The 14 activists with Brandywine Peace Community allegedly refused to leave the Center City building.
By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Inquirer Staff Writer
September 27, 2006
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Fourteen antiwar protesters were arrested for allegedly refusing to leave the Center City building in which U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) has a regional office, police said yesterday.
Capt. William V. Fisher, of the police Civil Affairs Unit, said the 14 - all associated with the Brandywine Peace Community - were arrested shortly before 5 p.m. Monday at One South Penn Square, the building southeast of City Hall also known as the Widener Building.
Fisher said all 14 were charged with defiant trespass, a misdemeanor, and held overnight at police lockups at the Major Crimes Unit, 39th Street and Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia, and Police Headquarters at Eighth and Race Streets in Center City.
One of the 14 arrested, Robert M. Smith, a veteran antiwar demonstrator from Swarthmore and longtime spokesman for the Brandywine group, said yesterday afternoon that all 14 were released on their own recognizance pending a Nov. 21 hearing at the Philadelphia Criminal Justice Center.
Smith said prosecutors yesterday added a charge of criminal conspiracy against all 14.
Smith identified the other 13 arrested as: Beth Friedlan, Caren Wisniewski, Sylvia Metzler, Mary Jo McArthur, Bernadette Cronin-Geller, Melissa Elliott and Ronald Coburn, all of Philadelphia; Timothy Chadwick and Robert Daniels, both of Bethlehem; Robin Lasersohn and Thomas Mullian, both of Media; Marjorie Van Cleef, of Bryn Mawr; and Silvia Brandon-Perez, of Tobyhanna, Pa.
Many of those arrested are veterans of the peace movement. Metzler, Mullian and Cronin-Geller, for example, were among 107 demonstrators arrested for blocking the entrance to the federal courthouse on March 20, 2003, at the start of the war in Iraq.
Metzler and Mullian were among a group that elected to spend seven days in the Federal Detention Center rather than pay a $250 fine.
Monday’s arrests capped a daylong antiwar march that began at 10:30 a.m. at Old First Reformed Church at Fourth and Race Streets, continued along Market Street, stopped at the federal building complex at Sixth Street, and circled City Hall before heading to the Widener Building.
Smith said four demonstrators got to the corridor outside Santorum’s ninth-floor office before the staff locked the doors and building management turned off the elevators.
The other 10 demonstrators arrested gathered in the lobby where Smith said they chanted, “Bush won’t listen, Congress must act,” read the names of Pennsylvanians killed in Iraq, and refused to leave until Santorum signed the “Declaration of Peace Congressional Pledge.”
Santorum spokesman Robert Traynham said that “the senator does respect other people’s rights to express their displeasure, but they don’t have a right to disturb the workplaces of others in the same building.”