Biography
Oscar Collazo was a Puerto Rican Nationalist who, with Griselio Torresola, attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at Blair House on November 1, 1950, during the Jayuya Uprising. Wounded in the gunfight that killed Torresola and White House police officer Leslie Coffelt, he was convicted and sentenced to death, but Truman commuted the sentence to life in 1952. After 29 years in federal prison, mostly at Leavenworth, he was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in September 1979 and returned to Puerto Rico a hero of the independence movement.
Meyer’s study dates President Truman’s commutation of Collazo’s death sentence to July 24, 1952, distinguishing the planned July 23 appeal by Marcantonio and Rosa Collazo from the accomplished executive act. The commutation changed punishment to life imprisonment and did not itself free him. Source: https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/377/37722223004.pdf#page=27
The chronology records that Oscar Collazo used the name Antonio Silva when registering at the Washington hotel before the November 1, 1950 Blair House attack. It says that he was wounded and taken prisoner during the attack. This adds the documented assumed name without treating the attack date as an independently established prison-facility intake or changing the existing case endpoints.
