Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground radical who served more than two decades behind bars for her role in the fatal 1981 armored truck robbery and spent the last part of her life helping people who had been incarcerated, has died. 78 years old, according to her. family.
Boudin, who lived in New York City, died of cancer on Sunday surrounded by family members, including her life partner David Gilbert, who was released from prison last year for his own role in the infamous Brink armored car robbery.
Boudin had expressed remorse for the robbery, in which a guard and two police officers were killed in upstate New York City. Behind bars, the former 1960s radical was described as a model prisoner. She was paroled in 2003, a move that angered some family and friends of the three men killed in the botched Brink robbery. Boudin kept a low profile after his release and continued to work on behalf of inmates and former inmates.
Her son with Gilbert, Chesa Boudin, said his mother devoted herself to others long after her cancer diagnosis in 2015.
“She, as a mother, offered not only unconditional love and pride, but also a model of how to live redemption and take responsibility for horrible mistakes without allowing them to completely define her life,” Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco, he told The Associated Press on Monday.
Kathy Boudin was the daughter of civil rights attorney Leonard Boudin and became a radical activist in the 1960s, joining the Weather Underground. The group helped define the radical anti-Vietnam War movement with its violent protests and bombings. Boudin was once seen running away naked from a 1970 explosion of a Greenwich Village row house that police say radicals were using as a bomb factory.
She and Gilbert joined members of the Black Liberation Army in the robbery on October 20, 1981, stealing $1.6 million in cash from an armored car outside Nanuet Mall near the Hudson River community of Nyack.
Brink’s guard, Peter Paige, was killed in the robbery and two police officers, Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown were killed when a getaway truck stopped at a roadblock and gunmen burst in from behind firing guns.
Boudin, who had been in the passenger seat of the truck, was apprehended while fleeing. She pleaded guilty in 1984 to murder and robbery, although she maintained that her role in the crimes was limited and that she was not armed.
“I feel terrible for the lives that were lost as a result of this incident,” Boudin said in court, standing next to his father. “I have led a life committed to political principles. I believe that I can be true to these principles in various ways without engaging in violent acts.”
She was sentenced from 20 years to life in prison. In prison, she developed a program on parenting behind bars and helped write a manual for inmates whose children are in foster care. She earned a master’s degree and worked to help inmates with AIDS.
After his release, he founded a program that provides medical care for people returning from incarceration and co-founded the Center for Justice at Columbia University, which seeks alternatives to mass incarceration. She earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University Teachers College and taught at the Columbia School of Social Work, according to the Center for Justice.
Gilbert, who pleaded not guilty, was sentenced to 75 years to life in prison. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo granted Gilbert clemency just before the Democrat resigned last summer.
Boudin and Gilbert married after their arrests and later divorced in prison, but remained close and had been spending their days together since Gilbert’s release, Chesa Boudin said.
The prosecutor, who ran on a progressive platform, was 14 months old when his parents were jailed. He was raised by Kathy Boudin and Gilbert’s Weather Underground compatriots Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, but kept in close contact with his biological parents.
“I have boxes and boxes of letters that she sent me from prison,” Chesa Boudin said of her mother. “We spend countless hours every month on the phone.”
Reference-news.yahoo.com