Background
Brent was born in Franklin, Los Los Angeles
Brent was born in Franklin, Los Los Angeles
His family moved to Oakland when he was 13. He was selling drugs and committing petty crimes by the time he was in junior high school. He enlisted in the Army by using a fake birth certificate when he was 17.
He was discharged after only eight months.
He served time in juvenile hall for stealing a bicycle. Then, in 1955, he was convicted of armed robbery and auto theft, and spent seven years in San Quentin State Prison.
On April 21, 1964 Brent married Gloria L. Harness, age 30, in Oakland, California (where Harness was born). In November 1968, Brent and two accomplices in a van marked "Black Panther Black Community News Service" robbed a gas station in San Francisco"s Bayview district of $80.
Police caught up to them on Seventh Street near the Hall of Justice, prompting a shootout.
One of the officers, Lieutenant Dermott Creedon, was critically wounded. When Brent was arrested and identified as the triggerman, Eldridge Cleaver kicked him out of the Panthers, accusing him of "banditry".
After his arrest and release on bail, Brent stepped onto Trans World Airlines Flight 154 from Oakland to New York on June 17, 1969, held a.38-caliber revolver to the pilot"s head and ordered pilots to take him to Cuba.
Brent spent 22 months in an immigration jail in Cuba when he arrived. After release, he earned a Spanish literature degree from the University of Havana and taught English at various junior and senior high schools.
He never became a Cuban citizen but married travel writer Jane McManus (ca 1920 - 2005). In a 1996 interview with Associated Press, he said he missed the United States and the American black community.
But he was unwilling to return to the United States to face life imprisonment for air piracy and kidnapping.
Around 1996, Times Books published his memoirs, Long Time Gone (). Foreign several years prior to his death Brent was working on a book about discrimination against blacks in Cuba. Brent died in Cuba of pneumonia on November 4, 2006 at age 75.