The Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California, United States was the target of two related domestic terrorist attacks in 1970, tied to escalating racial tensions in the state's criminal justice system. On August 7, 17-year-old Jonathan P. Jackson along with three inmates kidnapped Superior Court judge Harold Haley from the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California. As the kidnappers attempted to leave with five hostages by car, San Quentin guards shot at Jackson's retreating van, leaving four people dead, including Jonathan Jackson and Judge Haley. Three others were wounded. The event received intense media coverage, as did the subsequent manhunt and trial of Angela Davis, an ousted professor from UCLA with connections to George and Jonathan Jackson, and the Black Panthers. Davis owned the weapons used in the incident but stated that she had no knowledge of its happening. On October 8 of that year, the Weathermen detonated explosives in support of the earlier incident. Background - events at Soledad Prison Petition by W.L. Nolen In the summer of 1969, W.L. Nolen, a twenty-year-old inmate at Soledad prison in California, who had been convicted in 1963 for robbery, began circulating a petition to file a lawsuit against the prison's superintendent, Cletus J. Fitzharris, charging that guards and officials at the facility knew of "existing social and racial conflicts" and that they had been seeking to excite them through "direct harassment and in ways not actionable in court", including the filing of false disciplinary reports and intentionally leaving black inmates' cells unlocked to put them in danger of assault. He claimed officials were "willfully creating and maintaining situations that creates and poses dangers to the plaintiff [himself]" and that he "feared for his life." Soledad Shootings on January 13, 1970 - three deaths On January 13, 1970, three black prisoners were shot and killed at Soledad by corrections officer Opie G. Miller. The three prisoners were (i) W.L. Nolen (see above), (ii) Cleveland Edwards, then 21, who had been convicted in 1967 of assaulting a police officer, and (iii) Alvin Miller, then 23, who had been convicted of robbery. According to Ellsworth Ferguson, an administrative assistant to Fitzharris at the time, a fight began during a scheduled exercise period for 15 inmates from the maximum security wing of the prison. During the conflict, two white inmates among the group were beaten to the ground and officer Miller