Disturbing History - The Siege At Ruby Ridge

Episode Date: September 27, 2026

Listener discretion is advised. This episode contains descriptions of real-life violence and death, including the shooting deaths of a fourteen-year-old boy, his mother, and a federal law enforcement officer. It also includes direct quotations expressing racist and extremist beliefs. Some listeners may find this material disturbing or offensive.On August 22, 1992, an FBI sniper positioned roughly two hundred yards above a remote cabin in northern Idaho fired two shots. The first struck Randy Weaver as he moved near the shed where the body of his fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, had been placed after being killed the previous day. The second bullet passed through the curtained window of the cabin door and killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki, as she stood inside holding their ten-month-old daughter.At the time, no one had formally told the family who surrounded the cabin or ordered them to surrender. Federal authorities would not learn that Vicki Weaver had been killed until days later.This episode of Disturbing History takes a deep look at Ruby Ridge—not the simplified version that became a political slogan, but the complicated chain of decisions, mistakes, intelligence failures, disputed gunfire, and deadly consequences documented in the government’s own investigations.Brian traces the story back years before the siege, beginning with Randy and Vicki Weaver’s decision to leave Iowa and move their family into the mountains of Idaho. From there, the episode follows the growing interest of federal authorities, allegations made by a neighbor, Weaver’s contact with white separatist circles, and an undercover ATF investigation involving two illegally shortened shotguns. Government investigators would later question parts of that operation and acknowledge they could not completely rule out whether Weaver had been improperly encouraged into committing the offense.Then came the bureaucratic mistake that helped transform a firearms case into a federal fugitive operation.A probation officer sent Weaver a letter listing the wrong trial date—March 20 instead of February 20. By the time the mistake was discovered, a bench warrant had already been issued. Despite knowing Weaver had received incorrect information, the warrant remained active, and prosecutors later indicted him for failure to appear before the erroneous date he had been given had even arrived.The Justice Department would later describe the situation as creating an “appearance of governmental overreaching.” The episode also examines how letters written by Vicki Weaver and references to extremist figures helped shape the government’s threat assessment of the family, eventually contributing to comparisons between Weaver and violent white supremacist organizations.Then, on August 21, 1992, six deputy U.S. marshals conducting surveillance encountered the Weaver family’s dog, Striker. What followed at a trail junction known as “the Y” remains one of the most disputed moments of the entire case.Within seconds, Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan and fourteen-year-old Sammy Weaver were dead. Investigators were ultimately unable to conclusively determine who fired the first shot.The next day, the FBI arrived.Special rules of engagement were drafted during the flight to Idaho—rules that would later become one of the most controversial aspects of the operation. Within hours, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi fired the shots that wounded Randy Weaver and killed Vicki Weaver.From there, the episode reconstructs the extraordinary details of the siege: failed communications, surrender announcements broadcast after Vicki was already dead, FBI snipers suffering from exposure because they were not equipped for the mountain weather, armored vehicles approaching the cabin, negotiations conducted over loudspeakers, and the eventual arrival of former Green Beret and presidential candidate Bo Gritz, who helped establish direct contact with the family.The final portion of the episode examines what happened when Ruby Ridge reached the courtroom and eventually Congress. The forty-two-day criminal trial resulted in acquittals on most of the major charges. A Justice Department task force concluded that the sniper’s second shot did not meet constitutional standards. An FBI official later went to prison for destroying an internal report related to the case. The Weaver family received a $3.1 million civil settlement from the federal government.Years later, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi would face a state manslaughter charge over Vicki Weaver’s death, leading to a lengthy legal fight in the federal courts before the case was ultimately dropped.And in 1995, Randy Weaver appeared before the United States Senate carrying the cabin door through which the bullet that killed his wife had passed.Email BrianGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,

just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. This episode contains descriptions of real-life violence and death, including the shooting

deaths of a 14-year-old boy, his mother, and a federal law enforcement officer. It also includes direct quotations from individuals expressing racist and extremist beliefs. Some listeners may find this material disturbing or offensive. Listener discretion is strongly advised. Ruby Ridge is one of those names most Americans can play, without being able to say what happened there. It's a ridge above Ruby Creek and Boundary County, the northernmost county in Idaho, about 40 miles from the Canadian line,

timber country and mountains with one small town at the county seat and a scattering of smaller ones. In the 1980s, it was drawing a particular kind of newcomer. Jess Walter, the Spokane reporter who wrote the best book on this case, described the county in those years as a running blend of homeschoolers, Christian survivalists, John Birchers, tax protesters, identity Christians and neo-Nazis, people who could find one another there and find a ridgetop to build a life on. 80 miles south at Hayden Lake, the Aryan nations held at summer Congress every July.

In August of 1992 for 11 days, one family's cabin on that ridge was surrounded by the FBI's hostage rescue team, the Marshal Service's tactical group, and a good part of the Idaho State Police. When it was over, a deputy United States Marshal was dead, and so was a 14-year-old boy, and so was his mother. What came after is the part people usually know. Six months later, the federal government went into the branch Davidian compound at Waco, and a lot of the same agencies and some of the same people were there.

Three years after that, Timothy McVeigh cited Ruby Ridge in Waco as his reasons for blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City. The name became a slogan for people who use it to mean the government kills its own citizens. And for people who use it to mean, a racist, got what he had coming. Ruby Ridge is one of the most documented events in the history of American law enforcement. There was a 42-day federal trial. There was a Justice Department Task Force that spent a year interviewing everybody under oath and wrote 542 pages that were never officially released and leaked anyway.

There were 14 days of Senate hearings, and what all that paper shows is that almost every step on the way to that cabin door was a decision somebody made and wrote down, and that somebody else could have stopped. It starts with a neighbor who had a grudge. It runs through an informant who wasn't recording, a probation officer who typed the wrong month, and a judge who wouldn't fix it. And it ends with a threat file built from secondhand stories nobody checked, and a set of shooting rules. drafted on an airplane by men who believed that file. At about 6 o'clock on the evening of Saturday, the 22nd of August 1992, three people came out of a plywood cabin on a ridge in northern Idaho and ran for a small outbuilding just below the house.

The building was called the birthing shed. A baby girl had been born in it the year before. Since the previous day, it had held the body of a boy named Samuel Weaver, who'd been shot through the back on a logging trail below the house. His father, Randy Weaver, wanted to see him. His 16-year-old sister, Sarah, went along, and so did a 24-year-old family friend named Kevin Harris, who was carrying a rifle.

200 yards up the slope behind them, on a rock, an FBI sniper named Lon Horiuchi had a scoped rifle on the man at the shed door. He'd been in position for about 15 minutes, and he believed the man was Kevin Harris, moving around the side of the shed to get a shot at an FBI helicopter that was flying an observation pass. He fired one round. The bullet went in under Randy Weaver's right arm and out through his back, and Weaver ran.

All three of them ran for the cabin. Vicky Weaver was holding the door open for them. She had the baby from the birthing shed, 10-month-old Elashiba in her arms. Randy went in first, then Sarah. And Kevin Harris was last through the door when Horiuchi fired again. He aimed slightly in front of Harris. The bullet passed through the curtained window in the door. It hit Vicky Weaver in the head and killed her where she stood,

and it went on into Kevin Harris. Horiucci later testified that he never saw her. The Justice Department's investigators concluded that his first shot met the constitutional standard for deadly force, and that his second one did not. Nobody outside that cabin knew a woman was dead. The FBI didn't learn it for six days. The marshals who'd been on the trail the morning before

didn't know about the boy in the shed either. Those two bodies, a child and his mother, sat inside a perimeter manned by the FBI's hostage rescue team, the Marshal Service's Special Operations Group, and the Idaho State Police, while negotiators on a loud speaker asked Vicky Weaver what she'd had for breakfast. The rules the snipers were working under that evening

had been written on an airplane the night before. One phrase in them had been changed before the snipers went up. Deadly force can be employed. became deadly force, can and should be employed. The road to that door ran through a sought-off shotgun, a typo in a letter from a probation office, and a set of exaggerations that federal officials passed to one another for 18 months until the file on Randy Weaver described a man who didn't exist.

Randall Claude Weaver was born on the 3rd of January 1948 in Velisca, Iowa. He went into the Army in 1968 and came out with an honorable discharge, and the rank of sergeant. His service record shows training as a combat engineer. It does not show special forces, and it does not show green beret. And both of those claims are going to matter later, because Weaver told people for years that he'd been a green beret, and the people who ended up hunting him believed it.

He met Vicki Jordison in Fort Dodge, Iowa in 1970. She'd grown up on a farm near Colville and worked as a secretary for Sears. They married in November of 1971 and moved to Cedar Falls, where Randy planned to go to the University of Northern Iowa and then into law enforcement. He didn't finish school and he never became a police officer. He got a job at the John Deere tractor plant in Waterloo instead, and it paid well. Sarah was born in 1976. Samuel came in 1978 and Rachel in 1982. By the account in Jess Walter's book on the family, which is the most third.

thorough one written. The turn started with a paperback. In 1978, Vicky read Howell Lindsay's the late great planet Earth, which reads current events against Old Testament prophecy, and concludes that the end times have arrived. She read the King James Bible closely and drew rules from it about food, about how to live, and about where to be when the tribulation came. The verse she kept coming back to was in Matthew 24, then let them which be in Judea, into the mountains. The Weavers began meeting with other believers at a Sambo's restaurant in Cedar Falls. Over the next few years, their reading moved from prophecy to conspiracy, and the conspiracy had Jews at the center of it. Randy started sleeping in a flack jacket with a loaded gun under the

pillow. In January of 1983, the Waterloo Courier ran an interview in which the family talked about moving to northern Idaho, to live in an isolated place and survive what they called the coming Great Tribulation. They described a house in the woods with a defended perimeter around it. They called it a 300-yard kill zone. That year they sold up and went west, Randy driving the moving van and Vicki following in a pickup. On the 6th of September, 1983, they found a rocky bluff about eight miles southwest of Bonner's Ferry, in Boundary County, the northernmost county in Idaho, 40 miles from the Canadian line.

Vicky said it looked just like what the Lord had shown them. them. There was a spring on it and boulders and a view down the driveway. They built the cabin themselves, plywood and rough lumber, no running water, no electricity, no telephone. The nearest town was Naples, which was where they kept a post office box. The first federal file on Randy Weaver was opened in January of 1985, and it was opened because of a neighbor. Terry Kinnison had a property dispute with Weaver, and Kenison went to the Boundary County sheriff and then to federal agents with a story. He said Weaver had threatened to kill President Reagan and Governor John Evans. He said Weaver was tied to the Aryan nations, the white supremacist

church that Richard Butler ran out of a compound at Hayden Lake, some 80 miles south. He gave the FBI a list of the guns he said he'd seen in the Weaver House, which ran to two revolvers, three rifles, a 45, a 357, a mini-14, a shortened shotgun, and a heckler and coke with an adapter for full automatic fire, plus what he called thousands of rounds. Somebody else told investigators that Weaver had rigged his driveway with bombs. Another man said Weaver had talked about the world ending in two years, when, in Weaver's words, my home will be under siege and assaulted.

Two Secret Service agents drove up the driveway on the 12th of February, 1985, and interviewed him. He denied threatening anybody. He denied any connection to the Aryan nations and said he had no time for its preachers. He told them his religion was strictly by the Bible, and he told them he'd served three years as an Army Special Forces Green Beret and an Army engineer. That was the first time he told a federal agent that, and it went into the file. He also told them the Bible gave him the right to kill to defend his family,

and then said federal authorities were welcome on his property, regardless of the stories going around about him. No charges were filed against Weaver, and 16 days later, Randy and Vicky went to the county clerk's office and filed a handwritten affidavit. It said their neighbors were spreading lies about Aryan nation's ties and illegal weapons and threats against the president and the Pope, and that the lies were designed to provoke the FBI into storming their home. It gave what it called legal and official notice that Randy believed

he might have to defend himself and his family from a physical attack on his life. In May, Weaver wrote to President Reagan to apologize for what he called the evil of the neighbors who'd sent a threatening letter under his name. The same day, Vicky wrote the Secret Service field office in Spokane and demanded a written apology. Kenison later went back to the sheriff and reported that Weaver had fired shots at him. A couple named Rowe, who owned land below the Weavers, complained more than once over the following years, that the Weavers had fired weapons toward their property, and a running feud with the rouse over land and water and gasoline

went on right up to the summer of 1992. In 1988, Weaver ran in the Republican primary for Sheriff of Boundary County. He campaigned on enforcing only the laws people wanted enforced, and he handed out cards that read, get out of jail free. He lost, 384 votes to 102. In July of 1986, the Weavers drove down to Hayden Lake for the World War II, Aryan Congress at Richard Butler's compound. They'd go again in 87 and 89. At the 89 gathering,

Randy was one of the speakers. Somebody else was at the 86 Congress too. His name was Kenneth Fadley, and he was a confidential informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He'd been asked to attend because ATF was investigating a series of bombings around Curdoline that it believed Aryan Nations members had carried out. Fadley's cover was that he was that he, was a gun dealer who supplied motorcycle gangs, and he used the name Gus Magisona. He was introduced to Randy Weaver that July, and the Justice Department's later review says Weaver was, at that point, of no particular investigative significance to ATF. Fadley saw him again in January of 87 at a meeting with a man named Frank Cumnic, who

ATF suspected of trafficking guns and who the Secret Service had described as Weaver's mentor. Fadley was wearing a recorder. Kumnik accused him of being an informant, held a gun to his head, and ran an electronic stud finder over his body looking for a wire. He didn't find it. Weaver stood there through the whole thing

and according to the ATF file gave no sign of any interest in selling illegal guns. At the 87 Congress, Weaver brought Vicky and the kids. He told Fadley it was a struggle to feed his family. He also told him he didn't trust the Aryan nation's leadership. and didn't agree with what Butler was doing. Fadley kept treating him as one face among hundreds.

That changed in July of 1989. Fadley mentioned that his gun business was busy. Weaver didn't offer to sell him anything, but he invited Fadley to a house he was renting to talk about forming a group to fight what Aryan nations people called the Zionist organized government, meaning the United States. Weaver said the group would include Cumnick and a man named Chuck Holworth. who'd been convicted on an explosives charge and had started an Aryan nation splinter group in Montana.

The ATF wanted Holworth and now saw Weaver as a way to get to him. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. On the 8th of September at the ATF's request, Fadley called Weaver and set up a meeting for the 11th of October. That meeting was not recorded. What happened in it comes entirely from Fadley. He said Weaver asked how business was and Fadley's, said he'd sold all his product. Weaver said he was ready to go to work for him, asked what the

popular items were, and when Fadele mentioned shotguns, weaver said he could supply four or five a week, any size, and that there'd be no paper on them. Out at Weaver's truck, Weaver showed him a shotgun and pointed to a spot on the barrel, where he thought it could be cut. Fadley pointed to a spot and said, about here. Weaver's version, given to Fadley on a recording six weeks later, was that Fadley approached him and offered him a deal. The Justice Department reviewers wrote that they were troubled that the one meeting where everything started was the one meeting nobody taped, and that Fadley had admitted showing Weaver where to cut and hadn't told his ATF handler about it. They said they couldn't conclude Weaver was coerced or unduly enticed. They also said they couldn't be sure.

On the 24th of October, 1989, in a city park, with Fadley wearing a recorder and a transmitter, Weaver handed him two shotguns. One barrel was 13 inches. The other was 12 and 3 quarters. Federal law draws the line at 18. Weaver said he'd cut them himself, sitting under a shade tree with a vice and a hacksaw, and that when he got his workshop set up,

he could do a better job. Fadley paid him $300. Weaver asked for another $150. Fadley said next time. On the 30th of November, Weaver told him he had five, more ready. Then he told him something else. Somebody in Spokane had said Fadley was bad, meaning a cop. Fadley called the man a lying scumbag and offered to walk away. Weaver said

he'd feel better if their families could meet and that his family was all he cared about. Fadley paid $100 on the balance. The ATF told him to stop seeing Weaver. The entire federal case against Randy Weaver, the one that everything else grew out of, was too sought or off shotguns and $400. The ATF sat on it for months to protect Fadley's cover, and then in March of 1990, the cover was blown anyway. In May, Agent Herbert Byerley sent a report to the United States attorney in Boise recommending prosecution. In June, Byerley and another agent named Gunderson drove up the Weaver driveway to see if Randy might be turned. They didn't find Randy, but they found Sarah, who was 14, and had a semi-automatic pill.

and a pistol strapped to her hip, and Sammy, who was 12 and carried a large hunting knife. The agents didn't identify themselves, and they left. On the way back down, they saw Weaver's truck outside a motel and sandpoint. They identified themselves, showed him a photograph of the two shotguns, and told him they had a recording of the sale. He declined to listen to it. Beyerly explained that Weaver could help himself by giving the ATF information about Aryan Nations members and that his cooperation would be brought to the prosecutor's attention.

Beyerley gave him a phone number and told him they'd wait for him to come in. Weaver said he wouldn't be a snitch. That night, according to the date on the letter, Vicky wrote to the Aryan nations and all our brethren of the Anglo-Saxon race. We cannot make deals with the enemy, she wrote. This is a war against the sons of Isaac. If it's our time, we'll go home. The marshals who took over this case eight months later

did not know that the ATF had tried to make Weaver an informant. Nobody at the ATF told them, and they learned it more than a year afterward. The grand jury in Boise indicted Weaver on the 13th of December, 1990, for making and possessing an unregistered firearm. The ATF looked at the property and the family and decided it was too dangerous to serve the warrant at the cabin, for the agents and for the children. So the agents built a trick.

On the 17th of January, 1991, two agents parked a pickup camper on a bridge near the bottom of the Weaver's Road, raised the hood, and stood there looking at the engine. Birely and other agents and Boundary County Sheriff Bruce Whitaker were hiding in the back of the camper. Randy and Vicky drove down, stopped, and got out to help. The agents came out of the camper and put Randy on the ground. He grabbed for one agent's sidearm on the way down. He had a pistol in his front pants pocket. Vicky had a revolver in her purse, which she'd left in the truck. The sheriff decided not to charge her with carrying it, because he said later that law is rarely enforced in Boundary County. Weaver told the agents, nice trick, you'll never do that again.

The arraignment was the next afternoon, the 18th of January, in the federal building in Curdelein, in front of a magistrate named Stephen Ayers. Nobody from the United States Attorney's Office was there. Weaver had no lawyer yet. Air set trial for the 19th of February, released Weaver on an unsecured $10,000 bond, and told him to call a pretrial services officer in Boise named Carl Richens on the 22nd. To avoid confusion, the magistrate wrote Richens name and number on the release order by hand. He told Weaver it would be a crime not to show up. Weaver said he understood, signed, and confirmed that his mailing address was Box 103, Naples, Idaho. Weaver later testified that he came away from that hearing believing that if he lost at trial, he could lose his land. When Vicky's

parents visited the cabin that April, they told the marshals the same thing, that Randy feared the government meant to take the property. Whatever was said in that courtroom, the fear was there from the first day. On the 22nd, Weaver called Richens as ordered. Richens didn't have the paperwork yet, and asked for a phone number to call back. But Weaver didn't have a phone, and Richens never heard from him again. The court appointed a defense lawyer named Everett Hoffmeister,

who wrote to Weaver on the 19th, the 31st, and the 5th of February, asking him to make contact. None of the letters were answered, and none came back undelivered. On the 5th of February, the court clerk moved the trial from the 19th to the 20th,

because the 19th fell the day after a federal holiday, and people needed travel time. The notice went to Hofmeister and not to Weaver. On the 7th of February, Carl Rickens wrote Weaver a letter, trying to get him to call. It began, on January 18, 1991. You were released on pretrial supervision pending your trial set for March 20th, 1991. The trial was February 20th, and Richens later said it was a typo. He typed the wrong month into the one letter Weaver actually received from the government,

and nobody else got a copy. Weaver did not appear on the 20th. Hofmeister stood up in front of district judge Harold Ryan and detailed every letter and phone call he'd made. The prosecutor, an assistant United States attorney named Ron Howen, asked for a bench warrant, and Ryan issued one. Ryan said later that the case had no notoriety at the time and was just another case to him.

Six days later, a reporter named Ken Keller from the Kootenai Valley Times and Bonner's Ferry called the probation office and asked whether Weaver had skipped court because a government letter told him his trial was in March. The chief probation officer pulled the file and found the letter. He called the judge's clerk, the marshals, the United States attorney, and Hofmeister, and he recommended that nobody execute the warrant until after the 20th of March. Judge Ryan decided not to withdraw the warrant. His reasoning was that Weaver had been told the real date several times, that his lawyer had tried to reach him, and that a probation officer had no authority to change a trial date.

The United States Marshal for Idaho, Michael Johnson, asked the probation office to send Weaver a second letter explaining the mistake. That letter was never written. Richens testified that no steps were ever taken to tell Weaver the date in his letter was wrong. On the 28th of February, the marshals met with United States attorney Morris Ellsworth and Howen. Ellsworth's decision, in his own later words, was, let's go ahead and return the failure to appear indictment. And if Mr. Weaver appears on March the 20th, we may have to dismiss it.

The grand jury only met once a month. On the 14th of March, six days before the date Richens had put in the letter, it indicted Randy Weaver for failing to appear. The Justice Department Task Force that reviewed all this in 1994 wrote that it was not unreasonable for Weaver to assume the probation office spoke for the court, that the average citizen can't be expected to know the division of labor inside the federal judiciary, and that a corrected letter would have taken little effort and eliminated any question. They called the judge's approach unnecessarily rigid,

the prosecutor's office inconsistent and lacking leadership, and the timing of the indictment and appearance of governmental overreaching. In 16 years of police work, I learned which paper. Paperwork errors get fixed, and which ones get defended, and this one got defended. While that was happening, Vicky Weaver was writing letters. The first was dated the 22nd of January, the same day Randy called the probation office. It was addressed to the Queen of Babylon. A man cannot have two masters, it said.

Yahweh Yeshua Messiah, the anointed one of Saxon Israel, is our lawgiver and our king. We will obey him and know others. Then it quoted a passage that began. A long-forgotten wind is starting to blow. Do you hear the approaching thunder? It is that of the awakened Saxon. War is upon the land. The tyrant's blood will flow. She credited that last part to Matthews. The second letter dated the 3rd of February was addressed to the servant of the Queen of Babylon, Maurice O Ellsworth, United States Attorney.

The stink of your lawless government has reached heaven, it said. Whether we live or whether we die, we will not bow to your evil commandments. Ellsworth got both on the 7th of February. He didn't recognize the name Vicky Weaver and asked the marshals to assess whether the letters were a threat. A deputy named Warren Mays worked out that she was the wife of a man with a pending gun case, and Dave Hunt, a deputy out of Boise who'd carry this file for the next 18 months, was assigned alongside him. Howen recognized the quote,

and Matthews was not the book of Matthew. The line came from the Declaration of War written by Robert Matthews, the founder of the order, the group that had robbed armored cars and murdered the Denver talk show host, Alan Berg. Matthews had died in December of 1984, in a standoff with the FBI,

in a burning house on Whidbey Island, Washington. Within days, the chief deputy marshal in Idaho was reporting to headquarters that ATF sources thought Weaver had the potential to be another Bob Matthews, and his homestead another would-be island. From that point on, the file on Randy Weaver was a threat profile rather than a gun case, and the profile is what everyone who came up the mountain later was working from. Birely, the ATF agent, told the Marshal's Weaver believed the gun charge was the beginning of Armageddon, that he was ready to make

his stand in the final battle, that his children would be armed, and that they should be considered a threat to arresting officers. An ATF supervisor named Michael Kelly said the whole family, including the 12-year-old and the 14-year-old, was armed at all times and passed along an informant's claim that the children slept with weapons in their beds. The bail report said Weaver had admitted membership in the Aryan Nations, attended three congresses, and been wearing an Aryan Nation's belt buckle when arrested. The Secret Service briefed them on 1985.

A deputy sheriff reported that, Weaver had written the sheriff's office saying he wouldn't leave his cabin and that officers would have to take him out. Hunt and Mays got Weaver's discharge papers. They said he was a combat engineer, and nowhere was there a mention that he was a Green Beret. So the marshals wrote down that he may have had some demolition training and the Green Beret story, which Weaver had started himself, kept circulating anyway. By the time it reached the FBI, it had been rounded up to a man with special forces' skills and explosives' expertise. On the 5th of March, Hunt and Mays went to a couple named Bill and Judy Grider,

who lived in a cabin near the Weavers and shared their views, and who law enforcement privately considered more dangerous than the Weavers. Judy Grider mentioned in passing that Weaver had gotten a letter from the court, saying he didn't have to appear until the 20th of March. So the Marshals now had confirmation that the wrong date had landed in the cabin. The Griders carried in a message that the marshals didn't want a confrontation, and wanted Weaver to surrender. The next day, Bill Greider handed back a letter dated the 5th of March,

addressed to the servants of the Queen of Babylon. It was signed by all five Weavers, Randy, Vicky, Sarah, Samuel, and Rachel. Rachel was nine years old. We, the Weaver family, have been shown by our Savior and King, Yeshua the Messiah of Saxon Israel, that we are to stay separated on this mountain and not leave. You are servants of lawlessness, and you enforce lawlessness. Whether we live or whether we die, we will not obey your lawless government.

Grider added that Weaver had said if he died he was going home and the kids wanted to go with him, and that if a man came on to his property with a gun to do him harm, you can bet I'm going to shoot him. Hunt went back on the 8th and asked through the Griders, what would end this, and whether the children could at least come down off the mountain. Weaver's answer came back on the 11th, with four conditions. The ATF had to admit it had behaved improperly and that the government was after him. The ATF had to return the pistol it took from him on the bridge.

Sheriff Whitaker had to apologize in writing for calling him paranoid in court, and if his children couldn't live in peace on the mountain, then they didn't want to live. The chief deputy Ron Evans saw that as a possible suicide pact and cautioned his people not to read too much or too little into it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Hunt wrote that he wondered whether the weavers would use their children as the first line of defense. And so, in March of 1991, the two sides settled into their positions.

The government had a man who wouldn't come down, and a family that had signed a letter saying so. The Weavers had a probation letter with the wrong date on it, a bond they thought could cost them the land, and a set of beliefs that told them the end was supposed to look exactly like this. 17 months passed between that March indictment and the morning the Marshals went up the mountain. The Marshal's service was under orders from its director, Henry Hudson, that nothing be

done that might endanger the Weaver children. The Special Operations Group, the Marshal's tactical unit, sent teams to the mountain in the spring of 1992 to study the property. They put in surveillance cameras, took aerial photographs, and measured the driveway and located the rock outcropping above it, where every time a vehicle came up the road or the dogs barked, members of the family ran out with guns and took positions. They watched this happen so many times that they gave it a name, a vehicle response. Roderick, the marshal who led the surveillance, later said he'd seen it a hundred times. Surveillance video later shown to a jury had 13-year-old Sammy with a gun. about 84% of the time he was on camera.

Elisheba Weaver was born in 1991, in the shed below the cabin, with no doctor. That made four children on the mountain. Kevin Harris, who the family had taken in as a teenager, came and went and was up there for months at a stretch. The government tried intermediaries. Vicki's parents, the Jordicants, came out from Iowa in April of 1991, and reported back that Randy was afraid of losing the land, and that they had no suggestions.

The marshals asked that all communication go through Hoffmeister. The appointed lawyer Weaver had never spoken to. There were surrender teams, exchanged messages, a long-running plan for an undercover marshal to pose as someone buying property nearby, and a three-phase operational plan with the undercover approach as the third phase. There was also press.

By early 1992, Heraldo Rivera and the Los Angeles Times, were asking for interviews. The only reporter the Weavers let up the driveway was Michael Welland of the Little Weekly and Bonner's Ferry, who went up in May of 1992. Randy told him the feds cared more about shutting our mouths than about shotguns. Vicky told him there was nowhere left to escape our lawless rulers. Wheelan came away believing Vicky would rather die with her family in that cabin than submit,

and that this would include suicide rather than surrender. He told the FBI that in August. Judge Ryan had told the marshals back in March of 91 that he wanted Weaver in his courtroom. A newspaper in San Francisco ran a story in March under the headline, Standoff with Police Enter's second year. A fugitive on a ridge with an outstanding warrant was making the United States Marshal Service

looked like it couldn't serve one. The rouse down the hill were the other pressure. In August of 1992, Ruth Rowe reported to the sheriff that the weavers had taken a tank and piping from the Rouse water system, and two weeks later that they'd taken gasoline. The sheriff had told his deputies not to go up to the cabin because officers weren't welcome. Roderick worried that Wayne Rouse's father was going to try to handle it himself. In the spring, the marshal's undercover plan was ready. What they needed first was one more round of surveillance to pick positions for the cover teams who'd protect the

undercover marshal when he drove up that driveway. It was expected to take about two weeks and four trips up the mountain. Roderick wanted to do it in two. Six marshals gathered in Spokane on the 17th of August, 1992. There was Arthur Roderick, who'd led the earlier surveillance trips, and Larry Cooper and Dave Hunt, who'd owned the case since the Queen of Babylon letters, and Joseph Thomas and Frank Norris, who was a medic, and William Deegan, a special operations group, commander out of Boston, who'd been sent as the tactical units representative, and who was, in Cooper's words, like a brother to him. Dagan's instructions from his own commander were that this was intelligence gathering only. They set up in a condominium on Schweitzer Mountain near

Sandpoint. On the evening of the 19th, Roderick briefed them and repeated the standing order from headquarters. Avoid contact with the weavers, and above all the children. Thomas understood the instruction as if you see the children hide from them Roderick later described himself as having been brainwashed about keeping the kids out of the equation Dagan counted every man's ammunition Dagan had shipped weapons from a training display in Boston an M-16 carbine a sniper rifle a shotgun and a nine millimeter colt carbine with a suppressor on the 20th they spent an hour at a range siding them in with local deputies watching The defense would later point to the suppressed weapon and the range trip and the medic as proof the marshals came to kill the dog and start a fight.

The Justice Department reviewers went through each of those claims and rejected them. A suppressor on a surveillance weapon in bear country is ordinary. Siding and shipped rifles to ensure accuracy is ordinary. A medic on a mountain with no road out is ordinary. What the reviewers did fault was that six men went into the woods below a family with three known dogs. and no plan at all for what to do if a dog found them. They left the condominium at 2.30 in the morning on Friday the 21st. They dropped the van at Sheriff Whitaker's house, drove a jeep to the row place,

and parked it by the guest cabin at 4.30. They wore camouflage and carried radios and night vision gear, and none of them wore body armor, though it was available. Deggan and Roderick each carried an M-16, and Cooper carried the suppressed 9mm, because it was the weapon he knew best. Hunt carried a camera and his sidearm. They left the sniper rifle in Spokane.

They walked up the trail from the row house to a fork the marshals called the Y, and there they split. Hunt, Thomas, and Norris went up the left fork and climbed to an observation post they'd used before, a white pine on the north ridge, about 900 feet above the cabin and half a mile to three quarters of a mile away. Roderick took Cooper and Deegan up toward the compound in the dark to within two or three hundred yards of the bottom of the driveway

to show them the rock where the family took its positions. A dog barked while it was still dark, and they pulled back to the why. The sun was up by the time the observation team was in place, which was not the plan. The plan, as far as the tactical commander in Washington understood it, was in and out under cover of darkness. Cooper said afterward they couldn't have done what they needed to do,

before sunrise. From the ridge through a spotting scope and a video camera, the observation post watched a normal morning. Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris walked a security check around the house. The dogs barked now and then. Randy came out and yelled at them to shut up. Every so often somebody ran to the rock. Norris could see who carried what, and it was Harris with a long gun, Sammy with a rifle and a sidearm, Randy with a long gun, and Sarah with a a pistol in a holster. Hunt told Thomas it all looked exactly like the previous surveillance. He used the word clockwork. Roderick, Cooper, and Deegan got lost trying to reach the observation post and had to radio for directions. They arrived about nine, watched the cabin for a while,

and then Roderick took the other two down to a rock and a stand to birch, 200 to 250 yards from the cabin, a spot he'd picked in April for a counter-sniper during the eventual arrest. He and Cooper crawled 50 yards lower to a second rock that lined up with the base of the driveway. There, Roderick threw a rock to see how sound carried and whether the dogs would react. The observation post reported no reaction. He threw a second one, and again, there was nothing. Fifteen minutes later, the three of them backtracked toward the switchback road, and Roderick decided to show Cooper and Deegan the garden and springhouse below the cabin,

because a cover team might have to sit there, and because Cooper later said Roder Roderick figured that in a siege, somebody might need to cut off the water. Cooper didn't like being that close in daylight. Roderick said earlier teams had been closer without being seen. Before they moved, Roderick radioed the post and asked to be told of any movement, and Thomas came back that they had total containment. The weavers were inside. They were at the spring house getting ready to leave,

when Thomas radioed that the family was responding to an approaching vehicle. None of the men on the ground heard a vehicle. Ruth Rowe down at her house was loading laundry into her car around that time. The dog started barking and people came out of the cabin. Randy first, then Kevin Harris, then Sammy, then Sarah, then Rachel. Thomas said they were carrying equipment, which was the code word for guns. Vicky stayed in the compound. Hunt radioed that this looked like a typical vehicle response.

Then the family didn't go to the rock. They jogged down the driveway. Hunt's next train was. transmission was, you've got them all coming down the drive. And Roderick saw a big yellow Labrador coming straight at his position with Kevin Harris behind it carrying a rifle. The dog's name was Stryker. What happened over the next several minutes has two accounts and the government's own investigators after interviewing every surviving marshal under oath and reading every statement the Weavers and Harris ever made, wrote that they could not determine who fired first.

Randy Weaver's account was dictated to his daughter Sarah on the 26th of August, inside the cabin, while the siege was still on. It says that at about 1130, the dog started barking like they always do when strangers walk up the driveway, that he, Kevin, and Sam ran to the rock with their weapons, and that Stryker was down at the pump house, barking into the woods. Randy had a double-barreled 12-gauge. Kevin had a 30-0-6 bolt action. Sam had a mini-14 and 223. Sam said he heard something or someone running west, so they followed. Sam and Kevin went after the dog. Randy dropped down onto the old logging road headed west.

I didn't have any idea what they were chasing, he dictated. But I was hoping it was a deer. Vicky's journal entry for that day, which was recovered from the cabin, says that Randy, Kevin, and Sam went down past the pump house to see what was bothering the dog, and that the dog apparently made the servant of the New World Order retreat down the road. The entry ends in the middle of a thought. The marshals ran with Roderick leading,

then Deegan 10 yards back, then Cooper 10 yards behind him. The woods were thick and they made noise. Each time they stopped and looked back, the dog and Harris were closer. Roderick said out loud that the dog might have to be killed, because it had their scent. Cooper decided the same thing and dropped back to be the one to do it.

Roderick told the reviewers that at several points they could have gone to ground in their camouflage, and in his words, probably could have taken them out, and that they didn't, because they were under orders not to have a confrontation. They broke into a fernfield, crossed it, and went under a canopy of trees that led back to the why.

Roderick looked back and saw the dog, Harris, and for the first time, Sammy. Cooper said it was foolish to keep running and get shot in the back, and that they should take positions. The others agreed, and Roderick, went through first, into the clearing at the Y. Dagan stopped at the edge of the canopy and squatted behind a stump three or four feet off the right side of the trail. Cooper came to the water bar at the mouth of the Y, and there, through the brush, a short run from the door,

coming down the other trail from the cabin was Randy Weaver. Cooper said they looked at each other and Weaver seemed shocked. Cooper yelled at Harris behind him. Back off, U.S. Marshals. Roderick, farther in, saw Weaver to and yelled, Stop, U.S. Marshal. Weaver yelled something back. Weaver's own account has him being told to freeze by a very well-camiflaged person and answering with two words, I'm not going to repeat, and then retreating 80 to 100 feet toward home. The dog reached Cooper.

It circled him, snarling. He held it off with the muzzle of his weapon and didn't shoot, because Harris was right there, and he thought shooting the dog in front of him would start a gunfight with Deegan and himself standing in the open. The dog ran past him toward where Weaver had gone. Cooper dove behind a rock 15 feet behind Deegan. Harris and Sammy walked into the clearing directly in front of Deegan's stump, six to ten feet past him. Cooper thought they'd gotten away with it. Then Deegan rose up on one knee with his rifle at his shoulder and said,

Stop! U.S. Marshal! And it's here that the account split. Cooper's account is that Harris, whose back was to Deegan, wheeled and fired his 30-ought six from the hip. Dagan's arm went back and he started to fall. Harris began raising the rifle to his shoulder, as if to fire again. Cooper fired a three-round burst at Harris and saw him drop in Cooper's phrase, like a sack of potatoes. He was sure he'd hit him. He hadn't.

Cooper turned his weapon towards Sammy, couldn't see the boy's hands for a tree, and didn't fire. Somewhere off to his right, two shots, and Sammy's voice yelling, You son of a bitch. Then incoming fire and Deegan on the radio saying, Coupe, I need you. Cooper stood and fired a second three-round burst

in the direction the fire was coming from to cover himself while he moved to Deegan. After that burst, he saw Sammy run out of view up the trail toward the cabin, and he didn't think he'd hit him. Roderick's account is that he was farther down the path. He heard one shot from his left, heavy caliber, he thought.

The only thing in front of him was the dog, running toward the trail Weaver had taken. When the shot went off, the dog stopped and turned its head toward the marshals. Roderick fired once from his M-16 and hit the dog near the base of the spine. Then Sammy came into the Y running up the trail toward his father, called Roderick, a son of a bitch, and fired twice at him. Roderick dove into the trees. He found a bullet hole through his shirt afterward. He wasn't hit. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. Harris' account is in the same letter Sarah wrote on the 26th, and in a statement he gave the FBI on the 1st of September. He and Sam followed Stryker until they came out on the road that forks off the one Randy was on. Stryker reached the corner first, then Sam, then Harris. A camouflaged man in the road shot Stryker. Sam yelled, you shot Stryker, you son of a bitch.

They pointed a gun at Sam. Sam opened fire and headed up the road toward home. It looked to Harris as though Sam had been hit in the right arm. The men were still shooting at Sam. So, in Harris's words, I shot one of the sons of bitches. He told the FBI he heard the man call out that he'd been hit. He said Sammy was already running when he fired, that the shooting stopped for a few seconds.

Then one more shot, and Sammy yelped and went silent. Harris said he fired one more round in front of a camouflaged man who came out of the brush to scare him and stayed behind a stump for about 10 minutes. Randy Weaver up the trail, heard a shot, and striker Yelp. Then two more shots and the yelping stopped. He fired his shotgun once into the air to draw attention to himself, jammed it reloading, drew a 9mm pistol and fired three or four more into the air, and yelled for Sam and Kevin to come home.

Sam yelled back, I'm coming, Dad. Those three words come from Weaver's own dictated account. and nobody on either side has ever disputed them. Then there's the physical evidence. The marshals inventoried their ammunition early the next morning. Hunt, Norris, and Thomas hadn't fired. Roderick had fired one round. Cooper had fired six.

Degan's rifle had been fired seven times, and Cooper, who reached Dagan while he was still conscious and took the rifle off him, said he never saw Degan fire and didn't fire it himself. A wound ballistics expert, testified Deegan could have fired after being shot through the chest. That's 14 rounds from the marshals in total. Ruth Rowe, loading laundry down the hill, thought she heard about 50 shots in the first burst, over about two minutes. The three men at the observation post heard one shot,

then two quick ones, then a barrage. Two of them thought the first shot was a heavy caliber. Norris the medic thought the first shot and the two that followed all sounded like a 223, which was the Marshal's rifle and which neither Harris nor Sammy carried. Sammy Weaver was hit twice. One bullet went through his right arm near the elbow, front to back, and shattered the stock of his rifle. The second went into his back and out his chest, tracking slightly left to right. The pathologist who did the autopsy said the fatal wound looked like a low velocity round, not a 223, and was more consistent with a 9mm.

The prosecution's own expert at trial said the same thing and said it resembled the silver-tipped ammunition Cooper was carrying. There were two nine millimeters in those woods that morning, Randy Weaver's pistol, which he fired into the air, and Larry Cooper's carbine. The Justice Department wrote that it did not intend to speculate, and then wrote that the evidence, though not conclusive, certainly suggests that the shot that killed Sammy came from Cooper's weapon, most likely the second burst. the one fired for cover in the direction of incoming fire. The boy was 14 years old, and the wound was in his back. The marshal said they didn't know they'd hit him. The reviewers found no evidence that they did.

Cooper watched the boy run out of sight and assumed he was fine, and then spent the next two days believing the person he'd shot was Kevin Harris. Bill Deegan had been hit once in the chest. When Cooper got to him, he was on his left side, his arm still threw the rifle sling, making a gurgling, sound. He was conscious. Within a few moments, he wasn't, and then he was dead. Cooper put two fingers on his carotid artery, got three or four beats, and then nothing. Hunt Thomas and Norris came down off the ridge at a run and took a volley of fire over their heads from somewhere on their left

as they turned into the canopy. Thomas did a somersault and kept going. Nobody ever established who fired at them. Norris set his rifle down and worked on Dagen and then said he was gone. From the direction of the cabin came a long burst of gunfire, then wailing, men's and women's voices. The marshals heard cursing. They heard a woman shout, Yahweh. They heard a man yell, you son of a bitch, and somebody scream. You tried to kill my daddy. They didn't know what it meant. Roderick and Cooper assumed Harris had died of his wounds. Nobody up there said the name Sammy. According to Harris's statement about 15 minutes after the shooting, he, Randy and Vicky went back down the trail, picked up Sammy's body, and carried it home. They laid him in the

birthing shed. Hunt and Thomas went down the mountain for help. Roderick, Cooper, and Norris stayed in the brush with Deghan's body. Someone in the crisis center suggested they leave him and get out. They refused, and it rained. Every time they made a noise, Roderick said, the cabin answered with gunfire. A plane went over in the afternoon and they heard shots. Roderick had Hunt call the Federal Aviation Administration and closed the airspace. A rescue team led by the Idaho State Police reached them at 1130 that night, more than 12 hours after the shooting, and brought them in Dagen down in the dark. Nobody was left at the observation post. The reviewers noted that the one place from which anybody could see the cabin had been abandoned when the shooting started and never remand.

For the rest of that day and night, the government had no eyes on the weavers at all. Word that a deputy marshal was dead reached Washington on Friday afternoon, and it reached Washington in a shape that wasn't true. The first report said the marshals had been pinned down under fire for hours. They had been, in the sense that they were afraid to move. But the FBI's Crisis Center was told, and kept being told through Saturday that shots were coming from the cabin, that the weavers had fired on an airplane and that this was an ongoing gun battle. The FBI's senior hostage negotiator Fred Lansley would later put the actual situation

in one sentence. A barricaded subject at the top of a mountain. No hostages, family present, plenty of cover for perimeter personnel, and no gunfire since the previous morning. The FBI had jurisdiction because a federal officer had been killed. It sent the hostage rescue team, about 50 agents under its commander, Richard Rogers. On the flight West Friday night, Rogers and the FBI's assistant director for the criminal division, Larry Potts, were briefed by the associate director of the Marshal's service on Weaver's background, which by then included the Green Beret story, the explosives training,

the children who supposedly slept with guns, the Aryan nations, the letters, and 18 months of refusing to come down. All of it now attached to a man. who'd said he'd shoot anyone who came for him, and as far as anyone on that plane knew, had just done it. On that airplane, Rogers and Potts drafted special rules of engagement. The FBI's standard deadly force policy is what every police officer in the country works under in one form or another. An officer may use deadly force to prevent death or serious injury to himself or someone else, and may not otherwise. What Rogers and Potts wrote was different.

Rule 1. If any adult male is observed with a weapon prior to the announcement, deadly force can and should be employed if the shot can be taken without endangering any children. Rule 2. If any adult in the compound is observed with a weapon after the surrender announcement is made and is not attempting to surrender, deadly force can and should be employed to neutralize the individual. Rule 3.

If compromised by any animal, particularly the dogs, that animal should be eliminated. Rule 4 applied the ordinary FBI policy to anyone other than Randy Weaver, Vicki Weaver, and Kevin Harris. The phrase was originally, Deadly Force can be employed. Rogers changed it before the snipers went up the hill, to can and should. The operations plan containing the rules was faxed to FBI headquarters on Saturday afternoon.

Headquarters objected that the plan had no negotiation component, and a negotiator was called in to write one as an addendum. Afterward, nobody at headquarters would admit having reviewed the rules themselves, even though they were in the document that got faxed. Lansley, the negotiator, said the rules were the most severe he'd seen in hundreds of crises. When he heard Rogers tell the team there'd be no long siege, he took it to mean there'd be no negotiation, and he told Rogers so. Roger said, good.

I carried a badge for 16 years, and I've read a lot, of use of force policies. A rule that says an armed adult male can and should be shot on site before anyone has told him he's surrounded or asked him to surrender is not a police rule. A federal appeals court later said the same thing and almost the same words. It called them wartime rules and said they were patently unconstitutional for a police action. The rules also assumed a place that matched the file, with booby traps and fortifications and sympathizers waiting in the woods.

and the word the FBI used for the Weaver's plywood house was compound. Eugene Glenn, the special agent in charge from Salt Lake City, ran the scene from a command post at the base of the mountain. There was a crowd at the roadblock by the bridge. Skinheads were arriving from as far as Portland and Las Vegas. Governor Cecil Andrus declared a state of emergency in Boundary County on the 21st, which freed up National Guard equipment, and then his office held back the armored personnel,

carriers the FBI wanted, which delayed everything on Saturday. At 3.30 Saturday afternoon, the HRT sniper and observer teams, along with marshals from the Special Operations Group, started up the mountain. Before they left, they were briefed on the rules. While they were climbing, other observers reported to FBI headquarters that the subjects were outside the cabin, and headquarters reminded the field that the rules of engagement would apply. By 545, the snipers in position. Lon Horriucci was on a rock about 200 yards from the cabin, above and behind it, with a rifle and a round chambered. He could hear the engines of the personnel carriers running at the command post below. So, presumably, could the weavers? Nobody had made a surrender announcement.

Nobody had told the people in that cabin they were surrounded, or that the FBI had arrived, or what the FBI wanted. The plan was to get the snipers set first, in case of an ambival, bush in the woods, and then drive the carriers up and deliver a telephone and read a statement. The Justice Department's reviewers wrote that the absence of a surrender demand before the shooting subjected the government to charges that it was setting Weaver up for attack. An unarmed girl ran from the cabin to the rock outcropping and back. A minute later, an unarmed man was on the back deck. About ten minutes after that, an FBI helicopter started its engine down the hill for an observation

flight, and when it did, the girl and two men ran from the cabin to the rock. The last one out had a rifle. Horiuchi identified him as Kevin Harris. The three of them came back toward the house and went to the birthing shed. Horiuchi watched the man he thought was Harris, scanning the sky above and behind the sniper's position, where the helicopter was, and moving along the side of the shed toward the more protected side, and he believed the man was positioning himself to shoot at the helicopter. He fired as the man moved. The man's back was to him. Because the man kept moving, Oriucci assumed he'd missed. What Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris said, and what Sarah Weaver said, is that they'd gone to the shed to look at Sammy's body, and Randy was reaching to open the door

when the bullet struck him. It entered near his right armpit and exited his back. The reviewers found the shot met the constitutional standard, on the reasoning that an agent who believed in armed man was moving to fire on a helicopter carrying agents, could reasonably shoot. They noted there was no evidence anyone in the cabin ever fired at a helicopter, that day, or any other day, and the FBI itself later acknowledged that. Weaver ran for the cabin, and Sarah and Harris ran behind him, and Vicky held the door open with Elashiba on her arm. The first two went in. Horiucci's own written account says that after 10 or 20 seconds he saw the man he'd shot at running behind the other two, and that he fired again, leading him slightly,

as the man reached the door. The reviewers found no evidence anyone in that group fired at any FBI agent at any point that evening. Horiucci, they wrote, did not know whether the people running had any intention of shooting at anyone, and by his own account he knew the door was open, and people were going through it. Their conclusion was that the second shot did not satisfy the constitutional standard for deadly force, that firing at a fleeing person entering an occupied house without knowing who was behind the door was unreasonable, and that the rules of engagement had contributed to it. Inside the cabin, according to Jess Walter's account, the screaming lasted about half a minute. Jerry Spence later got Horriucci to agree on the witness stand that he'd heard it, and that it

went on about 30 seconds. Kevin Harris had a bullet in his chest and his arm. By Walter's account, a few hours later, coughing blood. He asked Randy Weaver to finish him. Weaver told him he couldn't do that. Rogers, who'd been in the helicopter, took two armored personnel carriers up to within 30 or 50 feet of the cabin at about 6.30.

Lancley read a surrender statement from the carrier. Mr. Weaver, this is Fred Lansley of the FBI. You should understand that we have warrants for the arrest of yourself and Mr. Harris. I would like you to accept a telephone so that we can talk and work out how you will come out of the house without further violence. That was the first time anyone in the cabin was told who was outside and why.

Vicky Weaver had been dead for about half an hour. There was no answer, so the FBI left the phone 20 yards from the door and laid wire down the mountain. It rang all night. That night, on the ridge, the weather turned. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The H.R.T hadn't brought its cold weather gear.

because nobody expected cold in August. Snipers were showing signs of hypothermia, and their optics were fogging. Around 8 o'clock, Rogers pulled every sniper off the mountain. Then Glenn cut the power to the cabin, which was a small generator and not much else, and posted SWAT teams around the command post below. The FBI's after-action understanding of what had happened that evening

was that Horiuchi's second shot might have hit an adult male. Headquarters was told that. The behavioral scientists at Quantico who were writing a psychological profile of the family were not told that shots had been fired at all. They found out later and said their profile would have been different had they had all the information of what was happening on the ground. On Sunday morning, the 23rd, the snipers went back up. Rogers took the carriers back to the cabin and spent about 30 minutes on a bullhorn

telling the occupants to come out, pick up the phone, and establish a dialogue. Lansley, the negotiator, asked to go along. Rogers told him he wasn't needed. According to Lansley, Rogers came back down and told him he'd delivered an ultimatum. If they don't come out, he'd start knocking down the outbuildings and then the house. And he said he now had to follow through because he couldn't back down from an ultimatum. Lanceley told him it would cripple negotiations. Another FBI negotiator, MacArthur Burke, said he was astounded.

The command post approved it anyway. That evening the armored carriers began pushing over the outbuildings around the cabin. The stated reason was to tighten the perimeter and remove cover in case an assault became necessary. One of the buildings was the birthing shed. That is how the FBI found Sammy Weaver by driving an armored vehicle into the shed where his parents had laid him. The marshal's crisis log first recorded gunshot wounds to his head and chest. Two hours later it corrected itself. Once in the back, once in the arm.

The marshals, according to the FBI agent who told them, appeared surprised. The FBI's own negotiators reported to Quantico on Monday morning that the mood among the commanders and the HRT appeared to be to mount an assault on the residence no later than Monday evening. The discovery of the boy's body stopped that. It was believed the family would break its silence to ask about their son's remains. There was no response. The behavioral profile arrived at the site on Monday, written by people. who didn't know a shot had been fired. It said the Weavers wouldn't trust federal negotiators,

that third parties should be considered, that any attempt to enter the house would be met with armed resistance, and that if Vicki Weaver believed the government would win, she could be expected to kill the children and herself. It also suggested that as the family got tired, they might mount a suicide attack on the perimeter. On Tuesday, the FBI cut the water. negotiators on the loudspeaker addressed Vicky Weaver by name and expressed concern for the family. Inside the cabin, Randy, Sarah, Rachel, Kevin Harris, and a 10-month-old baby were living with Vicky's body on the kitchen floor, partly under the table with a cloth over the upper half. The breakfast remark came in the first days of the loudspeaker effort.

A negotiator on the loudspeaker said good morning to Mrs. Weaver, said they'd had pancakes. He asked what she'd had and suggested she said, the children out for some. Weaver and his daughters later told Bo Gritz they developed an intense hatred for Lansley over the remarks directed at Vicky and the questions about breakfast, and that it strengthened their resolve. On Wednesday the 26th, at 1053 in the morning, Rogers went on the radio and revoked the special rules of engagement, and every sniper position acknowledged. The FBI's standard deadly force policy was back in effect. Glenn later gave several reasons. No shots from the cabin in four days. A carrier had sat in front of the house

unchallenged. The outbuildings had come down without a shot. No booby traps had been found. And the crime scene agents at the Y were telling him the early assumptions about the Degan shooting weren't being borne out by the evidence. The marshal's debriefings had raised questions and a review of the ATF case had raised more. William Gore, the agent in charge from Seattle, put it plainly. The entire predicate of the federal effort was in question. That same morning was the first time Randy Weaver said anything to the FBI. Lansley announced that a robot would bring the phone to the cabin and push it through a window. Weaver shouted at them to get out. Later that day, he said he wouldn't take the phone. The robot outside had a shotgun mounted on it. The shotgun wasn't loaded,

but Weaver had no way to know that. He told Gritz later that he believed anyone who stepped out to pick up that phone would be shot. His sister, Marnas Joy, was brought to the site. He'd asked for her. She tried on the 26th and again on the 28th, and he couldn't hear her. On Friday the 28th, Weaver said he'd talked to Bo Gritz. James Gritz was a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel with a long Vietnam record who was at that moment running for President of the United States on the populist party ticket. He was a hero to a large part of the crowd at the roadblock. Glenn agreed to let him try, after clearing it with Rogers and Washington, on the argument that a fellow Green Beret might get through where the FBI couldn't.

Nobody consulted Lansley. At dusk, Gritz went up. He tried the robot and a bullhorn from the carrier and got nothing. So he walked to the cabin and spoke to Weaver through a window. He asked if everyone was okay. No, Weaver said. My wife was shot and killed last Saturday. It was the first the government knew of it.

The FBI reviewed every recording made during the siege afterward and found nothing earlier. Lancley's contemporaneous notes record him learning that Vicki Randy and Kevin had all been shot from Weaver's statement to Gritz, six days after it happened. There'd been a rumor among the perimeter teams about something wrapped on the back porch, adult-sized, with a smell of death. The Marshal who heard it assumed it was Kevin Harris. The crisis log dismissed the rumor as false and unfounded. Gritz came back Saturday morning with Jackie Brown, a family friend, and a local minister named Chuck Sandlin. Weaver yelled at the minister to get off the property.

Rogers tried to keep Brown from going up and told her, by her account, that if she didn't come out in a reasonable time, he'd assume she'd joined the Weavers or been taken hostage, and the HRT might have to come in after her. She went anyway. Grit spent that day talking through the cabin wall, about the military, about God and about Harris, whose voice told Gritz he needed a doctor.

On Sunday the 30th, a retired Phoenix police officer named Gerald McClam, who went by Jack, joined him. Around mid-morning, Kevin Harris agreed to come out. Gritz and McClam met him at the back door and helped him down the stairs, and for the first time, with the door open, Gritz saw Randy Weaver face to face and saw inside. Gritz asked to take Vicki's body out and Weaver agreed. Rogers insisted Gritz were a transmitter so the forward command post could listen. Gritz and Randy Weaver put her in a body bag. Gritz noticed a holstered 9mm pistol on her and removed it.

He and Jackie Brown carried her down to the forward command post. Then Brown went back up with two buckets of water and three white towels and a roll of paper towels and cleaned the blood off the floor. Because she said, she didn't want the girls to have to clean up their mother's blood. Gritz told the FBI that Weaver wanted to surrender but his daughters wouldn't let him. Gritz also told the FBI that on Sunday, Rogers said that regardless of the day's events, the HRT was going to assault the cabin on Monday, blowing out the windows and doors. Gritz and McClam worked out a plan between themselves to physically tackle Randy and the girls if the

assault came, so they wouldn't be killed. Rogers testified at trial that he vetoed that plan. On Monday, Gritz had the robot and the carrier moved back from the house. He reached the trial lawyer Jerry Spence by phone, and Spence agreed to represent Weaver. Gritz carried up a handwritten note from prosecutor Ron Howen, promising Weaver a chance to tell his story to a grand jury. That note was never found in the cabin afterward. On the 31st of August, 1992, 11 days after the marshals walked up from the Rau house, Randy Weaver came came out with his three daughters. Sarah had been running the household for nine days with her mother's

body on the floor and a baby on her hip. Her written statement from the day before said, Our situation is not over a shotgun, but rather our racial and political beliefs. Grits at the roadblock told the crowd that some fat bureaucrat had authorized this and was going to be brought to justice. Glenn told reporters there were no winners in a situation with all this sadness. Randy Weir and Kevin Harris were charged with the murder of William Deegan, and later with a conspiracy that the prosecution said stretched back to Iowa, in which the Weavers had planned for years to provoke a violent confrontation with the government. The trial opened in Boise in front of District Judge Edward Lodge on the 13th of April 1993. It ran 42 days. The government called 54

witnesses and the defense called none. Jerry Spence represented Weaver and a Boise lawyer named David Nevin represented Harris. Nevin's view of the whole case was that it turned on the dog. If Roderick shot Stryker before anyone else fired, then Sammy fired at a man who just killed his dog and pointed a rifle at him, and Harris fired at men who were shooting at a 14-year-old. If Harris fired first, it was murder. Cooper testified Harris fired first.

Roderick testified he didn't shoot the dog first. Norris testified that the first shot he heard sounded like a 220. Rogers, the H.R.T. commander, testified that he never considered what Idaho law might have to say about any of it. I don't operate under state law, he said. I operate under federal law, which supersedes state law. Horriucci testified with 10 armed agents in the courtroom because neo-Nazi groups had printed wanted posters with his face on them. He said he never intended to kill Vicky Weaver and never saw her. Spence asked him whether he'd understood there might be someone behind the door. He said he had. After Horriucci finished and went home, a package arrived at the prosecutor's office from FBI headquarters, sent by fourth-class mail in response to a defense

subpoena. Inside was a sketch Horriucci had drawn on hotel note paper the day after the shooting, showing the cabin door as he'd seen it through his scope. In the window of the door were two semicircles, drawn where two heads would be. Howen had to disclose it. Horriucci had to fly back explain it. Judge Lodge fined the government for the lost trial day, and at sentencing, he issued a separate order fining the FBI and describing its failure to produce discovery, its failure to obey the court's orders, and its indifference to the rights of the defendants, and the administration of justice. The jury was out 20 days, the longest deliberation in Idaho's history to that point. On the 8th of July, 1993, it acquitted Kevin Harris of everything.

It acquitted Randy Weaver of murder, of conspiracy, of the assault charges, and of the original gun charge. It convicted him of failing to appear for trial and of committing an offense while on release. Lodge gave him 18 months in jail, three years of probation and a $10,000 fine. He'd already served most of it. He walked out on the 18th of December 1993 and went back to Iowa with Rachel and Elashiba. Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a Justice Department task force to go through all of it, and it did for a year. Its report, dated the 10th of June 1994, ran 542 pages, and was never officially released.

It leaked, and most of what's in this episode comes from it. The task force found that the rules of engagement violated the Constitution. It found that the first shot was justified and the second was not. It found that the marshals didn't go up the mountain to start a fight, and that Cooper didn't mean to kill Sammy Weaver, and that Cooper most likely did. It found that the FBI on the scene favored tactics over negotiation from the beginning, that its behavioral scientists were kept in the dark, and that it kept telling headquarters shots were coming from the cabin when none were.

It found the probation letter should have been corrected and wasn't, and that indicting Weaver six days before the wrong date looked like overreaching. It recommended that the second shot be referred for possible criminal prosecution. The Civil Rights Division looked at it and declined, finding no evidence of a willful violation. The FBI disciplined 12 of its people. Larry Potts, who drafted the rules on the airplane, got a letter of censure, then was promoted to deputy director of the FBI, then was removed from that job when the Ruby Ridge questions wouldn't go away.

Eugene Glenn, the on-scene commander, wrote to the Justice Department, accusing the Bureau of protecting its headquarters people and putting the blame on the field. Michael Cahoo, the chief of the FBI's violent crime section, pleaded guilty in 1996 to obstruction of justice for destroying an internal critique of the operation before it could be turned over to prosecutors and the defense. He served 18 months. In September and October of 1995, a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee chaired by Arlen Specter held 14 days of hearing. FBI director Lewis Free told the senators that what happened was one misstatement of fact exaggerated to another one, into a huge pile of information that was just dead wrong.

Randy Weaver testified too. Asked what he'd do differently. He said he would have come down the mountain for the court appearance. In August of that year, the government settled the family's wrongful death claim, without admitting fault, $3,100,000, a million to each of the three daughters. and 100,000 to Randy. Kevin Harris, who the government had fought for years, settled in 2000 for 380,000. In 1997, the Boundary County prosecutor, Denise Woodbury, charged Lon Horriucci with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Vicki Weaver. The case was moved to federal

court and Judge Lodge dismissed it on the ground that a federal officer acting within the scope of his duties is immune from state prosecution. The Ninth Circuit Court of a of Appeals, sitting with 11 judges, reversed him in 2001 by a vote of six to five and sent the charge back. Two weeks later, a new county prosecutor dropped it. Nobody has ever stood trial for the deaths of Sammy or Vicky Weaver. Randy Weaver went to gun shows and signed copies of the book he wrote with Sarah, and in later years he'd tell people religion was all a bunch of crap. He remarried and went on with his life, asked in 2001 what he remembered about the mountain. He didn't talk about marshals or snipers. There was no wind, he said. The snowflakes were so big you could hear them when

they hit the ground. The kids had three or four campgrounds around the land. Vicky canned. She and the kids picked huckleberries. He died on the 11th of May 2022 at 74, near Calispell, Montana, where Sarah and Rachel live. On the 6th of September, 1995, three years after the siege, Randy Weaver sat at a witness table in a Senate hearing room in Washington. At one point, he stood up and held something for the cameras. It was the front door of the cabin, brought to Washington for the hearing, with the bullet holes still in it, including the one a 308 round had made on its way to his wife's head at about six in the evening on the 22nd of August, before anyone had told the people inside who was out there, or asked them to come out.