A Murdered Trooper, a Communist Fugitive, and the Florida Senate Candidate Who Calls Her a Freedom Fighter

His name was Werner Foerster. He was 34, a husband, a father, a Vietnam veteran, and a New Jersey State Trooper. Born in Germany, he came to America after the war, served his adopted country in Vietnam, and returned home determined to build a future for his family. He worked as a welder during the day and studied at night until he earned his place in the New Jersey State Police Academy.

On May 2, 1973, a routine traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike ended his life and left his wife, Rosa, a widow and their little boy, not yet four years old, without a father.

The people involved in his killing belonged to the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist-Leninist self-styled revolutionary organization whose members robbed banks, attacked police officers, and fancied themselves soldiers in a war against the United States. Please.

During the confrontation, gunfire erupted, and Foerster suffered fatal wounds, including shots to the head from his own service revolver. Police arrested Joanne Chesimard, who later adopted the name Assata Shakur, and in 1977 a jury convicted her of first-degree murder and other related offenses. The court sentenced her to life in prison, which should have settled the matter, except that the American justice system had yet to contend with the spectacular evil of her revolutionary comrades.

In November of 1979, armed and violent members of BLA stormed the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. They violently took hostages and helped Chesimard escape. She fled to Cuba, where Fidel Castro's communist dictatorship welcomed her, protected her, and refused to return her to American authorities.

She changed her name to Assata Shakur, and for decades, this self-proclaimed champion of freedom enjoyed sanctuary and a life of luxury under a regime that imprisoned dissidents, silenced political opposition, and treated basic civil liberties as privileges the government could revoke at will. Apparently, revolutionary freedom tastes considerably sweeter when a murderous dictator provides the accommodations.

Chesimard/Shakur earned her entry into Hell when she died in Havana in September 2025 at the age of 78, and good riddance to her. She successfully evaded her sentence for nearly half a century. And one might reasonably assume that a convicted murderer who escaped prison with the assistance of armed militants and spent decades enjoying the hospitality of Fidel Castro would hardly qualify as an inspirational figure for someone seeking public office in the United States. That assumption, unfortunately, requires a level of common sense that Florida State Representative Angie Nixon appears to lack.

Nixon, a Socialist Democratic of America candidate for the United States Senate, has described Assata Shakur as a "famous freedom fighter." During a campaign appearance at a church, Nixon invoked Shakur's words about fighting for freedom and having nothing to lose but chains, apparently without the slightest embarrassment over the circumstances that made her revolutionary heroine famous. The spectacle is breathtakingly offensive.

A woman convicted of murdering a state trooper, who escaped her punishment and fled to a communist dictatorship, now supplies inspirational material for an American politician speaking from a church platform. I would call it an astonishing lapse in judgment, but that would suggest Nixon somehow stumbled into this particular moral sewer by accident. She did not.

Her admiration extends beyond public speeches. At Café Resistance, her Jacksonville bookstore and coffee shop, Nixon displays Shakur's portrait among other low-IQ radical figures. When critics challenged the display, she defended it as history, which is a rather convenient explanation for hanging a convicted murderer's portrait in a business devoted to celebrating resistance. There is an enormous difference between teaching history and romanticizing its more contemptible characters. We should study violent revolutionaries, but let's not turn them into saints for shooting police officers.

The Black Liberation Army was no civil-rights organization, regardless of how enthusiastically its latter-day admirers attempt to launder its reputation. Its members embraced revolutionary violence, regarded law enforcement officers as enemies, and advocated the destruction of the American political system. These were not the peaceful activists who endured fire hoses, police dogs, and imprisonment while demanding equal protection under the law. They were armed, ungrateful militants who justified criminal violence through ideology, and dressing their activities in the language of liberation does nothing to alter the record. Murder does not acquire moral legitimacy because the murderer carries a revolutionary manifesto.

What makes Nixon's celebration of Shakur so repellent is its extraordinary lack of self-awareness. This chick is running for Senate in a state with nearly a million refugees from the Cuban dictatorship. She mumbles through mindless speeches about justice, dignity, oppression, and the importance of honoring those the powerful have harmed. Yet the suffering of a million-plus of her constituents never registers with her.

Werner Foerster's widow and child scarcely register in the romanticized version of Shakur's story. The suffering of Werner’s family and the suffering of the victims of Castro’s regime interfere with her narrative. They disappear so Angie Nixon can lionize a murderer.

And please spare me the tiresome insistence that Shakur's conviction remains controversial. She maintained her innocence, and her supporters have challenged the fairness of her trial, but a jury convicted her, the courts upheld that conviction, and armed accomplices subsequently helped her escape from prison. These are stubborn historical facts, however inconvenient they may be to people determined to reinvent a convicted murderer as a misunderstood revolutionary. Nixon can call the portrait history until she has to pull out her dollar-tree megaphone. Nixon hasn’t (and probably won’t) understand that admiration isn't historical scholarship. Celebrating someone as a freedom fighter requires a moral judgment that deserves scrutiny. Something Nixon is short on.

Werner Foerster was a true, real-life American hero, not because he claimed some grand revolutionary purpose, but because he served his country, worked for his family, and accepted the risks that come with a police officer's duty. He bled out on a dark New Jersey highway at 34, while the sow convicted of his murder went on to live to be 78 years old under the protection of a tyrannical communist dictator. The historical record needs no embellishment. The moral implications need no explanation except to Angie Nixon.

His name was Werner Foerster. Badge 2608. Angie Nixon may prefer to celebrate Assata Shakur, but she should not expect Americans to mistake that disgraceful exercise in revolutionary nostalgia for a tribute to freedom.