10/27/2022 0 Comments Black panther informantHe never said why he did it or if coming so close to death had taught him anything. Heard said O’Neal never wanted to talk about the incident. About 15, 20 minutes later I heard an ambulance and I said, ‘I hope it’s not Bill.’ I called the emergency room and it was.” Heard says, “I ran out on the street but I didn’t know which way he went. It was last September, when O’Neal ran out onto the Eisenhower and was struck but only injured. Heard had seen O’Neal gripped by this rage once before. Black panther informant driver#I took his pulse and it was hardly anything.” After O’Neal was taken away Heard sat in the trooper’s car and listened to the deeply shaken driver tell how O’Neal had jumped out in front of him waving his arms. “The impact had torn the back of his shirt and pants off. When Heard got a close look at the body with his flashlight, his worst fears were confirmed. The state police were already on the scene. Heard ran to the ridge of the grassy slope and looked below to the Eisenhower, where he saw a prone body and a car with a broken windshield parked on the shoulder. There was a woman standing in front of the house and she said, ‘Lord, it sounds like somebody got hit on the expressway!'” Black panther informant free#I wrestled with him but he broke free and he ran out the door. He came out in a rage and he tried to jump out my living room window. But Heard, who says he knew O’Neal as well as anyone, depicts his nephew as a young man who cooperated with the FBI to reduce his own potential jail time, then got in way over his head and was forever tortured by the guilt.Īfter their drinking buddies left in the early-morning hours of King Day, Heard became worried when O’Neal kept getting up to go to the bathroom. After his cover was blown O’Neal entered the federal witness protection program, assumed the alias William Hart, and moved to California. Among the information the teenaged O’Neal fed his FBI contact was the floor plan of Hampton’s west-side apartment that was used to plan the fatal raid. Though O’Neal was a Panther insider to the point where he was in charge of security for Hampton and possessed keys to Panther headquarters and safe houses, he was at the same time serving as an informant for the FBI. O’Neal achieved lasting infamy in 1973 when his role in the 1969 raid in which Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered was revealed. The company left and that’s when he started acting kind of strange.”Īt 2:30 AM the 40-year-old O’Neal ran out of his uncle’s apartment, across the westbound lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway, and was struck by a car and killed. “We were just sitting around drinking beer,” Heard recalls, “talking to some friends of mine. William O’Neal spent the last few hours of his life with his uncle Ben Heard, a retired truck driver from Maywood.
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