‘I Held Out Hopes That I Would See This Day’

SANTA ANA — Minutes after his release on bail Tuesday, former Black Panther Party leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt was whisked to a nearby hotel where his first request was to take a shower.

“I’m funky,” he said, laughing with relatives and friends. “I haven’t had a shower in three days.”

Freshly showered and in a change of clothes later, he laughed when someone showed him the new $100 bill, asking if it was real. He knew it would be just one of thousands of things that have changed in the 27 years he has been behind bars.

“I held out hopes that I would eventually see this day,” he said in an interview, “but I didn’t have any idea that it would be anything like this.”

The reception he received from supporters when he walked out of the Orange County Jail was “mind blowing,” he said.

“The love I feel from people who seem to be breathing a collective sigh of relief . . . I don’t think it’s dawned on me yet.”

Pratt said his two combat tours in Vietnam prepared him for the “tortuous situation” in prison, where he spent his first eight years in solitary confinement.

And he repeated, as he has throughout his incarceration, that he did not kill Caroline Olsen during a 1968 robbery on a Santa Monica tennis court.

“My mother did not raise a murderer,” he said. “The last person I killed was in Vietnam.”

Olsen, he said, was an anti-war demonstrator, a woman who embraced progressive political positions.

“She was like a comrade of ours,” he said. “No one has championed her cause. She was just forgotten.”

He said his investigations over the years have come very close to identifying Olsen’s murderers, and he thinks he is close to turning up the “smoking gun.”

He was held so long in prison, Pratt said, because authorities “put themselves in a situation where they framed me for a murder I didn’t do. They had to continue to lie because if they stopped, then an investigation would have taken place which would have exposed them.”

He described himself as a prisoner of war, rather than as a political prisoner, saying a U.S. Senate committee led by the late Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) referred to the FBI’s infamous counterintelligence program--COINTELPRO--as a secret war.

“We were actually prisoners of that war,” he said.

“My belief is that J. Edgar Hoover sent a directive for his agents to cripple, neutralize the Panthers,” Pratt said. “I was personally targeted. We have those documents now.”

He said he believes that Olsen’s slaying was actually arranged to frame his predecessor as leader of the Panthers in Los Angeles, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. But Carter was killed in a 1969 shootout between the Panthers and members of the rival US organization on the UCLA campus. Once Pratt assumed Carter’s old post, he said he became the target for framing.

He described the justice system that kept him behind bars for 27 years and released him on bail Tuesday as “everything from racist to classist to sexist . . . and I’m talking about the whole shebang, not just the judiciary.”

That system, he said, is a tool that is manipulated by whoever is in power at the time.

He sees the irony in being released by Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the bench.

He threw his head back and laughed, saying he never expected that he would win his freedom in Orange County.

“I just feel so good about Judge Dickey,” he said, “a man standing on his own principles and doing what’s right.”