William Lee Brent
Black Panther Party member who hijacked a passenger jet to Cuba in 1969
William Lee "Bill" Brent (1931 – November 4, 2006) was an American member of the Black Panther Party and defector, best known for hijacking a passenger jet and diverting it to Cuba in 1969, where he spent the last 37 years of his life in exile.
Biography
William Lee Brent was born in 1931, in Franklin, Louisiana, and when he was 13 his family moved to Oakland, California. Brent was selling drugs and committing petty crimes by the time he was in junior high school, and at age 17 he enlisted in the U.S. Army by using a fake birth certificate. He was discharged from the army after only eight months, later serving time in juvenile hall for stealing a bicycle. In 1955, he was convicted of armed robbery and auto theft, for which he spent seven years in San Quentin State Prison. On April 21, 1964, Brent married Gloria L. Harness, age 30, in Oakland.
Black Panther Party activity
In November 1968, Brent and two accomplices in a van marked "Black Panther Black Community News Service" allegedly robbed a gas station in San Francisco's Bayview district of $80. Police caught up to them on Seventh Street near the Hall of Justice, prompting a shootout, where one of the officers, Lieutenant Dermott Creedon, was critically wounded. When Brent was arrested and identified as the triggerman, Eldridge Cleaver kicked him out of the Black Panther Party, accusing him of "banditry".
After his arrest, Brent was released on bail, and on June 17, 1969, he stepped onto Trans World Airlines Flight 154 from Oakland to New York City.
The public source identifies “William Lee Brent” as black Panther Party member who hijacked a passenger jet to Cuba in 1969. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around William, Brent and Black.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Lee Brent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.