Like some macabre fulfillment of McLuhanism, the bloodiest and most suspenseful act in the tragedy of Patricia Campbell Hearst became a public event. Millions of Americans watched last week as television carried live the Shootout in a Los Angeles residential neighborhood between lawmen and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had kidnaped—and claimed to have converted to radical terrorism—the 20-year-old publishing heiress. The TV images seemed plucked from old Viet Nam film clips: street fighting in Danang perhaps, the helicopters wheeling overhead, the hissing tear-gas canisters, finally the flames of the enemy's hideout leaping into the suddenly hushed twilight. But the reality was that Patty Hearst might well be in the flames, and the most stricken of all the electronic witnesses was the Hearst family, watching 350 miles away in a suburb of San Francisco.
So charred were the five bodies brought out of the ruins of the house that it was almost a full day before the family's agony was, in a measure, eased.
Patty Hearst was not among them, and so might still be alive. But the five included the leaders of the S.L.A. believed to be her constant captor-companions, raising the fear that she might have been killed earlier as the dragnet was closing in on the S.L.A. The dead:
>Donald David DeFreeze, 30, nominal leader of the S.L.A., a black who called himself General Field Marshal Cinque and whose belligerent voice threatened and denigrated the Hearst family on the tapes that the S.L.A. periodically released. An escaped convict and a reputed onetime police informer, DeFreeze took part at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville in the activities of the Black Cultural Association, an organization that attracted a few embittered whites and eventually was to help spawn the S.L.A.
>Nancy Ling Perry, 27, considered perhaps the most important spiritual and doctrinal leader of the group. An English literature major at the University of California at Berkeley, she wrote long S.L.A. diatribes that were heavily tinged with Maoist cant and attacked American society. She took part with other S.L.A. members in the robbery of a San Francisco bank on April 15, when Patty appeared to be an accomplice.
>Patricia ("Mizmoon") Soltysik, 24, also studied at Berkeley, where she became involved in radical feminist activities. Mizmoon is the name she was given by her lover, Camilla Christine Hall, another S.L.A. member and the daughter of a Lutheran minister.
>William Wolfe, 22, was once enrolled at Berkeley and attended meetings of the Black Cultural Association.
Known as "Willie the Wolf to his friends, he was the son of a Pennsylvania anesthesiologist.
>Angela Atwood, 25, a former student teacher in Indianapolis, where she is remembered as a rebel who opposed codes of conduct for students.
The drama began Friday afternoon in the unlikely setting of an auto-towing-company yard in a black district that stretches across south central Los Angeles. FBI agents, Los Angeles policemen and deputy sheriffs converged on the spot, which was turned into an impromptu central command and briefing post. They were joined by squads of newsmen who had picked up the same tip: the S.L.A. was hiding in the area.