MORE THAN 22 YEARS after he shot a police officer while springing a fellow revolutionary from custody, Mark Cook—in some views, Washington’s last political prisoner—has won his freedom. The state’s Indeterminate Sentence Review Board last week awarded a parole to Cook, a 62-year-old grandfather who has spent 36 of the last 46 years behind bars. Though still locked up at the Airway Heights Correctional Center near Spokane, Cook will soon be transferred to a less-restrictive facility, then finally set free—probably some time next year.

“He’s very happy with the board’s decision and he’s imagining freedom,” says Cynthia Skow, one of Cook’s attorneys. “I think it will be a struggle for him, but what else is new? I have no doubt that he is up to the challenge.”

Cook’s impending release closes the book on one of the most turbulent periods in Seattle’s history. (See “The Last Brigadier,” SW, 7/23.) During the mid-1970s, he was a member of the George Jackson Brigade, a small band of Communists that went on a three-year spree of bombings and bank heists from Bellevue to Olympia. Cook was convicted of attempting to rob a Tukwila bank in 1976, a botched operation that left one Brigade member dead and another wounded. Two months later, Cook sprung his injured comrade from Harborview Medical Center, shooting and seriously wounding King County police officer Virgil Johnson in the process.

Of the six incarcerated Brigade members, Cook—the only African American—has been locked up longest: 15 years in federal prison, five so far in the state system. He was denied parole 16 months ago but was granted another hearing in July. “We feel justice has been served,” Skow says. “All those prayers that all those people in all those black churches said a few weeks ago seemed to have helped.”