The last fugitive member of the Symbionese Liberation Army to be brought to justice was sentenced Monday to 4½ years in prison for passport fraud and possession of a pipe bomb.
James Kilgore, 56, belonged to the 1970s radical group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. He was on the lam for more than two decades before he was captured in 2002 in South Africa, where he was working as a professor under an assumed name.
Kilgore is expected to be sentenced next month to an additional six years in prison after pleading guilty last year to murder charges in the shotgun slaying of a bank customer during a 1975 SLA holdup.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel sent Kilgore to prison for possession of a bomb found in his apartment in 1975, and for using the birth certificate of a dead baby to obtain a passport.
Kilgore apologized for his acts and said the SLA’s violent protests against the Vietnam War were “misguided and misdirected.”
“There aren’t any shortcuts to meaningful social change,” he said.