Marilyn Buck was a getaway driver in infamous Brinks heist

Published 5:00 am Friday, August 6, 2010

Marilyn Buck, who served more than two decades in prison for her role in the 1981 Brink’s armored-car robbery in Rockland County, N.Y., in which three people were killed, died Tuesday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 62.

The cause was uterine cancer, according to the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel in Manhattan. Because of her illness, Buck was released from the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas, on July 15. She is survived by three brothers.

The Brink’s robbery endures in the national memory as a powerful example of a politically motivated act gone violently awry. Carried out by a coalition of radical groups that included the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army, the holdup netted nearly $1.6 million, which was recovered immediately.

Two police officers and a Brink’s guard were fatally shot in the course of the holdup, which unfolded in and around Nanuet, N.Y., on Oct. 20, 1981.

A former private-school honor student, Buck drove one of the getaway cars. In the ensuing melee, she accidentally shot herself in the leg and was described in later years as walking with a noticeable limp.

One of the last suspects to be apprehended in the case, Buck lived as a fugitive until 1985, when she was arrested outside a diner in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., little more than 10 miles from the site of the robbery.

Buck, who publicly called herself an “anti-imperialist freedom fighter,” was often described in the news media as the Black Liberation Army’s only white member. Law enforcement officials called her the group’s quartermaster, whose job it was to procure everything from armaments to automobiles to safe houses.