(John Ransom, Headline USA) Convicted murder, terrorist, and bank robber Kathy Boudin, mother of current San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, a Democrat, has died of cancer.
She outlived by over 40 years the two New York police officers and one Brinks guard who were killed as she helped the Black Liberation Army steal $1.6 million from a Brinks armored truck full of cash.
She was 78 years old and died peacefully at home.
“She made it long enough to meet her grandson, and welcome my father home from prison after 40 years,” Chesa Boudin said in a statement issued by the DA’s office shared with SFGATE.com.
Boudin, with her husband, David Gilbert, driving, fled with the gunman after their compatriots shot and killed Sgt. Edward Grady and Officer Waverly “Chipper” Brown, as the policeman investigated a suspicious U-Haul that transported the Brinks robbers.
An hour previously the group had gunned down Brinks guard Peter Paige during the robbery, according to an account in The Journal News of Lower Hudson New York.
Boudin and Gilbert were both members of the terrorist group the Weather Underground.
A devastating loss for the movement. Kathy was an incredible educator and organizer who spent years supporting the growing community fighting for prison abolition in NYC and beyond. So grateful to have known and learned from her. https://t.co/Ow3MrzxiyX
— Silky Shah (@silkys13) May 1, 2022
Boudin had previously fled Manhattan after a townhouse in which she was making bombs to attack Fort Dix US Army base exploded, said SFGATE.com.
Neither Boudin nor Gilbert actually fired a shot during the Brinks robbery, said NBC News, as it extolled Chesa Boudin’s run for district attorney in San Francisco, while Chesa Boudin used his experience as a prison orphan to argue for reduced sentences for those convicted of crimes.
But as accomplices to people with weapons ready to kill in a plot to steal millions of dollars, both Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were rightly convicted under the law for murder, continuing to help the robbery plan even after the robbers had shot Brinks guard Paige.
Clearly her bomb-making activities showed she was planning for violence.
Her son, Chesa, was then brought up by fellow Weather Underground bomber, Bill Ayres in Chicago, where he likely ran into future president Barack Obama, who the New York Times accused of trying to downplay his association with Ayers, even as Ayers hosted a fundraiser raiser for Obama’s first political office.
“While incarcerated, [Kathy] Boudin was a model prisoner, taught literacy, advocated for inmates with AIDS, and earned a master’s degree in adult education,” wrote New York Magazine, as if she was a modern-day Florence Nightingale.
Upon her release in 2003 she was hired as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and later to full professor, where she headed up the ironically named Center for Justice.
Last year her husband, David Gilbert, had his sentence commuted by then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, and was released from prison in October of 2021.
