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WORLD> America
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California due to release 1970s radical Olson
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-03-16 09:44 If her release goes as planned, her attorneys say she will be paroled to her mother's house in Palmdale and will have 24 hours to report to her California parole agent. Unless there is a change, she then will be allowed to return to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she changed her name and married Dr. Gerald "Fred" Peterson.
"Her release of course is a great relief," Peterson said in an e-mail to The Associated Press, declining a request for an interview. "We need to regroup in our home, and preserve our privacy as much as possible, and get our lives coordinated again. We're very happy to reunite." Many of Olson's friends and former associates in Minnesota declined to comment about her release, fearing any statements might hurt her chances of getting out on schedule. And some have simply run out of patience with the attention the case has gotten. "I don't have anything to say," snapped Wendy Knox, artistic director of the Frank Theatre and a longtime friend of Olson's. "Every time something happens in that case I get 50,000 calls from reporters." Others said they couldn't wait to see her again. "I'm planning on giving her a big hug when she gets back and am going to count on her to do what she did before, which was read the New York Times to the blind and volunteer in all sorts of activities to help the less fortunate," said Andy Dawkins, a longtime family friend from St. Paul. Not everyone will be happy to have her back. After Olson's arrest in 1999, Minneapolis gun store owner Mark Koscielski countered supporters with bumper stickers that said "Fight Terrorism, Jail Kathleen." "She's a ... terrorist and she shouldn't be out of jail," Koscielski said. The president of the St. Paul Police Federation, Dave Titus, wrote to Schwarzenegger last week arguing against letting Olson serve her parole in his city. "Returning Soliah to the same neighborhood that harbored her during her 24-year flight from justice is hardly conducive to strict parole monitoring," Titus wrote. "If having a convicted domestic terrorist living in their midst didn't bother her neighbors, why would the State Department of Corrections think they would report her if she violated parole?" Olson, then Soliah, was in her late 20s when she joined the SLA. The small band of mostly white, college-educated children of middle-class families was started in 1973 by an ex-convict named Donald DeFreeze. He died with five members of the group in a 1974 shootout with police at their Los Angeles hideout. After the attempted bombings of the LAPD police cars, Olson fled to St. Paul, 1,900 miles (3,060 kilometers) away, where she acted in community theater, joined a church, taught English to immigrants, worked with senior citizens and raised the couple's three daughters. She was arrested in June 1999 on a tip from the "America's Most Wanted" television show. Opsahl's son, Jon Opsahl, said he is glad the saga is coming to an end. "She did her minimal time and has paid her debt to society after all these years," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, she can leave the state as soon as possible and get back to her life."
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