Biography
White anti-imperialist activist and former Weather Underground member arrested in November 1977 in Los Angeles as one of the PFOC/LA 5 on conspiracy and explosives charges. Had previously lived underground after Weather Underground activity in the early 1970s. Documented in PFOC Breakthrough magazine.
Photo: U.S. Senate, The Weather Underground (1975), printed pages 43-45, via GovInfo. Original-image crop; identified by the source (Justesen, second row first portrait, printed page 45). Source: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-94SPRT39242/pdf/CPRT-94SPRT39242.pdf . Non-free image used at low resolution under this site's educational/memorial fair-use rationale; not an open-license or permission claim.
The Torch’s “Free the Prairie Fire Five” article individually names these defendants as arrested in the prosecution concerning an alleged plan to bomb California Senator John V. Briggs’s Fullerton office. It reports a February 1, 1978 grand-jury indictment for conspiracy involving a destructive device and disputes the prosecution’s account. February 1 is the indictment date, not an independently established arrest date. The Torch, March 15–April 14, 1978, vol. 5 no. 3, original PDF page 6. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/torch-us/v5n3.pdf#page=6
In a Spring 1978 first-person article, Judith Bissell and Leslie Mullin individually name the LA Five defendants and describe their continued Los Angeles County jail confinement after the November 19, 1977 arrests. The accompanying mail directory prints Michael Justesen’s historical local jail number as 4605786. It is not represented as a current BOP register number. The reported four months already held is preserved as a documented known subtotal of actual custody, with the overall total still unknown; the planned June trial is not treated as an actual disposition.
