her brother through her. In 1990, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. That year Lithuania declared independence. The Supreme Court of Lithuania vacated his death sentence in 1992 which allowed Pleškys to briefly return to Lithuania and meet his daughter Sondra for the first time. He died on April 14, 1993 in Oakland, California. Legacy Pleškys' defection was one of two incidents that inspired Tom Clancy in his writing of The Hunt for Red October. The other was the 1975 mutiny aboard the Soviet frigate Storozhevoy. Pasmerktas myriop (Condemned to Death), a documentary about Pleškys directed by , was released in 1999. In 2005, Marijona Venslauskaitė-Boyle, who knew Pleškys in his last years, published Search For Freedom: The Man From Red October about his life. See also The Defection of Simas Kudirka, a drama film based on the attempted defection by a Lithuanian merchant seaman List of Eastern Bloc defectors References Further reading 1935 births 1993 deaths Lithuanian military personnel Soviet defectors to the United States Soviet Navy officers American people of Lithuanian descent People sentenced to death in absentia by the Soviet Union