SAN FRANCSICO >> Larry Craig Green has spent 50 years behind bars for the racially-motivated string of 15 killings in San Francisco during the 1970s, widely known as the Zebra murders.

For all of those years, Green, 72, has maintained his innocence, insisting he was convicted based on lies from a paid government witness who was just as guilty as anyone who participated in the violence. But at a parole hearing last year, Green indirectly shed some light on how he came to adopt the “false philosophy” that prosecutors say led to the murder spree, resulting in convictions against four men who targeted White people at random, killing 15 and wounding eight. Four people were killed on Jan. 28, 1974.

“In the Nation of Islam we practiced or believed that the Black man was God and the White man was the devil and that wasn’t true,” Green said of his time in a since-defunct Nation of Islam mosque based in San Francisco. “That wasn’t based on the Quran or the history of Islam 1,400 years ago.”

Green was sentenced to life in 1976, along with co-defendants Jessie Lee Cooks, J.C.X. Simon and Manuel Moore. Over the five decades since, Cooks, Simon and Moore all died in prison, and several men implicated in a similar string of shootings in Sacramento were released on parole, records show.

Green is incarcerated at Solano State Prison in Vacaville, records show.

During his July 2024 parole hearing, which was denied for the 15th time in a row, Green said once again he was falsely convicted. But he said that Anthony Harris, the man who would collect $30,000 for testifying against Green and his co-defendants, confessed to one of the murders back in 1973.

“He said he had committed this crime to get some money and he had killed the man in the grocery store,” Green said of Harris, referencing the November 1973 killing of a grocer named Saleem Erakat, the only non-white victim of the murders.

When asked what he regrets from his early adulthood, Green said adhering to the “Nation of Islam’s false philosophy that I was a part of” which he believes “led to my association with Mr. Harris and inevitably my conviction in this case.” After his arrest, Green said he embraced traditional Islam and has forgone his earlier belief that “the White man is the devil.”

Harris testified in the 1970s that a group of Nation of Islam members formed a clique called the Death Angels, which committed murders around California. Police identified similar attacks around the state, including one murder and several shootings in Sacramento, and an attack on a cab driver in Oakland in 1974, by men found with literature referring to “white devils,” according to court records.

Green denied that the subgroup ever existed, and said he was attracted to the Nation of Islam due to it’s belief in self-sustainability for Black people during the 1970s.

“They were about business and making change. So it was fascinating to me as a young man,” he said.

Before Green’s parole was denied, several family members of victims spoke out, including loved ones of Nelson “Nikki” Shields, the final victim of the San Francisco spree, and Michael Dancik, whose brother, Paul, was shot and killed in December 1973.

Paul Dancik moved to San Francisco in 1967 and was an active participant in the Summer of Love and all it entailed, his brother said. “He believed in the dream of peace and understanding,” Michael Dancik said. “He also believed in racial equality and the equality of the sexes. Paul’s heroes included Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Another of the speakers was SFPD Sgt. Troy Carrasco, whose then-12-year-old sister was nearly abducted by a group of the suspects, weeks after a woman named Quita Hague was hacked to death with machetes after her and her husband were kidnapped in a similar incident.

“Fifty years, I think the conviction was 15 murders. Isn’t that like 3.3 years per murder?” Carraso said at the hearing, referring to the time Green has been incarcerated. “Not including all the other crimes and attempted murders and attempted kidnappings.”