Ties to Patty Hearst : Van With a Past Sold at Auction
Amid the battered black-and-white police cars and aging Jeeps, a faded red 1970 Volkswagen van--its moment of glory past--awaited its turn on the auction block Saturday as Inglewood police sold off surplus vehicles.
Few in the crowd knew of the van’s infamous past until the auctioneer told them.
“Around here, we call it the Patty Hearst van,” he said.
On May 16, 1974, Symbionese Liberation Army members and kidnaped heiress Patricia Hearst used the van in a gunfire-filled getaway after a shoplifting incident at an Inglewood sporting goods store. A day later, six members of the terrorist group--including its leader Donald DeFreeze--died in a two-hour shoot-out with 500 local and federal officers in South-Central Los Angeles.
Most of Crowd Unimpressed
Most of Saturday’s crowd, however, remained unimpressed by the van’s colorful history.
“That’s a good little van,” Inglewood resident Leroy Freeman said. “Nice and clean. I wouldn’t mind having it. They’ll probably bid it up so high just because of that SLA business. It’ll be a shame.”
But Renee Prahl of Inglewood said she felt a particular kinship to those events
Prahl said she was driving a boyfriend’s Volkswagen bug to Los Angeles from Colorado about the time of the Inglewood shooting when she was arrested as a suspected Symbionese Liberation Army member.
“They questioned me for hours,” she recalled, before she was released. “I still don’t know why they connected me with that brigade, but it was a big event in my life. When I found out they were auctioning off this van, I knew we had to at least look at it.”
Opening at $500, the van was sold--within three bids--to Prahl and her husband, Francis, for $1,200. Included with the van will be the FBI and Inglewood reports on the incident, as well as a certificate of authenticity.
Capt. Jim Seymour, the patrolman on call the day of the Inglewood shooting, said Hearst leaned out the van’s door firing a semiautomatic rifle to provide cover for SLA members William and Emily Harris, who apparently had shoplifted a pair of socks from the store. The three, who eventually were captured and convicted for various crimes, escaped that day in the hail of bullets and quickly abandoned the van.
When police found the vehicle, they also discovered a gun nearby--registered to Emily Harris--and a parking ticket inside the van that led them to the SLA’s hide-out in South-Central Los Angeles, Seymour said.
The group had pulled up stakes just hours before police arrived the following morning, he said, but the information put officers within blocks of the site where the shoot-out would occur later that day.
Inglewood Awarded Van
The courts later awarded the van to the City of Inglewood, where the Police Department has used it for the last 10 years in robbery stakeouts, drug raids and other undercover activities.
Its new life will be spent transporting antiques for the Prahls.
“This is so neat,” Prahl, 37, said, gazing at the van through bright red, heart-shaped sunglasses. “I never dreamed we’d get it. I thought it would go for twice as much. I’m so excited. I can’t wait to call my mom and all my friends. They’ll die when they find out about this.”
Francis Prahl took a slightly more prosaic view of the purchase.
Dismayed at his wife’s revelation of her arrest, Prahl, 31, a member of the John Birch Society, said: “That was a terrible thing. She’s reformed since then. I don’t attach any sentimental value to the van. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a second car.”
