Columnist Susan Snyder: Daughter recalls SLA slaying

Friday, Jan. 25, 2002 | 4:34 a.m.

It's been a long time since we've heard about the Symbionese Liberation Army -- the SLA.

Some of us may have heard of it for the first time a couple of weeks ago when five former members of the 1970s militant group were arrested and charged with murder and robbery stemming from the April 21, 1975 heist of a Carmichael, Calif., bank in which Myrna Opsahl was fatally shot.

Opsahl's daughter, Sonja Brownlee, a 42-year-old Elko pediatrician, says it should bring closure and relief for everyone involved.

"It's got to therapeutic for them to finally admit what they did. I don't know how they go to sleep at night," she said in a telephone conversation from her home Thursday.

Sleep doesn't come easy for anyone left behind. Opsahl, 42, was shot moments after one of the gunmen held the bank door open for her and her two female companions. The women were going to make a deposit for their church.

Brownlee was a 17-year-old high school senior when she was pulled from her classroom that day and carted off with her two younger brothers to American River Hospital where their mother died and their father worked as a surgeon. The Opsahls' eldest son was at college.

"They all tried to do everything they could. But she had been in shock too long and bled completely out," Trygve Opsahl told the Sacramento Union newspaper the day his wife was shot.

Brownlee says the emptiness never goes away. She married a doctor, and their children are 15, 13 and 11. Questions about Grandma never had easy answers.

"My daughter, when she was around 3, became kind of obsessed with it," Brownlee said. "She'd ask, 'Where's your mommy?' And I told her she had died in a bank robbery. She worried about it."

Worried, because mommies aren't supposed to go away like that. And no number of arrests or convictions will replace what Brownlee and her brothers lost.

"We had such a wonderful childhood. But we'll never know her as a person," Brownlee said. "It's not a happy thing, but it's kind of a comfort and relief to know people are going to be held accountable."

Claims that those responsible for Opsahl's death are now rehabilitated and leading productive, respectable lives are absurd.

"Rehabilitation means having remorse. It means standing up and saying, 'I did it, and I'm sorry,' " Brownlee said. "We're not the cause of making them suffer. They did it to themselves. You get really tired of the victim mentality."

The story of the SLA and Opsahl's death will fall on a new generation of ears as it unfolds during upcoming court proceedings. Let's hope they are not deaf ones.

Back in 1975, opening gunfire in a public building and killing an innocent bystander was unthinkable. We didn't just go on about our business.

Since then, thousands of bystanders have died in mass school shootings, a federal building bombing in Oklahoma City and terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. As a nation we're almost numb.

But 27 years after her death, maybe Myrna Opsahl can still teach us something in the simple words of a daughter left behind:

"It's not old news," Brownlee said. "A murder is an awful thing."