LOS ANGELES — When Jon Opsahl made eye contact with Sara Jane Olson's daughters in court Monday morning, a chill ran through him.

"People's lives are going to be affected and are going to change," Opsahl recalled thinking as he looked at the three girls, the eldest barely out of her teens, seated between their father and grandparents in the front row, "and all this didn't have to happen."

Olson, 54, faces life in prison if convicted of conspiring to murder police officers in 1975, and in a strange twist, perhaps no one in the courtroom knows better what her children stand to lose than Opsahl, a man who holds Olson partly responsible for his mother's death. He was just 15 in 1975 when his mother, Myrna, was killed during a bank robbery by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical group to which Olson allegedly belonged.

Like Olson, who has been called a pillar of the Minnesota community where she lived as a fugitive for 23 years, Opsahl's mother was a doctor's wife, a devoted mother to teenagers, and an active member of her church and community.

"I really do feel for them," said Opsahl, a 41-year-old sports medicine physician with three children of his own. His sympathy is limited, however. He wants to see Olson in jail.

Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, denies ever being a member of the SLA and says she had nothing to do with the bank robbery, nor the planting of pipe bombs under police cruisers in L.A. The current case, now in pretrial hearings and expected to begin next month, concerns only the pipe bomb allegations. No one has ever been prosecuted for Myrna Opsahl's death although Olson's brother Steven Soliah was tried and acquitted.

What drew Opsahl to cancel his morning appointments and drive an hour from Riverside to downtown Los Angeles was the hope that someday soon someone will be tried for his mother's murder. The prosecution plans to tell the jury about the whole history of the SLA, including Myrna Opsahl's death.

Monday's hearing bore little on that case: The defense argued that the original 1976 indictment against Olson should be quashed because Hispanics were underrepresented on the grand jury, and Judge Larry Fidler denied that motion. Pretrial hearings will resume on Wednesday when defense attorney Tony Serra is expected to be finished with an attempted murder trial in Modesto.

But Opsahl, making his first visit to court, remained optimistic. "I hope that this trial is more or less a prelude to a Carmichael trial," he said, referring to the Sacramento suburb where the robbery occurred.

In Carmichael, on a Monday morning in April 1975, Myrna Opsahl, a devout Seventh Day Adventist, went to the Crocker National Bank to deposit her church's collection plate. Soon after she arrived, one of the robbers fired a shot, striking Opsahl in the stomach. In her autobiography, kidnapped heiress turned SLA follower Patty Hearst wrote that Olson was present for the robbery, and that SLA soldier Emily Harris confessed to the shooting but dismissed Opsahl as a "bourgeois pig" because she was a doctor's wife.

After a jury acquitted Steven Soliah, Sacramento prosecutors continued investigating the case, but earlier this year, they said there was not enough evidence to prosecute anyone. Olson's attorneys say Hearst's account is fictitious and there is little chance Olson will ever be tried for that crime.

"If it's possible, there's less evidence against her in that case than in this one," defense lawyer Shawn Snider Chapman said.

The Opsahl family, Jon's 76-year-old father and three siblings, believe otherwise and have pushed the Sacramento prosecutor to move forward. Asked for a picture of his mother, Opsahl offers a postcard preaddressed to the Sacramento district attorney's office. Her picture is on one side with "Justice for Myrna" on the other. He has helped create Web sites in the past dedicated to his mother's murder and says he plans to unveil a new one offering specific evidence against the SLA after the trial is underway.

"I'm not bitter. I'm not even angry. I have a beautiful wife and children to go home to and my practice," said Opsahl. "It's the injustice of no one being held accountable. I've got the perfect life now, and I just wish my mom was around to share it."