Donald DeFreeze Donald David DeFreeze ( November 15 , 1943 – May 17 , 1974 ) , also known as Cinque Mtume , was the leader of the American guerilla group Symbionese Liberation Army , a group operating in the mid - 1970s , under the nom de guerre " Field Marshal Cinque . " Early life . DeFreeze was born in Cleveland , Ohio , to Louis and Mary DeFreeze . He began his criminal career at age 14 , after he ran away from home and became a street gang member in Buffalo , New York , before moving to California . From December 1969 to January 1972 , he was serving a sentence in Vacaville Prison for armed robbery . Those who remember him in prison considered him an unimpressive criminal . He was first arrested for stealing $ 10 from a prostitute and framed his friend as having committed the crime . While incarcerated at Vacaville Prison , DeFreeze met with some far - left radicals who were working as volunteers in the prison and was converted to their political ideas . He was transferred to Soledad Prison in Soledad , California , in January 1972 , from which he escaped on March 5 , 1973 . DeFreeze adopted the name " Field Marshal Cinque " ( pronounced " SINK - you " ) , having taken this name from Joseph Cinqué , the reported leader of the slave rebellion which took over the Spanish slave ship Amistad in 1839 . He adopted the surname " Mtume " from the Swahili word for " prophet " . SLA . DeFreeze , along with Patricia Soltysik , founded the Symbionese Liberation Army and soon recruited members for his group . The group perpetrated a number of crimes , the most infamous being the murder of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster and the abduction , torture , rape , and brainwashing of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst . DeFreeze is primarily suspected of having murdered Foster and shooting Assistant Superintendent Robert Blackburn . On May 17 , 1974 , the Los Angeles Police Department surrounded a house where DeFreeze and five other SLA members were staying . The stand - off quickly escalated into all out battle with both sides trading fire using automatic weapons . The house caught fire during the shootout ( possibly from a smoke grenade ) . DeFreeze and others crawled through a hole in the floor into a crawlspace beneath the house . Apparently burning alive , DeFreeze committed suicide by shooting himself in the right side of his head . His corpse was so severely burned that his family did not initially believe the remains belonged to DeFreeze . DeFreeze is buried in Highland Park Cemetery in Shaker Heights , Ohio . Cultural references . As stated by Stephen King in his book " Danse Macabre " , he was one of the sources of the recurrent character Randall Flagg : I sat there for another fifteen minutes or so , listening to the Eagles on my little cassette player , and then I wrote : Donald DeFreeze is a dark man . I did not mean that DeFreeze was black ; it had suddenly occurred to me that , in the photos taken during the bank robbery in which Patty Hearst participated , you could barely see DeFreeze ' s face . He was wearing a big badass hat , and what he looked like was mostly guesswork . I wrote , ' A dark man with no face , ' and then glanced up and saw that grisly little motto again : Once in every generation the plague will fall among them . And that was that . I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called " The Stand " .