Biography
Nelson Rodriguez was one of Los Siete de la Raza, a group of young Latino men from the Mission District of San Francisco charged in the May 1, 1969 death of plainclothes police officer Joseph Brodnik. Brodnik and his partner had confronted the group over a suspected burglary when a struggle broke out and Brodnik was fatally shot; the defense argued the fatal shot came from the gun of his own partner during the scuffle. Nelson Rodriguez was arrested and jailed pending trial, and the case became a major cause of the Bay Area Chicano and Latino movement, which built a defense committee, the newspaper Basta Ya, and community survival programs modeled on the Black Panthers. After a lengthy trial, the defendants were acquitted in 1970.
El Gallo names Nelson Rodriguez among the six Los Siete defendants then held in San Francisco City Prison following the May 1, 1969 incident. Its statement that police hunted the defendants for five days does not independently establish one uniform arrest date for every defendant. The report is an interim custody observation and adds no actual discharge or completed term. The separately named fugitive Gio Lopez was not reported in custody. Source: https://digital.auraria.edu/downloads/abqtx-rd289/asdc_archives_E_184_M5_G169_v2_no6.pdf#page=1
The Movement publishes a first-person interview with the six jailed Los Siete defendants, discussing community organizing, education and treatment in custody. Nelson’s account describes the group’s May 6 arrest in Santa Cruz and a separate San Francisco State warrant against him. Collective language is not used to manufacture a missing individual admission or release day, and the interview is not treated as another prosecution. Source: The Movement, November 1969, PDF page 10. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6911mvmt.pdf#page=10
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In a November 1969 jail interview, Nelson Rodriguez said he had attended the College of San Mateo, participated in its strike, and then joined the San Francisco State strike. He described recruiting other Mission District youths into education. Rodriguez said that after the May 6 arrest police also served him with a warrant alleging that he had thrown a rock at an officer during the San Francisco State strike. He disputed that allegation.
At the October 20, 1969 Los Siete hearing before Judge Karesh, Rodriguez read a letter protesting censorship of the defendants’ jail mail. The report says the judge left control of reading material to the sheriff. Its aggregate assertion that the defendants had been held since May 5 does not replace Rodriguez’s separately documented May 6 arrest.
