Ambush at Ruby Ridge

How government agents set Randy Weaver up and took his family down

Alan W. Bock from the October 1993 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

The arrival of the hostage team marked the beginning of buildup. At least 400 people equipped with sophisticated militar hardware, including "humvees," armored personnel carriers, an. various aircraft, were eventually deployed in the woods around Randy Weaver’s plywood cabin.

The rules of engagement supposedly required a warning before any shots were fired, but that didn’t happen. On August 22, the day after the shootout, Randy Weaver left the cabin for the little outbuilding that held his son’s body. As he raised his arm to unlatch the door to the shed, he was shot by a sniper posted on the mountainside. The bullet entered his right shoulder area and exited near his armpit. He and Kevin Harris, who was also outside, ran for the cabin. Vicki Weaver stood in the doorway, yelling for the two to hurry, cradling baby Elisheba in her arms. She was unarmed.

As Kevin Harris tumbled into the house, another shot from the sniper went through the glass window and entered Vicki Weaver’s temple, killing her instantly. The bullet and fragments of Vicki’s skull went on to injure Kevin Harris’s arm and torso, breaking a rib and puncturing one of his lungs.

The sniper, Lon Horiuchi, was a West Point graduate armed with state-of-the--art sniping equipment and trained to be accurate to within a quarter inch at 200 yards. He claims he missed Kevin and hit Vicki by accident. But Bo Gritz, the former Green Beret commander who eventually negotiated Randy Weaver’s surrender, said that after he became a negotiator the FBI showed him a psychological profile of the family prepared for the Marshals Service before the siege that described Vicki as the "dominant member" of the family. "Vicki was the maternal head of the family," Gritz told the Spokane Spokesmar-Review. "I believe Vicki was shot purposely by the sniper as a priority target....The profile said, if you get a chance, take Vicki Weaver out."

In any case, Vicki Weaver was dead. Her body remained in the kitchen, covered with a sheet, for a week. Gritz, who thought he remembered Randy Weaver from Weaver’s days as a Green Beret, arrived on the scene and offered to try talking Randy out peacefully. At first the FBI ignored him, but eventually they let him approach the cabin. Gritz secured a promise from Wyoming trial lawyer Gerry Spence, whose previous clients had included Imelda Marcos and the family of Karen Silkwood, to represent Weaver if he surrendered peacefully.

On Sunday, August 30, Vicki Weaver’s body was removed, and Kevin Harris, whose wound was infected, was taken to a hospital under heavy guard. Around noon the following day, after lengthy discussions with Gritz, Randy Weaver and the three girls came out. Randy was arrested, and his daughters were met by their maternal grandparents, who later took them back to Iowa.

Ron Howen, the assistant U.S. attorney who had been on hand during the siege, secured a 10-count grandjury indictment of Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris in September. As the trial began in April, U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge told the seven-woman, five-man jury: "This will be one of the most interesting cases you could be asked to sit on as jurors." As Dean Miller, staff writer for the Spokesman-Review, wrote later: "If anything, Lodge’s remark was an understatement."

The first of 54 government witnesses was Deputy U.S. Marshal Lawrence Cooper, who appeared in court wearing the same paramilitary full-camouflage regalia he had worn the day Sammy Weaver and William Degan were killed. A couple of witnesses detailed the confusion about when Randy Weaver’s original court date had been scheduled. Then came a long string of witnesses testifying about the Weavers’ beliefs. Although no evidence was presented to tie the Weaver family to neo-Nazi activities, the full panoply of right-wing anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic beliefs was trotted before the jury. Spence objected, saying the prosecution was attempting to "demonize" his client, but the prosecution was allowed to spend several days describing conspiracy theories, interlocking groups, and violent activities.

Spence and the other defense attorneys used cross-examination to poke holes in the sometimes shifting stories of government witnesses and to put the government on trial indirectly. They uncovered the embarrassing fact that some bullets had been removed from the scene, then brought back later to be dropped on the ground and photographed. They made sure jurors got a closeup look at photographs of the dead dog, Striker, with tracks showing that tank-like vehicles had run over his lifeless body several times. They got the original snitch to admit that it was difficult to persuade Randy Weaver to sell sawed-off shotguns, that Weaver had little inclination to break the law.

Judge Lodge issued a formal reprimand and imposed a fine on the prosecution after background information on the sniper and his initial reports–ordered to be made available to the defense–was sent by fourth-class mail from Washington, D.C., arriving the day after the sniper had testified. The defense team got a government ballistics expert to admit, after poring over maps and diagrams of the "Y," that the physical evidence supported the defense’s version of events as easily as it did the prosecution’s.

At one point, with the jury out of the courtroom as attorneys argued whether a witness should be called, Judge Lodge wondered aloud why Spence was objecting. By Lodge’s estimate, about 75 percent of the testimony from government witnesses so far had helped the defense. When the prosecution was finished, the defense declined to call a single witness, saying the government had so manifestly failed to prove its case that no defense was necessary.

On the final Friday of the case, Spokesman-Review writer Dean Miller reported, lead prosecutor Ron Howen "was 15 minutes into his response to the defense motion for dismissal when he appeared to lose his train of thought. Up to that time, his left hand was shaking violently and his delivery lacked its characteristic vigor. After a long pause, he sighed loudly, shuffled through his notes and looked over at co-prosecutor Kim Lindquist, who smiled encouragingly back, raising his eyebrows. Howen turned back to his notes and then stopped. ‘I’m sorry, judge, I can’t continue,’ he said, his voice unsteady." He left the courtroom and did not return after a recess. Lindquist had to present the closing argument the following Tuesday.

Spence was pleased by the verdict but not satisfied. "A jury today has said that you can’t kill somebody just because you wear badges, and then cover up those homicides by prosecuting the innocent," he said. "What are we now going to do about the deaths of Vicki Weaver, a mother who was killed with a baby in her arms, and Sammy Weaver, a boy who was shot in the back? Somebody has to answer for those deaths." Boundary County Prosecutor Randall Day, whose jurisdiction includes Naples, has the option of filing charges against the officials involved in the deaths, but he hasn’t disclosed his plans yet. Spence has said he would like to be deputized to prosecute the case himself. A civil suit on behalf of Randy Weaver is a virtual certainty.

If the holocaust in Waco hadn’t happened even as the Weaver trial was under way, all this might be an essentially regional story of government bungling with tragic results. But Waco did happen. The lead agency was the BATF, determined to make an arrest of dubious public-safety importance with an overwhelming show of force. The FBI got involved when the confrontation became a siege (Dick Rogers was on the scene at Waco too), and massive amounts of military and paramilitary equipment were deployed against American citizens. The option of a simple arrest was rejected in favor of a military-style attack. Innocent people were killed.

If you talked to some of the self-styled patriots who hung around the Boise courthouse, you would hear all kinds of scary theories. The Weaver operation was just a dress rehearsal for Waco, which was part of a government campaign to shut down, intimidate, or terrorize minority religious groups and political dissenters. Now and then, you’d hear that the real problem was Zionist control of the government.

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(d)N0t » Blog Archive » Dream Not Of Today – Obama’s Chance to Close Gitmo by Robert links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…alone a fair trial. Our government would never persecute, torture, and even kill innocent people to advance its own agenda, would they? Just look at the rubble the US government left in Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho. It is highly likely that faced with this political climate, Obama will cave and try them in military courts, where they probably will be found guilty and locked up indefinitely. I could be wrong, and…