Victim’s Family Testifies at a Hearing for FBI Sniper

Under stepped-up security in one of the nation’s hotbeds of anti-government sentiment, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi appeared in a courtroom here Tuesday to face charges that he illegally fired the precision rifle blast that killed the wife of white separatist Randy Weaver and triggered the end of the infamous siege at Ruby Ridge.

The preliminary hearing on involuntary-manslaughter charges marked the first time the Weaver family has testified about the August 1992 standoff, a landmark in the rise of the American militia movement and a turning point in the FBI’s use of confrontation with entrenched anti-government militants.

The 11-day siege, triggered when federal agents descended on the mountaintop cabin where Weaver and his family were holed up with guns and ammunition, left Vicki Weaver dead, along with the Weavers’ 14-year-old son and a deputy U.S. marshal.

In emotionally wrenching testimony that recalled the panic inside the tiny cabin, Sara Weaver on Tuesday said her mother was standing at the door clutching her baby daughter, Alisheba, and urging the family to run back inside, moments after Randy Weaver had been shot in the shoulder near a shed outside.

Sara Weaver, 16 years old at the time, testified that she heard the fatal shot break through the glass on the cabin door as she ran inside past her mother, with family friend Kevin Harris and her father in quick pursuit.

“I felt things on my face. I felt a ringing in my ear. I don’t know whether what was on my face was part of my mother, or the glass, or what,” she said, choking back tears.

Randy Weaver testified that after being shot, his wife fell to her knees, still cradling her baby. “I picked her up and I brushed her hair back out of her face a little bit, and it was all bloody,” he said. “I think she was still pumping a lot of blood, even when I pulled her inside the house. And then it stopped.”

Weaver and Harris were tried and acquitted in federal court on charges of killing Deputy Marshal William Degan. But this hearing marked the first time in the five-year public debate over the siege that a federal agent has faced criminal charges for the shots fired at Ruby Ridge.

“It’s very important that police agencies are held accountable just like the rest of us,” Randy Weaver, 49, said after the hearing. The judge is expected to rule next month whether Horiuchi will be held over for trial. “It’s not only important for our family to see some justice, but it’s important for the country, period. It’s like my Grandpa Weaver used to say, the government’s just like a garden: You gotta weed it every now and then.”

Horiuchi, a veteran of the FBI’s hostage rescue team, sat silently in the courtroom as Weaver and his daughter recounted the day that Vicki Weaver was shot. Horiuchi has said he was aiming at Harris, who was struck by the same bullet after it passed through Vicki Weaver.

Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman, appointed to help prosecute the case, said Horiuchi recklessly fired a shot with no way of determining who might get hit. “What you’ve got here is a guy from 200 yards shooting into a crowd of people, quite like a maniac throwing something off the roof of a tall building in an area congested with people,” he said.

“I see no difference between this and a drive-by shooting in the ‘hood. In the latter case, some black or Latino would be on death row. But in this case, the federal government is defending what happened.”

But Adam Hoffinger, one of a team of lawyers hired by the Justice Department to defend Horiuchi, said prosecutors did not come close to proving that Horiuchi violated the standards established for trained law enforcement officers in the midst of a standoff with well-armed and entrenched anti-government activists.

“There’s been no testimony whatsoever about what the standard of care was for a hostage rescue team sniper. There’s been no testimony whatsoever about whether there was a breach in that standard of care,” he argued.

“We’re talking about a hostage rescue team sniper who was sent up to do a highly specialized task. The standard of care has to be different for a medic who conducts emergency medicine in wartime and a plastic surgeon who conducts medicine in Beverly Hills. The state hasn’t come close to dealing with that.”

What Horiuchi saw when he scanned the front door of the cabin with his high-powered rifle is a key issue in the case. The FBI was operating under special rules of engagement that called for officers to shoot any armed male--essentially, orders to shoot on sight. Even under those rules, which a federal appeals court has ruled were unconstitutional, it would not have been legal for Horiuchi to fire at Vicki Weaver had he seen her.

On Tuesday, Randy Weaver testified for the first time that his wife had actually walked outside the cabin, holding the baby, a few minutes before the shooting--enough to place snipers on notice, presumably, that she might have been standing near the door as Horiuchi trained his sights on Harris.

Hoffinger quickly raised doubts about the testimony, wondering aloud whether the young mother, an automatic pistol strapped to her hip, would have been carrying her daughter when she ran outside the cabin after her husband had been shot.

“You’re telling us she was carrying her baby in the middle of a firefight, knowing that one shot had been fired?” he asked incredulously.

Throughout the four-hour hearing before Idaho District Judge Quentin Harden, Hoffinger attempted to place the shooting in the context of federal agents facing well-armed, heavily entrenched family members who were not prepared to surrender without a fight.

He questioned Sara Weaver about swastikas and notes about the American Nazi Party on her calendar, and a reference to Martin Luther King Jr. Day as “Coon Day.” He read portions of a poem she had written that included such passages as: “Awake O White Man and rise to fight,/ For there is terror in the air/ And screams in the night . . ./ Take up your sword, take up your gun,/ Yahweh is a man of war, be ready to kill . . . “

“Isn’t it a fact that long before August 22, your father prepared you and your family members for a war against the federal government? Isn’t it a fact that both you and your mother were both crack shots, and were better than your father?” he asked. “You were ready to engage the enemy, the federal government on Aug. 22, weren’t you?”

“Sir,” Sara Weaver replied, “I wasn’t ready to do anything except mourn.”

Boundary County prosecutor Denise Woodbury said she had expected to call several of Horiuchi’s fellow agents to testify, but the Justice Department refused to voluntarily supply them. Should Horiuchi be bound over for trial, she said, she will issue subpoenas.

In an unusual move, Yagman called Horiuchi to testify. But his lawyers vigorously opposed the attempt, and the judge instead agreed to admit transcripts from the agent’s testimony in the original criminal case against Weaver and Harris. In that case, he admitted he fired the fatal shot but said he was aiming at Harris and never saw Vicki Weaver.

Harden made an initial ruling that Horiuchi had unlawfully killed Vicki Weaver in the operation of a firearm, but he held off on determining whether there was sufficient cause to hold him for trial on involuntary-manslaughter charges. Before making that determination, the judge asked lawyers to submit further arguments about how egregious a case of negligence, recklessness or carelessness would have to be to meet the test of the manslaughter statute.

Those arguments are due on Dec. 29. On Jan. 12, a separate hearing is scheduled in federal court on Horiuchi’s motion to have the entire matter transferred to U.S. District Court, where he would be permitted to argue that he is entitled to immunity from prosecution because he was carrying out his duties as a federal law enforcement agent.

But Yagman said Horiuchi is not entitled to assert that defense, either to claim immunity or to assert that the rules of engagement drafted by his superiors allowed him to fire the shots at the cabin.