News / Politics
Eight Arrested for 1971 Killing of San Francisco Police Officer
Police have arrested eight men in connection to the 1971 shooting death of Sgt. John V. Young of the San Francisco Police Department.
According to police, seven of the eight men arrested were members of the Black Liberation Army, a violent offshoot of the Black Panther Party.
The murder of Young occurred on Aug. 29, 1971 when two men entered a San Francisco police station and fired a shotgun through a hole in a bulletproof window. One of the men arrested on Tuesday, Harold Taylor, was charged for the murder in 1975 but the judge dismissed the charges after discovering that evidence had been obtained from Taylor and three other suspects through torture.
Two of the men charged in the 1971 murder are already serving life sentences for the murders of two New York police officers.
During the period of 1968 thru 1973 the Black Liberation Army launched a series of attacks designed to kill San Francisco and New York police officers.
The murder investigation of Young was reopened in 1999 after what San Francisco Police Department officials called “advances in forensic science led to the discovery of new evidence in one of the unsolved cases.”
Charges of murder and conspiracy were filed against Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64; Richard Brown, 65; Herman Bell, 59; Anthony Bottom, 55; Henry Watson Jones, 71; Francisco Torres, 58; and Harold Taylor, 58.
Police are still searching for a ninth suspect, Ronald Stanley Bridegforth.
