U.S. Lawman Killed While Watching Home of Fugitive

A U.S. deputy marshal was shot and killed Friday as he and five others kept watch on a federal fugitive’s mountaintop cabin, authorities said.

The deputy marshals came under fire as they were watching the fortress-like home where authorities say Randy Weaver, 44, has lived in self-imposed exile since February, 1991, when he failed to appear for trial on a federal weapons charge.

Deputy U.S. Marshal William F. Degan, 42, from the marshals’ Boston office, was killed, according to a statement from Henry Hudson, who heads the U.S. Marshals Service.

The other deputies were not hurt but were pinned down on Ruby Ridge, 40 miles south of the Canadian border, the Marshals Service said. Federal, state and local law enforcement officials were being deployed to get them out.

About 30 residents were evacuated, Boundary County sheriff’s Deputy Lonnie Ekstrom said. The remote area is about 70 miles north of Coeur D’Alene, Ida.

Weaver, who federal agents say has ties to the white supremacist organization Aryan Nations, was indicted in Boise, Ida., in December, 1990, on federal firearms charges. He was accused of selling sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent.

Weaver was arrested by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents, but authorities said he returned to his mountaintop cabin the following month after a federal magistrate released him on his own recognizance.

Hudson said authorities knew that Weaver was in the cabin Friday but believed he was heavily armed and did not want to provoke a confrontation.

Marshals Service spokesman Stephen Boyle said the deputies were only there to try to determine how many people might be inside the cabin and how difficult it might be for authorities to move closer. He said it was not known if Weaver’s wife or any of his four children were in the cabin.

Weaver has said that his exile would end only with the deaths of himself and his family or an admission by authorities that he was set up on the weapons charges.