COME BACK HOME, THERO (ALL IS FORGIVEN) OR...NEW ENGINE KID JAMS!

“(Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze)...handed me this book, you know, with all these cobras on the cover. He asked me to read it. I did and I thought man, this is really shit. I told him it was a bunch of garbage. It wasn’t realistic as far as revolution was concerned. Actually, it was bullshit, it was suicide” - Thero Wheeler 1974 

Convicted of assault and battery in his teens, Thero Wheeler became a member of the Palo Alto-based radical leftist group Venceremos through their prison outreach program during the early 70s. Fellow prisoners claimed Wheeler spoke about staging a political kidnapping to raise money to finance what he called a ‘peoples’ army’. Despite being known for expounding on such revolutionary concepts,  Wheeler was given a cushy work detail of mowing lawns at a Little League baseball field near where he was being held at a state prison-cum-psychiatric facility in Vacaville, California where rumors of mind control experiments on inmates abounded. On August 2, 1973, Thero fired up the mower and kept going and going and going and never looked back. 

In Oakland, Thero was sequestered with another escaped convict and former Vacaville inmate, Donald DeFreeze. A lifelong criminal who held the nickname of “Dumb Donald” among his fellow prison mates, DeFreeze was a recent convert to radical politics and black power due to Colston Westbrook, a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley who was also a former member of the U.S military and employee of the Los Angeles Police Department. Westbrook was an outside organizer for an inmate group called the Black Cultural Association who took Donald under his wing and conveniently gave him a crash course in black nationalism and guerilla warfare prior to his escape in March of ‘73. 

When presented with the outlandish plans for the Symbionese Liberation Army,  the guerilla group DeFreeze was going to start with a gaggle of late-to-the-party radicals from the outskirts of the now-defunct Venceremos group, even the politically-charged Wheeler claimed to find it all highly naive, cartoonish, and disturbing.  And yet, when the small and hastily-assembled cadre somehow pulled off kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in February of the next year, Wheeler was identified as one of the abductors with his sketch being released to the press. 

As the media circus the SLA kicked off began to unfold, the story flipped to Wheeler not being a part of the action with some outlets claiming it was whiter-than-wonder-bread SLA member Bill “Teko” Harris in blackface. These reports still did not stop the media from claiming Thero as one of the six dead after the SLA’s clash with the LAPD’s SWAT team in May. As the Hollywood-like tale of rich-girl-turned-radical hypnotized the nation, Wheeler was actually bouncing around America’s lefty underground in search of a doctor to fix a stomach ulcer he'd been dealing with since his time locked up. When it was apparent no one could help him, he returned to the Bay Area. But when Thero got word the SLA was looking to off him, he kept moving until hitting Houston, Texas. 

Using the alias of Bradley Bruce, he found a job that offered health insurance. After years of suffering, he finally got the surgery he so desperately needed. The fact the job was working an assembly line making burglar alarms adds a very thick coating of irony to the story. Thero got comfortable pretty quick in Houston. He got married and had a daughter. Then in July of 1974, he tried to break up an altercation between two people in front of a bar and was shot. When his true identity was found out after being admitted into the hospital, he was returned to California to finish his sentence. 

Soon after being brought back into the California Prison System, Thero granted a revealing though self-serving interview to famed San Francisco Chronicle journalist Paul Avery. He alleged DeFreeze was being used by monied radicals and college professors. “They tried to use me too,” he claimed, “He was being used by people who felt certain things should be done but didn’t have the nerve to do it. Donald had been locked up in jail and messed up like thousands of others that go in and out of there. He was bitter, he was uneducated and he was trying to find a way out. It’s easy to convince an embittered person to do something. But revolution is a long, slow process; an evolutionary process” 

Thero Wheeler in 2005. This photo accompanies an article in the Fog City Journal that lists Wheeler as a Vietnam Veteran.

Having passed in 2009, Thero can no longer shed any more light on the many alternative theories surrounding one of the most bizarre and gappy moments in American History. As someone who has studied the story from my armchair for many a year, I don’t think I’ll ever buy any definitive narrative on the saga. But as long as this tale continues to fester in our history, I will forever pick at the scab and marvel.

Another buncha folks in my same age bracket who apparently feel the same way about the SLA are the three fellas who make up Engine Kid. After not playing together in over twenty-five years, the Kid went in and recorded a new ep entitled (gulp!) Special Olympics. Among the four tracks is “Patty: Tania” their own paen to Cinque, Teko, Kujo, Fahizah, Mizmoon, Osi, Yolanda, Bo, and the rest of that loveable ragtag gang of radical freedom fighters. The delicate creeper of a jam is the latest testament to the pus-like intrigue that will forever ooze from the wound the Symbionese Liberation Army inflicted on our country's culture. Crack open your well-worn copy of The Voice of Guns and use it as the soundtrack to your homespun theorizing.