FBI Arrests Patricia Hearst
3 Radical Friends Are Also Caught
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ─ Fugitive newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst and three radical comrades were arrested yesterday, ending one of the longest manhunts in American history.
Miss Hearst, first the captive and then the zealous comrade-in-arms of the Symbionese Liberation Army, was arrested without resistance in a house in the city's Bernal Heights district along with fugitive Berkeley artist Wendy Yoshimura.
The FBI said a 27-year-old housepainter was also arrested at the house. Stephen F. Soliah would be charged with harboring a fugitive, agent Frank Perrone said late yesterday. The FBI said it had been watching the house for two days.
About an hour earlier, police and federal agents arrested SLA members William and Emily Harris when they spotted them jogging on a street a few miles away.
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After their arraignment in a crowded federal courtroom, the Harrises and Miss Hearst were taken by car to an undisclosed location. Miss Hearst smiled and waved at reporters from the back seat of one auto, and Mrs. Harris proferred a clenched-fist salute.
Harris was taken from the federal building in another car. The three were guarded by U.S. marshals, and vehicles with law enforcement officers were at the front and rear of the caravan.
"Thank God, she's all right," Miss Hearst's mother, Catherine, said in a barely audible voice when informed. "Please call it a rescue, not a capture."
FBI special agent-in-charge Charles Bates said the arrests "effectively put an end to everyone we know who was in the SLA."
The arrest of Miss Hearst came fewer than 10 miles from the Berkeley apartment where she was kidnapped by SLA members Feb. 4, 1974.
Miss Hearst and the Harrises were arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Owen Woodruff on a variety of state and federal charges and were held on $500,000 bail each pending further hearings today.
Miss Yoshimura was released to the custody of the Alameda County Sheriff's office, where she is charged with possessing explosives.
Miss Hearst, 21, dressed in a striped shirt, brown jeans and sandals, was arraigned on federal charges of bank robbery and firearms violations.
Standing before the magistrate with her arms folded, she answered softly "yes," when asked if her name was Patricia Hearst. It was barely a year and a half ago when she proclaimed herself "Tania," the name she had adopted as a sign of her revolutionary ardor.
Appearing pale but calm, she conferred in whispers with her attorney, Terrence Hallinan.
Defense co-counsel Ted Kleiness said Miss Hearst asked to see her parents. "She was very, very interested," Kleiness said, "she was very friendly toward us."
Miss Hearst's father, San Francisco Examiner President Randolph A. Hearst, was in New York on business and said as he boarded a plane for San Francisco: "I am very pleased that things turned out the way they did."
Hearst said of the bank robbery charge against his daughter: "I don't think anything will happen on that score. After all, she was a kidnap victim, you must remember."
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Miss Hearst was abducted by gun-carrying members of the SLA, described by authorities as a tiny band of white ex-college students led by black prison escapee Donald DeFreeze.
She was dragged kicking and screaming from the apartment she shared with her fiance, Stephen Weed, in Berkeley, where she was a sophomore at the University of California.
The terrorist group demanded as a precondition for her release that the Hearsts feed the poor, and the family put together a $2 million "People in Need" giveaway program. But the SLA denounced the effort as a sham.
On April 3, 1974, Miss Hearst shocked the world by renouncing her family in a taped message, and declaring that she was joining her captors. To symbolize her conversion, she adopted the name "Tania," a figure from the Latin American guerilla movement.
On April 15, Miss Hearst dramatized her conversion when she and several SLA comrades allegedly staged an armed holdup of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco. In a later taped message she called her father a "pig" and scornfully rejected Weed.
