![]() In a 1989 interview with Eyes on the Prize, O’Neal was asked whether he felt regret. He came back to Chicago about four years before his death. ![]() I think he never got it out of his system and was confused.”Īccording to the Tribune, he spent some time living in California. “He could play all the roles, every part they (FBI agents) needed. “He was always a mysterious guy,” an official who knew him told The Tribune. He was pinched as a car thief, which gave the FBI leverage over him, and he obviously became a controversial figure when his actions were revealed. The Tribune reported that, in real life, O’Neal ended up in the Federal Witness Protection Program in 1973 after infiltrating the Black Panther Movement. The Tribune reported that O’Neal had run in front of a car before but was only injured that time.Īccording to the Tribune, O’Neal was living under a new identity – William Hart. He tried to swerve, but it was too late.” His death was ruled a suicide,” the Reader reported.Īccording to Heard, O’Neal “was forever tortured by the guilt.” Heard told The Reader that he heard the “deeply shaken driver tell how O’Neal had jumped out in front of him waving his arms. The company left and that’s when he started acting kind of strange.”Īt 2:30 a.m., O’Neal, then 40, ran out of the apartment “across the westbound lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway, and was struck by a car and killed. “We were just sitting around drinking beer,” Heard told The Reader, “talking to some friends of mine. The Reader described how O’Neal was drinking beer with his uncle Ben Heard on Martin Luther King Jr. In 1990, shortly after O’Neal’s death, the Chicago Reader wrote a story called, “The Last Hours of William O’Neal.” The Chicago Tribune reported in a 1990 story that the Cook County Medical Examiner had officially ruled O’Neal’s death a suicide. In the case of O’Neal, it was determined that he died of suicide. The story ended very tragically for all involved. He died after being run over by a car on January 15, 1990. The movie’s release has some people wondering: What happened to William O’Neal? Where is he today? Some consider it an assassination the FBI director had instituted a counter intelligence movement in an attempt to break the back of the Panthers and other revolutionary groups. The Chicago Tribune called O’Neal a “key federal government informant who infiltrated the Black Panthers in the late 1960s.” Hampton and another Black Panther leader, Mark Clark, were killed during a law enforcement raid. It’s a true story O’Neal really was an FBI informant who gave the feds the floor plan to Hampton’s apartment, according to the Chicago Reader. The movie, which is based on real life, tells the story of the life and death of Hampton and the role William O’Neal, an FBI informant and one-time car thief, played in it all. The story of William O’Neal features prominently in the newly released movie Judas & the Black Messiah, which just hit theaters and some streaming services and features the death of Chicago Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton.
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