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According to police, four Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) men knocked on the door, announced who they were and set to work at once with the battering ram. The door burst open on the third swing. In the police version, the SWAT team stumbled into a hail of automatic-weapons fire; the Panthers insist that the police opened fire first. It was nearly an hour before newsmen arrived, and when they did, police kept them more than two blocks away. "The fury of the gun battle was right out of Viet Nam," reports TIME Correspondent Martin Sullivan. "Hundreds of rounds were fired. The police hurled everything in their armory at the building: that it still stands is a miracle." When the fray was finally over, 13 Panthers stumbled out through the tear gas and gun smoke to surrender, three of them wounded—including the two women who had been inside. Three policemen were injured.
Now, Sullivan observes, "there is not a pane of glass left intact. Bullets have gouged great chunks out of the brickwork. Buckshot has ripped away the posters that used to plaster Panther headquarters." Only a picture of Cleaver still remains, and a sign that says: "Free Huey. Feed Hungry Children." On Wednesday, a group of Panthers pushed aside yellow sawhorses blocking the entrance and marched back in, disregarding a front door warning put up by the Department of Buildings and Safety: UNSAFE—DO NOT ENTER.
Bullets or Nails. Neither Panther nor policeman died in the Los Angeles shootout. That had not been the case the week before in Chicago, where police bullets killed Panther Leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. After interviewing survivors and investigating ballistic evidence, Panther lawyers contend that the police burst in and began firing without warning, killing Clark in the first volley and pumping fatal shots into Hampton as he lay in bed. State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who organized the raid, denounced press and television accounts of the Panthers' story as "an orgy of sensationalism."
The police insist that they opened fire only after they were greeted with a 12-gauge shotgun shell through the closed front door. To the Chicago Tribune, which he praised for its "accurate, fair and balanced account," Hanrahan gave "exclusive" photographs that the newspaper said showed a hole in the front door made by a 12-gauge shotgun slug, a bullet-riddled bathroom door and two holes in the backdoor jamb made by shots fired by Panthers inside the building.
Skeptical newsmen revisited the apartment and discovered that they could find no sign of the shotgun shell in the hallway outside the front door; that the bullet-riddled door led to a bedroom, not to the bathroom; and that the doorjamb "holes" were actually nail heads. Headlined the rival Sun-Times: "Those Bullet Holes Aren't." Hanrahan disclaimed responsibility for the Tribune captions ("We're not editors"), but Tribune Editor Clayton Kirkpatrick said that they came from material provided by the police and by Hanrahan's office. Late last week, at the request of black and white civic organizations, the Justice Department promised an investigation of the shootings, and Cook County Coroner Andrew Toman pledged a blue-ribbon inquest.