Late one night in May 1973, New Jersey trooper James Harper stopped a speeding white Pontiac LeMans for a broken taillight. Sundiata Acoli was driving the car. In the back was Zayd Malik Shakur, the minister of information for the Harlem Black Panther Party. In the passenger seat was 26-year-old Joanne Chesimard, wanted by the FBI for armed bank robbery and by the New York police in connection with the slayings of two policemen and a hand‐grenade attack on a police car. Six months before, she and two men stole $1,800 in bingo money from a church safe. When Monsignor John Powis let them in, Chesimard put a gun to his head until he opened the safe, and they told him, “We usually just blow the heads off White men.”
Noticing a “discrepancy” in the driver’s identification, Trooper Harper asked Acoli to exit the vehicle. Meanwhile, State Trooper Werner Foerster, who had arrived as backup, reached into the car and pulled out a semi-automatic pistol magazine. Harper ordered the car’s nervous occupants to keep their hands on their laps. Chesimard suddenly raised a pistol and shot Harper in the shoulder; he fired back into the car, hitting Zayd Shakur. Acoli attacked Foerster, seized his pistol, shot him in the head, and jumped back into the car. He sped off down the turnpike with the injured Chesimard and dead Zayd. They were soon apprehended.
