Dwight Armstrong

Dwight Alan Armstrong (August 29, 1951 – June 20, 2010) was an American anti-Vietnam War activist who helped use a truck bomb to shatter Sterling Hall, a centrally located building on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus, on August 24, 1970. Armstrong and three others targeted an army mathematical research center on an upper floor. They considered the university complicit in military research that enabled aggression. The bomb gutted the building, killing one person and injuring three. Armstrong spent several years on the run before being imprisoned for his role in "a political protest that, gone violently wrong, endures in the national memory as an act of domestic terrorism".

Sterling Hall bombing

In response to the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, in which four protesters were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard, they conceived of an attack on the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, which had been a frequent site of anti-War protests. Karl made a bomb out of dynamite, of fuel oil and of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. The bomb detonated at 3:42 a.m. on August 24, 1970, killing Robert Fassnacht, a physics post-doctoral researcher who was working late in the building's basement, injuring three others, and causing as much as $8 million in damage to the building (equivalent to $ million in ). On September 4, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began a search for the four fugitives, placing them on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Armstrong remained underground until he was arrested in April 1977 in Toronto; he had been arrested three times before, but each time police never learned his true identity. He pleaded no contest to state murder charges and federal conspiracy charges. As part of his plea bargain, he was sentenced concurrently to seven years each in state and federal prison and was released on parole in 1980 on the condition that he participate in a community rehabilitation program.

He was arrested again in 1987 in Indiana where he was charged with operating a meth lab run out of a warehouse. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was released in 1991. He came back to Madison, where he tended to his mother and worked driving a taxi.

Death and legacy In a 1992 interview with The Capital Times of Madison, he stated that "My life has not been something to write home about". He justified the bombing, stating that "We did what we had to do; we did what we felt a lot of other people should have done", continuing that "I don't care what public opinion is; we did what was right."

Armstrong died of lung cancer at age 58 on June 20, 2010, at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison, Wisconsin. He was survived by his mother, his brother, two sisters and a daughter.