PHOENIX -- The past caught up with antiwar activist Howard Mechanic on Friday, long after the passions of the Vietnam era had cooled.
After nearly 30 years of lies, the former Scottsdale City Council candidate known as Gary Tredway was revealed this week to be Mechanic, an activist who skipped out on a five-year prison sentence for hurling a cherry bomb at firefighters during an antiwar protest in 1970.He began serving the sentence Friday after admitting his identity in federal court. He had surrendered after a week of newspaper investigations unraveled his past.
The U.S. Attorney's Office also charged him Friday with using a false Social Security number to obtain an Arizona driver's license. The felony is punishable by up to five years in prison.
John Eichenauer said he was surprised that his friend of 15 years turned out to be a fugitive. "They say it takes awhile to know somebody," Eichenauer said. "But perhaps it's not necessary to know everything. We all have flaws, skeletons."
Mechanic, 51, is one of a number of Vietnam War-era activists who went underground in the 1970s, only to resurface after decades of relatively quiet suburban life.
Last year, authorities arrested an alleged member of the Symbionese Liberation Army who is accused of placing bombs under two Los Angeles police cars in 1975. Kathleen Soliah, who has yet to go to trial, was living under an assumed name, married to a St. Paul, Minn., doctor and raising three children.
Federal authorities had been hunting for Mechanic since he fled his 1972 sentence stemming from a protest at Washington University in St. Louis, where he had been a student. The demonstration came the day after four students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot to death by National Guardsmen.
During the protest at Washington University, an ROTC building was set on fire. The firefighters he was accused of throwing the cherry bomb at had come to fight the blaze. No one was injured. Mechanic was charged under a 1968 anti-riot statute with obstructing and interfering with law officers.
"Obviously he was just one of the people who got in the way," said Tredway's longtime friend Steve Brittle. "It's the height of absurdity to take a productive member of society and put him in jail."