By 1968, many Black Panther leaders had been arrested, including founder Huey Newton for the murder of a police officer (Newton's prosecution was eventually dismissed), yet membership surged. Black Panthers later engaged the police in a firefight in a Los Angeles gas station. In the same year, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, creating nationwide riots, the widest wave of social unrest since the American Civil War. In Cleveland, Ohio, the "Republic of New Libya" engaged the police in the Glenville shootout, which was followed by rioting. The year also marked the start of the White Panther Party, a group of whites dedicated to the cause of the Black Panthers. Founders Pun Plamondon and John Sinclair were arrested, but eventually freed, in connection to the bombing of a Central Intelligence Agency office in Ann Arbor, Michigan that September.