This is a magazine feature, not an archive entry. Assata Shakur was not a serial killer and does not appear in this site's roster.
Assata Shakur died in Havana on September 25, 2025, at the age of 78. Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced it the following day, using her legal name, Joanne Deborah Byron, and attributing the death to health conditions and advanced age. Her daughter, Kakuya Shakur, confirmed it. She had been a fugitive from a New Jersey life sentence for 45 years.
She was convicted in 1977 of the first-degree murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster, along with seven other felonies, and sentenced to life imprisonment. She said for the rest of her life that she had shot nobody.
Shortly after midnight on May 2, 1973, a car was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike. Three people were inside: Shakur, who was then known as Joanne Chesimard, Zayd Malik Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli. Two state troopers were involved, James Harper and Werner Foerster. In the shooting that followed, Foerster and Zayd Shakur were killed and Harper was wounded. Shakur was shot twice. The FBI's account describes Foerster as having been killed at point-blank range.
Those facts are not in dispute. Almost everything about the sequence in which they happened is.
The state's case was that Shakur took part in the shooting. Her account, which she maintained in her writing for the next five decades, was that her hands were in the air when she was hit and that she fired no weapon. A Middlesex County jury convicted her in March 1977.
Acoli was tried separately and convicted in the same killing. He served nearly fifty years before he was granted parole in 2022, at which point the case against the men in the car had run its full course through the American courts. Shakur's never did.
On November 2, 1979, members of the Black Liberation Army posing as visitors took her out of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. She was not seen publicly for five years. In 1984 she surfaced in Cuba, where Fidel Castro's government granted her political asylum, and she stayed there for the rest of her life.
The American response escalated slowly and then sharply. In 2005 the FBI classified her as a domestic terrorist and put a one million dollar reward on her capture. In 2013 it added her to its list of most wanted terrorists, the first woman ever placed on it, and doubled the reward to two million dollars. She was by then a 66-year-old woman who had lived openly in Havana for a quarter of a century.
Reaction to her death divided along the same line the case always had. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and State Police Superintendent Patrick Callahan said they would vigorously oppose any attempt to return her remains to the United States, and that she had died without being held fully accountable. Trooper Foerster, their statement noted, never had the chance to live out his days in peace.
That is the part of this worth sitting with. A state trooper was killed doing his job and his family has spent fifty-two years watching the person convicted of it live somewhere the law could not reach. That grievance does not depend on the verdict being right.
Nor does the reverse. Shakur's claim about her arms was never tested by an appellate court, because she removed herself from the system that would have had to hear it. Leaving prison ended her sentence and it also ended her appeal. Whatever the medical evidence was worth, it was worth nothing after November 1979.
What the record establishes is narrow and it is not nothing. Werner Foerster was killed. A jury found that Shakur was responsible. She spent the next forty-five years saying it was wrong and never returned to argue it where it would have counted. Both sides of that lost the argument by outliving it, and her death in Havana closed the case without answering it.
This piece was written for the magazine from independent reporting of the case. A submitted manuscript on the same subject exists in the magazine's files and was not used, and none of its wording appears here.
Assata Shakur is not in this site's roster of serial killers and no entry has been created for her. She was convicted in a single killing. The case is carried here because it is one of the clearest examples in the magazine's subject matter of a conviction that two institutions describe in terms that cannot both be true, and because it ended, as a small number of cases do, with nobody having conceded anything.