SOLIAHS FACE REVISITING FAMILY ORDEAL DAUGHTER CHARGED IN SLAYING AT BANK AFTER SON'S '76 ACQUITTAL.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick and Karen Maeshiro Staff Writers

PALMDALE - For Martin and Elsie Soliah, the Sacramento County charges against their daughter, Sara Jane Olson, are a repeat of something they went through more than 25 years ago.

Their son, Steven, was tried and acquitted in 1976 for the same Sacramento-area bank robbery for which their daughter and four other people were charged Wednesday with murder.

``I'm p----- off,'' Martin Soliah, a retired Palmdale High School coach and teacher, said Thursday at the door of the couple's west Palmdale home.

He declined to speak further, and said his wife didn't want to talk either.

Their eldest daughter, known as Kathleen Soliah when she graduated from Palmdale High School in 1965, was already facing sentencing today after pleading guilty - then unsuccessfully trying to withdraw her plea - to participating in a 1975 plot to blow up Los Angeles police cars.

The bombs, which didn't go off, purportedly were planted in revenge for the deaths of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army radical group in a 1974 police shootout.

With the new charges, Olson is back in jail awaiting transfer to Sacramento County after her sentencing in the bomb plot.

Also in jail are former SLA members Bill and Emily Harris, and Mike Bortin, who is married to Olson's younger sister, Josephine.

A fifth defendant is fugitive Jim Kilgore, who is also wanted in the bomb plot.

When Olson was arrested in June 1999, after she and Kilgore were profiled on the television show ``America's Most Wanted,'' Elsie Soliah said her children had only helped to hide the three surviving SLA members after the shootout, when the three were convinced the FBI and police intended to gun them down, too.

Elsie Soliah also said in a June 1999 interview that her son had called his parents shortly after his arrest with kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and the Harrises back in 1975, five months after the Carmichael bank robbery in which customer Myrna Opsahl was hit by a shotgun blast.

``The first thing he said was, 'We weren't part of that group. We were helping those people, and I'm sorry we got involved. We made a mistake,''' his mother said in that interview.

Olson had been a friend of one of the slain SLA members, Angela Atwood, whom she had met in the cast of a play and worked with at a restaurant.

The SLA survivors went to Olson for help after she was one of the main speakers in an SLA memorial rally in Berkeley's Ho Chi Minh Park.

Steven Soliah was the only person tried for the Carmichael bank robbery. His father took off time from teaching at Palmdale High to attend the 1976 trial.

The federal court jury acquitted Steven after the defense brought in a woman who testified he was with her, and put on the witness stand a bank customer who looked remarkably like him.

The customer testified that he had come into the bank during the robbery, saw what was going on, and walked out.

But Hearst - who joined the SLA after it kidnapped her at age 19 from her Berkeley apartment - told a different story.

In the autobiography she wrote after President Carter pardoned her for her conviction in another SLA bank robbery, she said Steven Soliah waited outside as a lookout with Bill Harris.

She wrote in her book - and told investigators - that Olson, Bortin, Emily Harris and Kilgore were the four masked robbers who went into the Crocker National Bank. Hearst said she and a woman named Wendy Yoshimura were the getaway drivers.

Hearst wrote that Emily Harris fired the shot that killed Opsahl, apparently by accident when she pointed the gun at the woman and ordered her to lie down on the floor.

Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully told reporters Wednesday that new evidence that has surfaced recently provides additional corroboration to Hearst's allegations.

For example, using forensic testing procedures not available until recently, the FBI laboratory linked the lead pellets that killed Opsahl to shotgun shells found in an SLA hide-out in San Francisco, Scully said.

``Based upon the review of both old and new materials, I believe that there is both direct and circumstantial evidence sufficient to file charges and begin criminal proceedings for the murder of Myrna Opsahl,'' Scully said at a Sacramento news conference.

Steven Soliah, Hearst and Yoshimura cannot be prosecuted because they were each given immunity years ago in grand jury proceedings, Scully said.