The end came suddenly for Werner Foerster, a 34-year-old state trooper executed with his own gun on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. For many others — his widow, the State Police and the woman convicted of his murder — the end remains elusive, postponed these 40 years by a fight over what justice really means.
Law enforcement officials advanced their side of that debate on Thursday by placing Joanne D. Chesimard, who was convicted of the murder in 1977, on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists. She became the first woman named to the list, and only the second domestic terrorist, the agency said.
The reward for Ms. Chesimard’s capture and repatriation from Cuba, where she moved after escaping from prison in 1979, was doubled to $2 million.
“I hope that they can get her,” Trooper Foerster’s widow, Rosa, 72, said from her home in Florida. “She’s still there. She has her freedom, and I don’t have my husband. That’s what’s hard about it.”
Ms. Chesimard was named to the list because she is “a supreme terror against the government” who continues to give speeches espousing revolution and terrorism against the United States, Aaron T. Ford, agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Newark division, said at a news conference.
“She’s a danger to the American government,” he added.
Ms. Chesimard has proclaimed her innocence and called herself the victim of a racist judicial system. Ms. Chesimard was a member of the Black Panther Party whom the police once called the “soul” of the Black Liberation Army. Those organizations were targeted by the F.B.I.’s Counter Intelligence Program, which used legal and illegal surveillance in an attempt to discredit mostly leftist political organizations in the 1960s and early ’70s.
On May 2, 1973, Trooper Foerster and another trooper stopped a car for a motor vehicle violation with three people inside, including Ms. Chesimard. The F.B.I. says she fired the first shot, wounding the other trooper. One of Ms. Chesimard’s associates was killed along with Trooper Foerster. Ms. Chesimard’s shoulder was hit during the gunfire, and her defenders say she was merely another victim who could not have fired a weapon because of her wound.
“There is no evidence that she in fact either caused the death or was involved in the shooting of the state trooper,” Lennox S. Hinds, 73, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers who defended Ms. Chesimard in the murder case, said in a telephone interview.
Supporters of Ms. Chesimard, who changed her name to Assata Shakur, see the F.B.I.’s putting her on the list as an attempt by law enforcement officials to capitalize on the 40th anniversary of Trooper Foerster’s murder and on the recent horrors committed by domestic terrorism in the Boston Marathon bombings.
“The allegation that Ms. Shakur is a terrorist is unfounded,” Professor Hinds said. “The attempt at this point by the New Jersey State Police to characterize her as a terrorist is designed to inflame the public who may be unfamiliar with the facts.”
Asked why the State Police was continuing its effort to bring Ms. Chesimard back to prison, Col. Rick Fuentes said: “It closes an open wound. It also sends a message that we will not give up when one of our members dies.”
