Biography
Howard Mechanic was a college student at Washington University in St. Louis who attended a protest at his local university held in response to the Kent State Shooting. A local judge had previously issued an injunction against protests on campus and Mechanic was one of the hundreds of people arrested that night for violating the injunction. After an FBI memo falsely identified Mechanic as a leader in the student movement local prosecutors added federal charges against him after an undercover informant claimed to have seen Mechanic throw a firecracker during the demonstration.
Howard Mechanic and the other students arrested were sentenced by the local judge to six months in county jail for violating the court order that banned protests on campus. Jail officials, fearing that the students’ radical beliefs might spread to other inmates, placed them in solitary confinement, segregated from the general population. Mechanic later claimed that during his sentence, guards often taunted him for being Jewish and left the doors to his cell open, encouraging him to escape so they could justify shooting him.
After his release, Mechanic faced an impending trial on the federal charges. Despite the lack of evidence—relying solely on a single state witness who claimed to have seen him throw a firecracker in a crowd of 3,000—he was convicted and sentenced to five years.
Mechanic went into hiding and relocated to Arizona under the alias Gary Tredway. The FBI continued to search for Mechanic who was fugitive and spent the next 3 decades periodically surveilling his family, tapping their phones and having agents spy on family events while searching for him. In 1999 reporters who reexamined his case found another man had confessed to have been the one who threw firecrackers at police that night. Meanwhile, Mechanic spent this time building a new life. He got married, had children, opened a successful business, and became a landlord. He was a respected member of the community and local activist who eventually ran for City Council. However, when a newspaper journalist told Mechanic he couldn’t find a record of his college transcripts while doing a candidate profile on him Mechanic admitted his true identity to the reporter, leading to his arrest by the FBI.
The original December2000 roster reports Howard Mechanic surrendered to serve his old federal sentence in February2000. A contemporaneous clemency-support packet preserved in the William J.Clinton Presidential Library explicitly states on physical page8 that he had been incarcerated at Florence, Arizona since February10,2000. This fills a separate2000 admission episode following the long fugitive gap; it does not extend continuous imprisonment back to the1970 protest. The same packet separately reports four-and-a-half months actually served in county jail before that gap, not five completed federal years. The clemency request and prospective pardon do not establish actual physical release. The packet’s September6 additional failure-to-appear sentence is concurrent, not another consecutive custody period.
A September 7, 2000 St. Louis Post-Dispatch report says Judge Roger Strand imposed four months for failure to appear after Mechanic’s guilty plea the previous day. The term ran concurrently with his existing sentence; prosecutors agreed not to oppose his clemency request. This agreement did not itself grant clemency or release.
