For once, Wikipedia gets it right.
On the evening of December 3, 1969, Fred Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, which was attended by most members of the Chicago Black Panther Party. Afterwards, as was typical, several Panthers retired to Hampton's Monroe Street apartment to spend the night, including Hampton and Deborah Johnson, Blair Anderson, Doc Satchell, Harold Bell, Verlina Brewer, Louis Truelock, Brenda Harris, and Mark Clark.No conspiracy here: just a flat-out national security state death-squad killing, courtesy of Mark "Deep Throat" Felt's COINTELPRO.
Upon arrival, they were met by FBI informant William O'Neal, who had prepared a late dinner which was eaten by the group around midnight. O'Neal had slipped secobarbitol into a drink consumed by Hampton during the dinner in order to sedate Hampton so that he would not awaken during the subsequent police raid. O'Neal left at this point, and, at about 1:30 a.m., Hampton fell asleep in mid-sentence talking to his mother on the telephone. Although Hampton was not known to take drugs, Cook County chemist Eleanor Berman would report that she ran two separate tests which each showed a powerful barbiturate had been introduced into Hampton's blood. An FBI chemist would later fail to find similar traces, but no explanation for how Berman's tests could have been flawed was offered and she stood by her findings.
The raid was organized by the office of Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan using officers attached to his office. Hanrahan had recently been the subject of a large amount of public criticism by Hampton, who had made speeches about how Hanrahan's talk about a "war on gangs" was really rhetoric used to enable him to carry out a "war on black youth."
At 4:00 a.m., the heavily armed Chicago police team arrived at the site, dividing into two teams, eight for the front of the building and six for the rear. At 4:45, they stormed in the apartment.
Mark Clark, sitting in the front room of the apartment with a shotgun in his lap, was on security duty. He was killed instantly after firing off a single round, which was later determined to be a reflexive reaction in his death convulsions after being shot by the raiding team; this was the only shot the Panthers fired.
Automatic gunfire then converged at the head of the bedroom where Hampton slept, unable to wake up as a result of the barbiturates the FBI infiltrator had slipped into his drink. He was lying on a mattress in the bedroom with his pregnant girlfriend. Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder, and fellow Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:
"That's Fred Hampton."
"Is he dead?... Bring him out."
"He's barely alive; he'll make it."
Two shots were heard, which it was later discovered were fired point blank into Hampton's head. One officer then said:
"He's good and dead now."
Hampton's body was dragged into the doorway of the bedroom and left in a pool of blood. The officers then directed their gunfire towards the remaining Panthers, who were hiding in another bedroom. They were wounded, then beaten and dragged into the street, where they were arrested on charges of aggravated assault and the attempted murder of the officers. They were each held on $100,000 bail.
Chicago boys Barack Obama and Eric Holder's COINTELPRO is just as active, and getting more so thanks to the Roberts Court decision in the appropriately titled Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project case.
*
Mike Gray and Howard Alk's very raw 1971 documentary, The Murder of Fred Hampton
