairman. "We occupied a vacant county-building
office without any desks or chairs."
Despite challenges and perennial threats by subsequent supervisors to
revoke its funding, the commission continues to this day. Rusty
Kennedy, who joined in 1976 and became its executive director in
1981, has seen a welcome trajectory between police and his
organization over the decades.
"There's been a dramatic shift in the attitude of Orange County
law-enforcement leaders toward the Human Relations Commission. When
the commission was created, the Police Chiefs Association came down
and testified that it shouldn't be created," he recalls.
"Transitioning through the years from the days when the police
complaints were considered a hostile thing and treated very poorly,
we've come to a day when they are seen as important tools in managing
liability and recognizing officers that may be going off the deep end
before they become really problematic."
* * *
After the League trial, Lynem tried to live a normal life. He worked
for the county in mental health but fell into cocaine and heroin and
turned to robberies to support his habit. He eventually spent four
years in state prison, where he struck up an improbable friendship
with his main antagonist on the force.
"I can't stress enough how much I hated that man," admits Bob
Stebbens, who worked at the SAPD for 32 years before retiring as a
captain in 1989. The Huntington Beach resident worked on community
relations when Sasscer passed away. "The African-American community
in Santa Ana was good. We'd get militants from Los Angeles to try and
stir things up, but most locals would say, 'Leave us alone. Things are fine.'
"The more miserable I could make it for the Panthers, the more I
could enjoy it," he adds with a chuckle. Stebbins remembers two
encounters he had with Lynem before Sasscer's murder. "One time, I
walked into [Panther] headquarters in uniform to burn Michael. I
asked to see him, and in front of everyone, I said, 'Thanks, Mike,
for the info' to make the others think he was an informant. Another
time, he came into my office, and Michael told me in effect that we
cops better change or the Panthers would burn the city down. I told
him he better have a lot of gas because we're going to blow you off
the face of the Earth."
The two wouldn't speak again until 1978, when Santa Ana Mayor Loren
Grisetwho had helped Lynem find Christcalled Stebbins and said he
had a letter from someone in his past. It was Lynem writing from
prison, with Griset's encouragement, to amend for his wrongs.
Stebbins wrote back to Lynem, not expecting a reply. Days later, he
received one, along with a Scripture verse, Galatians 3:28: "There is
neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are
all one in Christ Jesus."
The two continued their correspondence during Lynem's prison stint.
Once Lynem was released, the two told their story before
congregations and Christian businessmen's meetings. They still speak regularly.
"I knew that God would have me be friends with Michael," Stebbins
says. "It wasn't something I asked for, but all that hatred passed
away. We still talk about how we came togethereven for us, it still
blows our minds."
But the friendship wasn't popular among Santa Ana officers. "I could
understand their feelings, but the reality was that we were brothers
in Christ," Stebbins says. "Michael was my friend, and that was the
way it was going to be. Some thought I was a traitor. What else could
they think? They couldn't possibly understand."
League continued the activist life outside of prison. He has worked
with All of Us or None, a group centered on incarcerated and released
prisoners and felons. A 2005 Workers World article quoted League as
saying, "When people fight back, this place is set up to make the
most extreme examples of them. . . . If you've been convicted of a
felony, you're a legal slave in the United States."
He's also active in the campaign to free Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, a
Black Panther convicted of murdering a security guard in 1969. "I'm
proud of Arthur [League]he's done a lot of good for himself," Lynem
says. They recently talked for the first time since 1977. Neither
mentioned Sasscer.
Now living in the Bay Area, League declined the Weekly's numerous
requests for an interview but has maintained his innocence.
* * *
Nelson A. Sasscer Park is a small oasis in Santa Ana's downtown civic
center, a triangle of trees and walkways squeezed between local,
state and federal government offices. It's not the most accessible
public space, sitting at the meeting point of four major streets. But
Sasscer Park is popular, especially during hot days, when its ample
shade, massive fountain and sloping canals draw people looking to cool down.
A tiered marquee displays the park's name to the commuters who zip
by. But there is no plaque dedicated to Sasscer, who left behind a
21-year-old widow and is buried in Maryland, his home state. His only
other public monument is outside the SAPD station a couple of blocks
down, a bas-relief of the young officer looking downward but smiling.
Every May, his name is read in the roll call at the Plaza of the
Flags naming of every Orange County law-enforcement official killed
in the line of duty. A Santa Ana policemen dresses as Sasscer, down
to his badge number: 112.
"You pay tribute to them at the time they pass away, then it becomes
a memory," Walters says. "Unfortunately, as time fades, the memory fades."
Lynem doesn't want this tragic episode forgotten, but for different
reasons. He regrets fostering the anti-police sentiments that led to
the officer's murder. "I wish it never happened," he says. But "it's
part of [Orange County's] total black experience. It's the truth.
It's what happened. Sasscer's murder is painful to talk about. But it
affected a lot of people. It is what it is."
.
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