Donald DeFreeze

Donald DeFreeze
FBI file photo showing DeFreeze robbing the Hibernia bank
Born	(1943-11-15)November 15, 1943 Cleveland, Ohio
Died	May 17, 1974(1974-05-17) (aged 30) Los Angeles, California
Other names	Field Marshal Cinque, Cinque Mtume
Movement	Symbionese Liberation Army

Donald David DeFreeze (November 15, 1943 – May 17, 1974), also known as Cinque Mtume, was the leader of the American far-left militia group Symbionese Liberation Army, a group operating in the mid-1970s, under the nom de guerre "Field Marshal Cinque".

DeFreeze was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to African-American parents Louis and Mary DeFreeze, the eldest of eight children. His mother was a registered nurse at a convalescent home. His father was a violent man who punished him three times as a child by breaking both his arms. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade at age 14 and ran away from home. He moved to Buffalo, New York, where he lived with the Rev. William L. Foster, a fundamentalist minister, and his family. He became a street gang member in Buffalo. The Rev. Foster would say of him later:

He was arrested for stealing from parking meters and stealing a car. He was sent to the state reformatory in Elmira, New York. In 1970, DeFreeze wrote of his time here, which he called a prison or a mental institution:

DeFreeze moved to the Newark area. In 1963, he married Gloria Thomas, who had three children from a previous marriage. DeFreeze and Thomas had three children together. In 1964 his wife had him arrested for desertion. In 1965 DeFreeze moved with his family to California, where they settled in Los Angeles. He said that the worries of trying to support the children engulfed him. He wrote, "I just couldn't take it anymore. I was slowly becoming a nothing".

In 1964, police stopped DeFreeze while he was hitchhiking on the San Bernardino Freeway near West Covina, California, and found a tear-gas pencil bomb, a sharpened butter knife, and a sawed-off rifle in his suitcase.

In 1965, DeFreeze was arrested for firing a gun in the basement of his home. "I started playing with guns and fireworks", he would later write. "Just anything to get away from life and how unhappy I was". The charges were dropped and DeFreeze took his family to California.