A Son Has Been Waiting 26 Years for Justice

Five weeks ago, I wrote a column telling Sara Jane Olson to spare us the tiresome woe-is-me act regarding her days and nights with the Symbionese Liberation Army.

If she wanted the court’s mercy for trying to blow up police cars in L.A., I said, Olson ought to spill the beans on who gunned down an innocent woman in 1975 during a Carmichael bank robbery.

The day the column appeared, I got this message:

“Thanks for refocusing the issue on my mom’s unresolved murder by the SLA.”

It was from Jon Opsahl.

For 26 years, the Riverside physician and father of four had kept his mother’s memory alive and campaigned for her murderers to be brought to justice.

It was no whodunit, he argued. It was an SLA job all the way, and anyone who wanted the details could read Patty Hearst’s book, because she claimed to have driven the getaway car.

Or they could check out a Web site that was half tribute to Opsahl’s mother and half indictment of prosecutors for sitting on their hands. “Justice for Myrna Opsahl’s murder has been denied for over 26 years,” reads a printable postcard on the site, and it’s addressed to the Sacramento County District Attorney.

Opsahl was either snubbed by authorities or was told there simply was not enough evidence to arrest his mother’s killers.

What more did they need? he wondered.

On the Web site, next to a photo of his smiling mother, was a quote that has torn Opsahl apart for a quarter of a century. It is from the book “Every Secret Thing” by Hearst, who was quoting the alleged killer, Emily Harris.

“Oh, she’s dead, but it really doesn’t matter. She’s a bourgeois pig anyway.”

On Wednesday, Jon Opsahl finally got the first piece of the justice he has been waiting for. Four former SLA members, including Sara Jane Olson, were arrested and charged with the murder of his mother.

“Mission accomplished,” Opsahl told me before boarding a plane to Sacramento, where he attended the news conference.

He didn’t know, and it’s still not entirely clear, what developments led to the arrests. If Olson ratted out her former buddies in an attempt to cushion her own fall, he wasn’t aware of it.

The D.A. said the arrests were based on a review of both old and new evidence. Opsahl wasn’t all that interested in the particulars. At the news conference, he sat with his father, also a physician, and then spoke for both of them when he said of the arrests:

“It’s about time.”

Olson, who has claimed she gave money to SLA members back in the 1970s when her name was Kathleen Ann Soliah, has insisted she had nothing to do with any murder and was not at the bank where Opsahl was killed.

But in Hearst’s book, the former newspaper heiress puts Olson in the bank with three SLA members.

“I believe Sara Jane was right there,” Opsahl said. “And I believe she kicked one of the tellers, who happened to be pregnant and ended up having a miscarriage. She was in the bank with a gun, she and the others, and they let my mother bleed to death on the floor.”

Opsahl was shot, according to Hearst’s book, when a nervous and trigger-happy Emily Harris allegedly emptied her shotgun into Opsahl’s side.

According to Hearst’s account, one SLA member was later quite grateful that Opsahl happened to step in front of the trigger-happy Harris, or an SLA soldier could have been lost.

“If it hadn’t been for good ol’ Myrna,” Hearst wrote, quoting Bill Harris, “one of our comrades would be dead now. Good old Myrna, she took all the buckshot.”

Jon Opsahl, 15, was in school at Sacramento Union Academy on that day in 1975. In an irony he would never get over, he had been assigned by his school newspaper to report on the mysterious doings of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

He couldn’t figure out what they were really about, he says. Not then. Not now.

The nurse came for him and brought him to the principal’s office, where his younger brother, Roy, and older sister, Sonia, were waiting.

“We were driven without a word to the hospital,” says Jon Opsahl. None of them knew what for, but they figured it must have something to do with their father, a surgeon at the hospital.

“We had no idea until I saw my Dad crying, and he told us my mother was dead.”

She had been a pillar, Jon says. His father was always at work, and his mother handled everything at home, attended all their school activities, kept them active in the church.

“I’m 42, or I will be in March, and my mother was 42 when she was killed,” Jon told me, talking by cell phone. “That’s one of the strange things about this: realizing how my mom lost out on the best years of her life, being killed at 42, with four children and a husband.”

In June of 1999, Sara Jane Olson/Soliah was arrested in St. Paul, Minn., after more than 20 years on the lam. As both a defense and a plea for clemency, her supporters offered up the story of Olson’s All-American life.

She had married a doctor. She was involved in her community. She was the happy, doting mother of three children.

In other words, she had become like Jon Opsahl’s mother, the “bourgeois” woman she and her comrades are now charged with murdering.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.