Echoes of the Revolution

Authorities suspected the BLA in a series of police ambushes from Los Angeles to New York, despite a membership of fewer than 100. In the wake of Young's murder, the Chronicle and Examiner received identical letters signed by the BLA. The group boasted about the siege of the "Ingleside Pig Sty" and called it "one political consequence for the recent intolerable assassination of Comrade George L. Jackson."

Yet 35 years later, with the black power revolution long since dissipated, it is former Panthers and BLA members who remain shadowed by the events of Aug. 29, 1971. This summer, state and federal authorities delving into Young's murder served DNA warrants on some two dozen people, among them five men identified as potential suspects by police in 1973. The collecting of mouth swabs marked the most recent turn in what has evolved into an investigation without end. In 2005, state prosecutors convened a pair of grand juries in San Francisco to examine the case, two years after federal prosecutors impaneled one of their own. None of those gambits yielded clues that led to arrests.

In fact, since reopening the Young case in 2002, authorities have succeeded primarily in boosting the ex-Panthers' profile. After spending several weeks in county lockup last year for refusing to testify before either grand jury, the five men emerged as a minor cause celèbre in activist circles. They count actor Danny Glover and Harvard professor Charles Ogletree as advocates, and travel across the country to speak out against the investigation.

To its targets and their supporters, the ongoing probe evokes the specter of COINTELPRO, J. Edgar Hoover's infamous FBI campaign to dismantle dissident groups by any means necessary. Under that program, the five men allege, San Francisco homicide detectives were complicit in torturing two of them in 1973 to extract false confessions in the Young investigation. Now, the graying ex-Panthers contend, authorities are exploiting the Patriot Act to pursue the case, recasting the radicals of the past as domestic terrorists.

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In early 2003, three men appeared on the doorstep of John Bowman's house in Oklahoma City. Two of them he had never seen before. The third he had hoped to never see again.

"Do you remember me?" Frank McCoy asked.

Bowman stared in disbelief. He recognized McCoy as one of two SFPD detectives who grilled him all those years ago about Sgt. John Young's murder. There could be no forgetting.

McCoy wanted to discuss the Ingleside shooting and Bowman's days with the Black Panthers. Recovering from his initial shock, Bowman declined to answer questions and invited the trio to leave.

A social program developer and father of two, Bowman, 58, speaks in a slow baritone deepened by his barrel-chested build. The sight of McCoy reminded him that his past devotion to the Panthers shades the present. "Because of that commitment that I made in 1967, I'm still being persecuted and punished," Bowman said in a radio interview last year.

Within a few weeks of McCoy accosting him, he received a summons to appear at a federal grand jury hearing in San Francisco. Authorities delivered subpoenas to more than 20 people in all, including at least four of Bowman's ex-Panther cohorts: Richard Brown, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones, and Harold Taylor. Each endured drop-ins from McCoy or his old police partner, Ed Erdelatz, the detectives who originally probed Young's killing.

Their sleuthing efforts stalled in 1976, after a Superior Court judge nixed murder charges against Bowman, Taylor, and Ruben Scott, another former Panther. The file gathered dust for the next quarter century, until the FBI's San Francisco office, working with federal prosecutors, revived the investigation sometime in 2002. The decision coincided with the Department of Justice's expanding prosecution of political crimes, both recent and vintage, in the name of homeland security.

FBI officials tapped Erdelatz and McCoy to resume digging into the Young case. Since neither still held a police badge, the agency in effect deputized them for the job. At the time, Erdelatz worked as an investigator for the District Attorney's Office in Alameda County, a job he quit last year. McCoy apparently had settled into retirement. (Erdelatz did not respond to SF Weekly's interview requests; McCoy could not be reached for comment.) Their surprise visits exhumed dark memories for Bowman and his one-time Panther brethren.

Bowman, born and raised in the Fillmore, joined the party in 1967, a year after Panther founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale unveiled their Ten Point Program, black berets, and bandoliers. Inspired by the group's message of self-reliance, Bowman worked as a program organizer, setting up free medical clinics and advocating tenants' rights. As he gained experience, he traveled to the party's chapters in Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C., assisting with similar projects.

Like Bowman, Brown grew up in the Fillmore and worked as a Panther organizer, running a jobs program for low-income residents. In 1968, the two men also briefly landed in jail together, in connection with a police shooting near the Hall of Justice.