Both Sides Still Wrestling With Horrors of Ruby Ridge : Idaho: Some fear shootout anniversary may spark new violence. Many in militia movement see call to arms.

Fingers of clouds hang across Ruby Ridge, and the tiny plywood cabin near the peak--its roof drumbeating in the slow rain--perches dizzily on the edge. The view down the valley sweeps to Canada’s blue peaks.

Here, says Jackie Brown, plodding down a trail behind the cabin, is where 14-year-old Sammy Weaver died, shot in the arm and the back after he fired his rifle on the federal marshals who had shot his dog.

Here, she says, moving to the crooked wooden porch, is where the bullet pierced the door and slammed through Vicki Weaver’s face, sending 10-month-old Elisheba flying from her mother’s arms.

“They say babies don’t understand,” said Brown, a friend of the Weavers who cleaned up Vicki’s blood in the midst of the siege. But a year later, Brown says, when Elisheba spoke her first words, they were: “Mama fall down.”

A hard rain fell that day three years ago when federal marshals climbed under cover of darkness to Randy Weaver’s remote cabin. The officers remembered later how they huddled cold and scared in the woods outside the cabin over the body of Deputy U.S. Marshal William F. Degan, shot and killed by Weaver’s friend, Kevin Harris. It took all that day and into the next night to get the marshals off the mountain.

The shootout and 11-day siege that began on Aug. 21, 1992, has emerged as one of the most troubling episodes in the history of the FBI and an anthem for the rising influence of anti-government and militia groups in the Northwest.

The FBI has suspended five top officials pending a criminal probe of possible obstruction of justice in the investigation of the shootout. The government last week agreed to pay $3.1 million to the Weaver family to settle a civil suit. A Senate subcommittee is scheduled to hold public hearings into the episode next month.

Elisheba and her older sisters, Sara, now 19, and Rachel, 13, who once toted hip holsters over their long skirts on the mountainside, now are millionaires. Weaver, living on Social Security in a small Iowa town and without the strong influence of his deeply religious wife, is said to have abandoned much hope of a future. His lawyer, Gary Gilman, said the family was in tears and Weaver was physically sick as news of the settlement brought back memories of the event. “He just said: ‘Leave me alone,’ ” Gilman said.

After a federal trial that acquitted Weaver and Harris on the most serious charges and a lengthy Justice Department internal investigation that was largely noncommittal, the tiny Boundary County prosecutor’s office and the Sheriff’s Department in Bonners Ferry now is charged with determining who, if anyone, should be prosecuted under state law. Almost all of the principals have refused to be interviewed, let alone take the polygraph tests the sheriff is seeking.

Search for Justice

Sheriff Greg Sprungl has file boxes all over the floor of his office, all of them leading nowhere.

“Will justice be served? That’s impossible for me to answer,” Sprungl said. “Because I don’t know what justice is.”

Across northern Idaho and into western Montana, anti-government and militia groups have seized on the Ruby Ridge shootout as a call to arms. In their minds, the camouflage-clad police teams, trucks, helicopters and armored personnel carriers that climbed Ruby Ridge that day are proof of a government run dangerously out of control. The siege involved more than 400 law enforcement officers from the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, the Idaho National Guard and the Idaho State Police.

Some officials are fearful that Monday’s anniversary of the Ruby Ridge shootout could inspire a fresh wave of violence. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms moved quickly this month to arrest three men, one of them with suspected ties to the militia movement, when 500 pounds of explosives were stolen from a mine in northern Idaho.

About 100 pounds of the explosives are still missing, and ATF agent Herb Byerly said some of the material was intended for delivery to a group that planned to blow up a dam in Canada.

It was the Aryan Nation, the most extreme of these anti-government, white supremacist groups, that agents had sought to infiltrate when they sent an informant to meet with Weaver and negotiate a deal to buy illegal sawed-off shotguns. Refusing to act as an informant against the group, some of whose meetings he had attended, Weaver was indicted on the weapons charges.

Confrontation

The path of confrontation was set when he failed to show up for his trial and threatened resistance against anyone who came after him.

“We have to make all the noise we can about the Randy Weaver thing. It’s a wake-up call to our race to tell them what kind of condition we’re in,” the Rev. Richard Butler, 77-year-old patriarch of the Aryan Nation, said in a recent interview. His remote compound in the scenic flatlands is blocked by a gate and a sign, “Whites Only.” Pictures of Adolf Hitler line his office walls.

“The bureaucracy of our government figured it [the Weaver case] would go away, but it didn’t. A lot of people didn’t want to rock the boat before; now all of a sudden they find they need to get off the fence, and sometimes it takes a big event to get people to make a decision,” Butler said. “We’ve determined that the only way to rectify the problem is not by cutting off the tentacles of the octopus. We have to remove the octopus.”

Harris’ lawyer, David Nevin, said he has thought about why the Weaver family story has had such resonance. For him, it has to do with a growing national consciousness that the cavalry called in as protectors, the millions of dollars spent on hiring police officers to arrest criminals and the building of prisons to house them have not protected enough. If anything, crime has become worse. And sometimes, he says, the police themselves seem to be dangerous.

“Let’s just suppose your government really did want to get you. How hard would it be . . . to discredit you and put you in prison? Mainly, you’re protected against that sort of thing not because they can’t, but because nobody really wants to,” Nevin said. “When you start toying with those things, you soon get yourself in a very uncomfortable place. Because, finally, there’s no place to go. There’s no place to hide.”

There is little doubt that the Weavers suspected their own Armageddon was at hand. As the spiritual mentor of a family that observed the feasts of the Old Testament, rejected Easter as pagan and believed that whites are the only true Israelites, Weaver’s wife, more than a year before the siege, addressed two letters to “The Queen of Babylon” and mailed them to the U.S. attorney’s office in Boise.

“A long-forgotten wind is starting to blow. Do you hear the approaching thunder? . . . The stink of your lawless government has reached Heaven, the abode of Yahweh our Yahshua. Whether we live or whether we die, we will not bow to your evil commandments.”

Watching Weaver

The Marshals Service, under orders from the judge in Weaver’s weapons case to bring him into court, began laying the groundwork for what he expected would be a difficult arrest. Weaver, officials believed, had made it clear he wasn’t going to surrender easily, and his background as a Green Beret made it possible that he could mount a vicious defense from his remote mountaintop retreat.

They set up surveillance and began monitoring the Weaver family’s habits from the forested mountainsides around the cabin, presuming they were undetected.

But John Trochmann, a longtime friend of the Weaver family and now head of the Militia of Montana, remembers otherwise. On April 19, 1992, Trochmann said he drove up to the cabin to check on the Weavers and bring them supplies.

Vicki, he says, was sitting next to a cable strung out across the road, with children Sammy, Sara and Rachel standing around her. “She said: ‘John, what are you doing here?’ ” Trochmann recalled. “I thought . . . what do you mean, what am I doing here? What am I usually doing here? I came to visit. Then she said a very curious statement: ‘I don’t know who to believe anymore.’ She said: ‘John, turn around and look. There are marshals all along the hill behind you.’ So I did, and I saw them.”

Michael Johnson, former U.S. marshal for the district of Idaho, said he had taken extraordinary measures to persuade Weaver to surrender, all fruitless.

“The biggest frustration to me is that we spent so much time trying to figure out a way to apprehend Randy Weaver, when he was basically hiding behind his family, and to still have this outcome,” Johnson said in an interview.

“I even went around the U.S. attorney’s office and tried to cut another deal with Weaver in April of ‘92, after we were told in November not to do it. Weaver was given seven or eight opportunities [to surrender], and the last opportunity I gave him was so open-ended as to say: ‘What will it take? What do you want?’ I wanted to take one last chance, and Weaver said: ‘Stay off my mountain.’ ”

It was on a seemingly routine foray on Aug. 21, 1992, when Degan, commander of the marshals’ Northeast Task Force in Boston, joined five other marshals for a nighttime survey of the Weaver property.

As day broke, three marshals on Degan’s team crept down to the springhouse below the cabin when they were alerted that the Weaver family had run outside.

Weaver, in a dictated account of the events, said he heard a noise and sent Sammy and Harris out into the woods after what he hoped was a deer. A Justice Department inquiry failed to determine what happened when the two groups collided at the intersection of two old logging roads. The firefight left Degan, Sammy and Striker, the family dog, dead--but no one has determined who shot first.

Weaver’s lawyers insist that it began with the shooting of the dog, prompting Sammy to scream: “You son of a bitch!” and fire in fury. Harris has said he shot Degan after the marshals shot Sammy in the back.

The marshals agree that they shot the dog--and initially thought they might even have shot Harris--but insist they didn’t know Sammy had been hit until his body was found several days later. One of the marshals claimed Harris had wheeled around and shot Degan after the marshals announced their presence and ordered a halt.

But it was the events of the next day that have raised the most lingering questions about the government’s response.

Receiving reports that Deputy Marshals Arthur Roderick and Larry T. Cooper, who had stayed out on the mountainside with Degan’s body, were “pinned down,” the FBI’s elite hostage rescue team was flown in. The Idaho National Guard was called out. Armored personnel carriers began rumbling up the mountain. FBI supervisors communicated back and forth from the field to headquarters about what the shooting orders for snipers would be.

An initial plan was rejected because it did not contain an option for negotiating a peaceful surrender. FBI field commander Eugene Glenn told Justice Department investigators that he got final approval from FBI headquarters at 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 22 for a plan that included rules of engagement that have become the key controversy in the subsequent probe.

The rules appeared to go beyond standard FBI policy, which states that deadly force can only be used in the face of an imminent threat. Instead, they specified that deadly force “can and should be employed” against any armed adult leaving the cabin.

Glenn says former FBI Deputy Director Larry A. Potts, who was demoted because of publicity from the case and later suspended pending the cover-up investigation, approved the rules of engagement. Potts has adamantly denied that. He told investigators that the rules he approved said deadly force “could” be used against armed adults in the face of “the threat of death or grievous bodily harm,” a policy he believed was in line with standard FBI practice.

The FBI’s report on the incident that might have cleared up the question has disappeared.

The rules, by any measure, were extraordinary. Some of the FBI sharpshooters told Justice Department investigators they had never seen anything like them. A member of the Denver SWAT team called to Ruby Ridge told investigators he understood the policy as, “If you see ‘em, shoot ‘em.”

The FBI never got a chance to execute its negotiation strategy. It never even got a chance to broadcast its planned warning that the cabin was surrounded.

Instead, as a helicopter with senior FBI officials circled overhead for a look, Weaver, Harris and Sara came out of the cabin carrying guns. Harris said later that he was going to get a battery, while Weaver and Sara were going to the shed to see Sammy’s body. An FBI sniper said Weaver “was watching the helicopter, and at times he would kind of bring his weapon up and [I] perceived that perhaps he was trying to get a shot off.” The sniper fired, hitting Weaver in the arm. Then he fired at Harris.

The shot was taken slightly ahead of Harris as he ran for the cabin door. It went through the window on the door and hit Vicki Weaver as she stood unarmed behind it, holding her baby. Harris, hit by the same bullet, was wounded in the chest and the arm and lay for days in the cabin as the siege continued.

The next evening, as armored personnel carriers were leveling the cabin’s outbuildings, Sammy Weaver’s body was discovered. It was the first time, FBI officials say, that officers realized that he had been shot. The clearing stopped. Negotiation efforts were renewed.

Glenn “began to re-evaluate the intelligence he had received at the command post. The cabin’s occupants had not acted aggressively since the apparent attempt to fire on the helicopter 24 hours earlier,” Justice Department investigators said.

On Aug. 23, at 10:53 a.m., orders were issued downgrading the rules of engagement to the FBI’s standard policy on deadly force.

James (Bo) Gritz--a fellow ex-Green Beret with ties to the right-wing militia movement, and a 1992 presidential candidate--volunteered to go into the cabin to persuade Weaver to surrender. He was joined by retired Phoenix police officer Jack McLamb and the Weavers’ friend, Jackie Brown, who said she saw Harris lying on a recliner as she entered the stuffy cabin, its windows blacked out by the denim curtains Vicki had made.

“Right away, he said: ‘Jackie, I didn’t want to shoot him, they were killing Sam,” she recalled. “There were big tears coming down his face.”

The mood inside, she said, was “very calm. Scared, yes. But very much in control. . . . They believed that none of them were going to get out of there alive.”

Harris agreed to leave the cabin the next day and was flown by helicopter to a hospital. Later, Gritz went out to get a body bag, and Brown demanded towels and water to clean up the blood where Vicki’s corpse had lain for six days. It wasn’t until Weaver helped Gritz place his wife’s body in the bag, Brown said, that “Randy finally lost it.”

“That was the only time I saw him break down. He told Bo, he said: ‘Look what they’ve done to my beautiful wife.’ And then Bo and I carried her out of the cabin.”

A Secret Pact

McLamb said he and Gritz went into the cabin that last day, knowing that officials planned to place explosive charges on the doors and windows and storm the cabin by noon if the family didn’t come out. He said he and Gritz made a secret pact that they would wrestle the family to the floor and lay on top of them while the officers outside blew out the windows and doors. “And we’d try not to get shot for turning traitor,” he said.

McLamb said they stood in the living room and told Weaver about the plan to storm the cabin. They told them well-known defense lawyer Gerry Spence had agreed to represent him.

“They said they’d go pray [in the bedroom]. Then Randy came up and said: ‘Get away from the door.’ We didn’t know what was going to happen. . . . We stepped away from the door, and the door opened. They said: ‘We’re coming out.’ You talk about tears. We ran in there and grabbed the girls and cried and hugged each other for about 10 minutes.”

Finally, McLamb said, he took the hands of Sara and Rachel. Gritz had Weaver and the baby, who by that time had been without breast milk from her mother for six days. “We walked out of there, and even the officers, they were all crying,” McLamb said.

Eleven days after the siege began, it ended.

But in many ways, it’s still going on in these hills and valleys.

Here, Weaver’s frequent words that he just wanted “to be left alone” strike resonant chords. Makeshift cabins are lodged deep inside the woods all over these mountains. And many of the families inside them are deeply suspicious of times that seem to have gone bad and a government that seems only to get in the way.

Taking Sides

“The Weavers believed in an ‘end time,’ an Armageddon-type thing,” said Frank Reichert, a neighbor on Ruby Ridge who has begun editing an ultraconservative newspaper.

“But the whole issue is a polarizing thing. If you believe in the government, if you believe that regulations are for our own good, that your government is out to do what’s best for you, then you take one side. But if you believe that the government is a veil of tyranny coming down on us, then you’re going to believe something else. People are heating up. And it’s forcing people in the middle to take sides.”

Militia leaders and other anti-government groups in the region believe that many of the facts of the Weaver case may never be known. “There are many bits and pieces that make this whole picture quite gruesome,” Trochmann said. “An agent being shot . . . and no one being brought to justice. A 14-year-old kid . . . being shot in the back. How could these marshals coerce a child into a mortal gunfight and think they could get away with it? And then how could they expect to get away with shooting a mother in the face, unarmed, with a tiny baby in her arms? That’s not going to go away. It’s never going to go away until those that carried it out are brought to justice.”

From the other side, too, there is a disquieting sense that justice isn’t finished. Degan’s widow, Karen, refused to discuss the case, saying in a brief letter: “I will not diminish the value and strength of Bill’s commitment by talking about my personal sense of loss and injustice on the anniversary of his death.”

But she said: “The death of my husband remains the untold tragedy of the events of three years ago on Ruby Ridge.”