During the last decade of his life, Charley Hoblin lived alone on his catamaran, poking into backwater marinas along the Southeast coast. He would anchor offshore, coming in occasionally for a meal or supplies, then move on before anyone noticed. He called his boat the Cheshire Cat.

In the spring of 2021 he showed up at McCotters, a marina outside Washington, N.C. The boat was in bad shape. He asked if he could put it on blocks, out of the water, until he could get the money to repair it.

He kept living on the boat, keeping to himself even as he grew sick. A lifelong smoker, he developed throat cancer but refused treatment, walking with a cane, then not really walking at all, boat-bound, until the marina staff called 911.

It was only after he died on Dec. 7 at a hospital in nearby Greenville, N.C., that the people at the marina learned Mr. Hoblin’s real name, the one that had brought him notoriety more than 50 years earlier, the one attached to the life he had been running from ever since.

Charley Joe Pernasilice, as he was known back then, was a 19-year-old temporary inmate at the Attica Correctional Facility in western New York when nearly 1,300 prisoners took it over on Sept. 9, 1971. Four days later, state troopers attacked, firing wantonly, killing 30 prisoners and nine guards. It was the deadliest prison uprising in U.S. history.

A guard named William Quinn had been killed at the start of the violence, and in 1972 Mr. Pernasilice and another prisoner, John Hill, were charged with his murder. While Mr. Pernasilice was being held for trial, guards beat him severely, an incident for which the judge blamed his own intransigence.

As his lawyers showed in court, the evidence against Mr. Pernasilice was so thin as to be nonexistent, and the murder charge fell apart. But he was still convicted of attempted assault, again with almost no evidence, and sentenced to two years in prison.

Before the uprising, Mr. Pernasilice had been a happy-go-lucky teenager, if a bit wild. His initial infraction, the one that started him on his path to Attica, had been a few hours of joyriding on a neighbor’s motorcycle in Syracuse, N.Y.

Later, after the violence of the uprising, after the beating and the abuse by a system intent on retribution for Attica, he emerged a changed man. Suspicious. Angry. Withdrawn.

“He used to smile all the time and laugh, but no more after Attica,” Tom Edwards, a journalist and longtime friend of Mr. Pernasilice’s, said by phone. “He lived two lives.”

A representative from the Paul Funeral Home in Washington, where Mr. Pernasilice’s body was cremated, confirmed his death, adding that no one had come to retrieve his ashes. He was 70.

Charley Joe Pernasilice (pronounced per-NAH-suh-leeze) wasn’t even supposed to be at Attica in the first place.

He was born Charles Joseph Hoblin on June 15, 1952, in Seminole, Fla., a suburb of St. Petersburg. His mother, Betty, divorced his father, Charles Hoblin, when Charley was still very young, and married Rudolfo Pernasilice, who was in the Coast Guard. He adopted Charley, who took his last name.

The family lived for a time at a Coast Guard facility on Ocracoke Island, near the south end of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. With the beaches and gulls and carefree air, it was, Charley later told Mr. Edwards, the happiest time of his life.

When he was a teenager his family moved to Camillus, a suburb of Syracuse. That’s where Charley started to have problems. At 15 he ran away from home and ended up in Baltimore, living in a shelter run by a church.

The rector reached out to Mr. Edwards, a reporter he knew at The Baltimore News American, a now defunct newspaper. He said Charley was a bright and lively youth who probably didn’t have a chance on the city streets, and asked if Mr. Edwards could help get him straight. Mr. Edwards bonded with Charley and eventually put him on a bus back to Camillus.

Less than a year later, Charley got into trouble for stealing a neighbor’s motorcycle. The neighbor had reported it missing but refused to press charges. The police charged Charley anyway, and he was sentenced to two years in juvenile detention at a facility in Coxsackie, N.Y.

He served his time, but when he got out, in 1970, he jumped parole. He headed west, and for a while lived on the road, drifting through communes, falling in with the last of the 1960s counterculture.

It didn’t last; in 1971 he was picked up in Utah for hitchhiking. The police saw that he was wanted in New York for violating his parole, and they shipped him east. Because the Coxsackie facility was full at the time, he was sent to wait for his hearing in Attica, a notoriously crowded and dangerous prison.

Two weeks after he arrived, a fight between guards and a group of prisoners erupted into an uprising. During the melee, several guards were severely injured, including Mr. Quinn, who was hit on the back of the head.

Some 1,280 prisoners, about half the population of Attica, captured a section of the prison and kept several guards as hostages. They released the wounded guards, including Mr. Quinn, and presented a list of demands for better conditions and a general amnesty for the uprising’s participants. Mr. Quinn died in a hospital two days later.

The uprising dominated national news and made the prisoners a political cause célèbre. Though many on the right saw the incident as another instance in the decline of law and order, many other Americans saw it as part of the country’s civil rights struggle: Some 65 percent of the prisoners were Black or Hispanic, mostly from the cities, while almost all of the guards were rural and white.

The Black activist Bobby Seale arrived to show his support. The left-wing lawyer William Kunstler represented the prisoners in their negotiations.

Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who refused entreaties to visit the site, eventually ordered the retaking of the prison. On Sept. 13, scores of state troopers marched in through clouds of tear gas, firing indiscriminately, killing prisoners and guards alike.

Though Governor Rockefeller insisted that the prisoners had killed many of the guards, a report later showed that all 39 deaths were caused by the troopers’ bullets. (Three prisoners were killed by fellow inmates during the occupation.) Substantial evidence indicated that several prisoners were shot at close range, execution style.

Mr. Pernasilice and Mr. Hill, another recent arrival, were among the 1,280 inside the prison, essentially bystanders caught in the flow of events. They emerged physically unharmed but mentally scarred by what they had seen.

After being released, Mr. Pernasilice went to live with Mr. Edwards, by then in Washington, D.C. Mr. Pernasilice was part Catawba Indian, and he found a job with a publication covering Native American affairs. He tried to put Attica behind him.

It was a temporary reprieve. Almost a year after the uprising, Mr. Pernasilice and Mr. Hill were charged with Mr. Quinn’s murder. Mr. Kunstler volunteered to represent Mr. Hill. Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general and an acquaintance of Mr. Edwards, represented Mr. Pernasilice.

A single eyewitness put Mr. Pernasilice at the scene, but during the trial Mr. Clark easily dismantled the man’s credibility. The judge ordered the charge reduced to attempted assault, even though, as Mr. Clark insisted, no evidence supported that claim either.

Both Mr. Pernasilice and Mr. Hill were convicted in 1975. Mr. Hill was released on parole in 1979 and died in 2013. Hugh L. Carey, who succeeded Mr. Rockefeller as governor, pardoned Mr. Pernasilice in 1976.

Many observers felt that the two men never had a chance against a justice system that seemed hellbent on revenge; Tom Wicker, a reporter for The New York Times who covered Attica and wrote a book about the uprising, said the trial was “not fairly conducted.”

Mr. Pernasilice tried to build a new life. He got married and had children. But he couldn’t hold down a job. He started going by his birth father’s surname, Hoblin. He tried to forget how he had choked on tear gas, run barefoot over broken glass, dodged bullets and seen men killed.

“The retaking destroyed his life, just emotionally destroyed his life,” Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy” (2016), said in a phone interview. “He’s just a very tragic figure who reminds us about what the horror of what Attica really was.”

Mr. Pernasilice took his family from place to place, often on a boat, home-schooling his children, keeping the world at arm’s length. But he was emotionally erratic and prone to bad decisions. Time and again he ran afoul of the law, at which point the local police would learn who he really was, meaning it was time to move on.

He became verbally abusive. He would lash out at friends. His marriage fell apart. His wife, Robin, divorced him in 2010. His two children, Paige and Dylan, stopped seeing him. He kept sailing, alone, aboard the Cheshire Cat. He turned away from even the few friends who hung on, like Mr. Edwards.

No one knows why he made Washington, a small city on the Pamlico River in North Carolina, his last port of call. But he knew the area well. Just 60 miles to the east is Ocracoke Island, where as a child he had spent so many happy days.

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