Police, scholars reflect on death of Kathy Boudin, convicted in 1981 Brinks truck robbery and murders in Rockland County
NEW YORK -- There was reaction Monday to the death of 1960s radical Kathy Boudin, who was infamous for her role in the deadly 1981 Brinks truck robbery in Rockland County.
CBS2's Tony Aiello covered Boudin's controversial release from prison in 2003, and now has details of her death over the weekend due to cancer at age 78.
For more than 40 years Rockland County has followed the fate of Boudin. The deadly Brinks truck robbery she participated in is documented in a display in the county sheriff's office basement.
"She's known as a terrorist, and she'll always be a terrorist in our eyes in Rockland County," Sheriff Louis Falco said.
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The young Boudin was a radical leftist who embraced violence to force change. She went to prison expressing remorse for the deaths of Brinks guard Peter Paige and officers Waverly Brown and Edward O'Grady. Their sacrifice is memorialized at the scene where they were gunned down by members of the Black Liberation Army, who were traveling in a getaway truck with Boudin.
Aiello was at Bedford Hills Correctional when Boudin was released in 2003. She walked out holding a flower.
Angry protests dogged her for a while, but Boudin ignored them, spending the last 19 years working as a social work educator and advocate for formerly incarcerated people.
"She wasn't going to abandon the causes that drove her to decades of violence and living in the underground, but she did do so peacefully in the years since her release," said David Viola, a professor at John Jay College.
Viola is an expert on domestic political radicals who turn to violence.
"I think she very much was remorseful for the violence she was a part of, the deaths she was a part of, and the pain that she was a part of," Viola said.
Aiello spoke briefly with a relative of one of the Brinks' victims, who told him Boudin died peacefully surrounded by loved ones, a privilege denied to the men who died during the robbery.
Her family includes Chesa Boudin, now the district attorney in San Francisco, and David Gilbert, who was paroled last year for his part in the 1981 murders.
