Remembering Ruby Ridge
We reached out to a number of key players involved with the Ruby Ridge incident and asked them for some remembrances from 25 years ago. The following excerpts were submitted by the individual listed, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sandpoint Reader editorial staff. Next week, we will publish additional remembrances.
Lt. Col. “Bo” Gritz
GERRY SPENCE
Jess walter
Mike Weland. Mike Weland is author of “An Interview with the Randy Weaver Family,” published in the Bonners Ferry Herald May 2, 1992. Weland is currently editor of News Bonners Ferry (www.newsbf.com)
Gerry Spence.
“Bo” Gritz. Lt. Col. Bo Gritz (ret.), 22-year army veteran with the U.S. Special Forces and author of three books (most recently, “My Brother’s Keeper”). Uninvited, he traveled to Naples and negotiated the surrender of Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris, ending the siege. He now lives in Nevada with his wife, Judy. (www.bogritz.com): Dick Rogers, the FBI Hostage Response Team Commander said to me: “If you don’t have them out by noon, we’re going to take them out! If you’re with them, you’ll go with them!” I couldn’t tell the Weavers, it would cause them to be more determined to die in place like Sammy and Vicki. Randy Weaver told me: “Thank You, Bo, but they will have to kill us like they did our mom, and little brother.” I prayed hard and suddenly the door opened, and Randy told his daughters: “Get your things together, we’re going to follow Colonel Bo down the hill.” I had Randy’s right hand tightly in my left as we started down the rickety stairway. The girls, huddled together, closely followed. I had called Gerry Spence, Esq. the day before, and by God’s Grace, he agreed to defend Randy for free. Ruby Ridge was space in time when federal law enforcement blanked out the U.S. Constitution and went as crazy as a demented PTSD combat vet. In this madness four lives were violently taken (U.S. Marshal William Degan, Sammy and Vicki Weaver, along with their loyal dog, Striker. Sorry to say this wasn’t the end. I’ve been involved in more than a dozen other deadly sieges where Americans were in harm’s way thinking they were right when the government thought them to be wrong. 18 /
R
/ August 17, 2017
One of the nation’s most well-known attorneys, Spence has never lost a criminal case, and has not lost a civil case since 1969. He successfully defended Randy Weaver on murder, assault, conspiracy and gun charges in the famous Idaho federal standoff case at no charge. Spence is the founder and director of the nonprofit Trial Lawyers College (triallawyerscollege.org) where lawyers, young and old, learn the Spence method of trying cases on behalf of the people. Now retired, the law firm he established is still active and can be found at spencelawyers.com: My most vivid memory of that time is the terrifying power the United States, including its military, launched against an innocent family trying to survive in the wilderness. It brought great shame on our government and its agencies and was a precursor to a totalitarian nation. Twenty-five year later we have likely learned little. The human memory is both short-lived and flawed, and the forces that brought on the standoff at Ruby Ridge are still at play, mostly unfettered.
Randy Weaver, left, talks with his counsel Gerry Spence, right, during his trial. Public Domain photo.
Mike Weland
Jess Walter. Jess Walter, author of six novels including “And Every Knee Shall Bow: the Truth and Tragedy of Ruby Ridge and the Randy Weaver Family,” a reporter for the Spokesman-Review at the time of the siege: The entire thing is vivid in some ways, and watching the PBS miniseries really brought the whole thing back. A few things pop out: the anger and fear at the roadblock — hundreds of state and federal agents and angry protesters, including some skinheads and others who seemed to want to spark more violence. There were times when it felt like something awful was going to happen. And the day the standoff ended, when a few of us reporters were taken up to the cabin. There were federal agents wandering around, and maybe I’m reading too much into their faces, but I wondered later if they were thinking what I was thinking, that this plywood cabin wasn’t the “compound” that officials had talked about, that this had all gotten so horribly out of hand, that it was too much for, as Sara Weaver would say, “one family.” I don’t know that it’s something I learned, but something I’ve observed over the years is how our political disunity is more than just disagreeing over whether abortion should be legal or how much money teachers should make. We are at a place now where the right and left in this country don’t even see the same reality, can’t even find a common set of facts. Ruby Ridge showed what can happen when the middle ground loses its purchase, when sides dehumanize one another, when paranoia and blunt force take the place of basic humanity.
I have many vivid memories of the siege. As a reserve Bonners Ferry police officer sworn in three days before, I was among the first to help block Ruby Creek Road shortly after the marshals reported the firefight. As the only reporter to sit down with the family prior to the siege, I remember sitting with the surviving family dog, who was tied to a tree at the base of their road and so grateful for the attention. I remember watching the sniper teams walk by as they changed shifts, how fast “Federal Way” transformed from an empty meadow to the second biggest city in Boundary County and laughing when someone posted the cardboard sign to a fence on the road in. Young agents stuck for hours at a time, ear glued to a telephone on the end of an open line to Washington, D.C., with no one, not even the agents in charge, able to make but the simplest decision, and even then, nearly every federal decision made being wrong. I remember the anguish of many of those agents, worried about their families on the east coast facing a major hurricane while they were on a hill in Idaho. Helping carry the body bag holding Samuel Weaver, the 11-year-old boy who so impressed me once the family adjusted to my presence, to the helicopter for the flight off the hill, thinking how small and light he was, of the feeling that went through the crowd gathered at the roadblock when news broke that Vicki Weaver was dead. Looking back, what strikes me most is how quickly mistrust on both sides so quickly and tragically escalated, how such trivial actions blew so insanely out of proportion: Randy Weaver, a cold-blooded Green Beret killer with the hate and the know-how to pose a lethal threat to the might of the federal government. A small wooden shack transformed into a fortress, an idyllic meadow into an armed federal compound overnight. How easily the scenario was repeated just months later in Waco, and how easily it could, to this day, be repeated again.