Emily Harris (SLA)

Emily Harris
Emily Harris's 1975 mugshot
Born	(1947-02-11) February 11, 1947 (age 70) Baltimore, Maryland
Other names	Yolanda Emily Montague Schwartz
Movement	Symbionese Liberation Army

Emily Harris (born February 11, 1947 as Emily Montague Schwartz) was, along with her husband William Harris (1945-), a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a leftist United States group involved in bank robberies, kidnapping and murder. In the 1970s, she was convicted of kidnapping Patty Hearst. In 2003, she was convicted of murder in the second degree for being the shooter in a 1975 slaying that occurred while she and other SLA members were robbing a bank in California. She was sentenced to eight years in prison for the murder.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Clarendon Hills, Illinois, Harris was the daughter of Frederick Schwartz, an engineer, and had a middle-class upbringing. She graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor's degree in language arts, having earned straight A's. She was briefly an English teacher at Binford Junior High in Bloomington, Indiana.

Emily and Bill Harris arrived in Berkeley, California in 1973 from Bloomington, Indiana. They came with their friends Gary Atwood and Angela Atwood. They soon joined a left-wing group that, among other things, visited prisoners in northern California. The Harrises met an escaped prisoner, Donald DeFreeze. They joined the SLA, created by Mizmoon Soltysik, Nancy Ling Perry, Joe Remiro, Russ Little, Willie Wolfe, Angela Atwood, Thero Wheeler, and Camilla Hall. Emily Harris's nom de guerre was Yolanda. On November 6, the SLA committed its first public act, the assassination of popular Oakland, California school superintendent Marcus Foster. The SLA mistakenly thought that Foster was behind a plan to create student identification cards for Oakland high schools. Subsequently, they kidnapped Patty Hearst, the college student heir to the Hearst newspaper chain.