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OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:35 PM – Friday, September 26, 2025
Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army member who was convicted in the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper, has reportedly died in Cuba, where she fled to after escaping from prison in 1979. Shakur was 78-years-old.
Shakur, born Joanne Deborah Chesimard, was the godmother and step-aunt of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, who was fatally shot in 1996.
Her conviction for the murder of Trooper Werner Foerster, and subsequent escape, garnered her a permanent spot on the New Jersey State Police’s Most Wanted List. The U.S. had sought to extradite Shakur from Cuba ever since — though without success.
The Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that she died on Thursday in Havana from “health complications and advanced age.”
The convicted cop killer and civil rights activist had continued to be a top priority for law enforcement officials in the United States over the more than four decades after she broke out of the Clifton, New Jersey, prison.
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In May 1973, Shakur and two other members of the Black Liberation Army, an underground Marxist–Leninist, Black-nationalist militant organization, were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike by Trooper Werner Foerster and another state officer. The encounter quickly escalated into a shootout that left Foerster and one of Shakur’s companions dead.
Officer Foerster, 34, was survived by his wife and young son.
Shakur, wounded in the exchange of gunfire, was taken into custody and later convicted of first-degree murder.
However, in 1979, just two years into her life sentence, Shakur was broken out of prison with the help of Black Liberation Army members. Soon after, she escaped to Cuba and communist leader Fidel Castro granted her asylum.
She gained infamy as the first woman to be placed on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list for domestic terrorism-related crimes.
Born in Flushing, Queens, and raised between New York City and Wilmington, North Carolina, Shakur became politically active while studying at Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College of New York.
“I was convicted by—I don’t even want to call it a trial, it was a lynching, by an all-White jury,” she told BET in 2001, speaking on her conviction. “I had nothing but contempt for the system of justice under which I was tried.”
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