Randy Weaver, a former
Iowa factory worker and
U.S. Army soldier, moved with his wife and four children from Iowa to northern
Idaho during the 1980s so they could "
home-school his children and escape what he and his wife Vicki saw as a corrupted world." In 1978, Vicki, the religious leader of the family, began to have recurrent dreams of living on a mountaintop and believed that the
apocalypse was imminent. After the birth of their son, Samuel, the Weavers began selling their belongings and visited the
Amish to learn how to live without electricity. In 1984, Randy Weaver and his neighbor Terry Kinnison had a dispute over a $3,000 land deal. Kinnison lost the ensuing lawsuit and was ordered to pay Weaver an additional $2,100 in court costs and
damages. Kinnison wrote letters to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the
Secret Service, and the county
sheriff in which he alleged that Weaver had threatened to kill
Pope John Paul II,
President Ronald Reagan, and
Idaho Governor John V. Evans. In January 1985, the FBI and the Secret Service launched an investigation into allegations that Weaver had made threats against Reagan and other government and law enforcement officials. On February 12, Weaver and his wife were interviewed by two FBI agents, two Secret Service agents, and the Boundary County sheriff and his chief investigator. The Secret Service had been told that Weaver was a member of
Aryan Nations (an antisemitic,
Neo-Nazi, white supremacist terrorist organization) and that he had a large weapons cache at his residence. Weaver denied these allegations, and the government filed no charges. On three or four occasions, the Weavers had attended Aryan Nations meetings at
Hayden Lake, where there was a compound for government resisters and
white supremacists/
separatists. The investigation noted that Weaver associated with Frank Kumnick, who was known to associate with members of Aryan Nations. Weaver told the investigators that neither he nor Kumnick was a member of Aryan Nations but he stated that Kumnick was "associated with
The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord." On February 28, Randy and Vicki Weaver filed an
affidavit with the county courthouse alleging that their personal enemies were plotting to provoke the FBI into attacking and killing the Weaver family. On May 6, the Weavers sent President Reagan a letter claiming that their enemies might sent Reagan a threatening letter under a forged signature. In 1992, the prosecutor cited the 1985 letter as an
overt act of the Weaver family's conspiracy against the federal government.
ATF involvement The
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) first became aware of Weaver in July 1986, when he was introduced to a confidential ATF informant at a meeting at the World Aryan Congress. The informant portrayed himself as a weapons dealer working with
motorcycle gangs. Weaver had been invited to the meeting by Kumnick, the original target of the ATF investigation. It was Weaver's first time at this Congress. Over the next three years, Weaver and the informant met several times. In July 1989, Weaver invited the informant to his home to discuss forming a group to fight the "
Zionist Organized Government", referring to the U.S. government. In October 1989, the ATF claimed that Weaver sold the informant two
sawed-off shotguns, with the overall length of the guns
shorter than the limit set by federal law. In November 1989, Weaver accused the ATF informant of being a spy for the police; Weaver later wrote he had been warned by "Rico V." The informant's handler, Herb Byerly, ordered him to have no further contact with Weaver. Eventually, FBI informant Rico Valentino outed the ATF informant to Aryan Nations security. In June 1990, Byerly attempted to use the sawed-off shotgun charge as leverage to get Weaver to act as an informant for his investigation into Aryan Nations. Weaver refused to become a "snitch", and the ATF filed the gun charges in June 1990. The ATF alleged that Weaver was a bank robber with criminal convictions. A federal grand jury indicted Weaver in December 1990 for making and possessing, but not for selling, illegal weapons in October 1989. The ATF concluded it would be too dangerous for agents to arrest Weaver at his property. In January 1991, ATF agents posed as broken-down motorists and arrested Weaver when he and Vicki stopped to assist. Weaver was told of the charges against him, released on
bail, and told that his trial would begin on February 19, 1991. On January 22, the judge in the case appointed attorney Everett Hofmeister as Weaver's legal representative. The same day, Weaver called
probation officer Karl Richins and told him that he had been instructed to contact Richins on that date. Richins did not have the case file at that time, so he asked Weaver to leave his contact information and said he would contact him when he received the paperwork. According to Richins, Weaver did not give him a telephone number. Hofmeister sent Weaver letters on January 19, January 31, and February 5, asking Weaver to contact him to work on his
defense within the federal court system. On February 5, the trial date was changed from February 19 to 20 to give participants more travel time following
a federal holiday. The
court clerk sent the parties a letter informing them of the date change, but the notice was not sent directly to Weaver, only to Hofmeister. On February 7, Richins sent Weaver a letter indicating that he had the case file and needed to talk with Weaver. This letter erroneously stated that Weaver's trial date was March 20. On February 8, Hofmeister again attempted to contact Weaver by letter informing him that the trial was to begin on February 20 and that Weaver needed to contact him immediately. Hofmeister also made several calls to individuals who knew Weaver, asking them to call him Hofmeister told
U.S. District Court Judge
Harold Lyman Ryan that he had been unable to reach Weaver before the scheduled court date. When Weaver did not appear in court on February 20, Ryan issued a
bench warrant for failure to appear in court. The USMS agreed to put off executing the warrant until after March 20 in order to see whether Weaver would show up in court on that day. If he were to show up on March 20, the
Department of Justice claimed that all indications are that the warrant would have been dropped. But instead, the
U.S. Attorney's Office (USAO) called a
grand jury on March 14. The USAO did not inform the grand jury of Richins's letter and the grand jury issued an
indictment for failure to appear. As the law enforcement arm of the federal courts, the USMS were responsible for arresting and bring in Weaver, now considered a
fugitive. Weaver simply stayed in his remote home, stating he would resist any attempt to take him by force. Weaver was known to have an intense distrust of government. The erroneous Richins letter compounded this sentiment and may have contributed to Weaver's reluctance to appear for trial. He was suspicious of what he thought were inconsistent messages from the government and his lawyer; he began to think there was a conspiracy against him. The U.S. Attorney directed that all negotiations go through Hofmeister, but Weaver refused to talk with him. Marshals began preparing plans to capture Weaver to stand trial on the weapons charges and his failure to appear at the correct trial date. Although marshals stopped the negotiations as ordered, they made other contact. On March 4, 1992, U.S. Marshals Ron Evans and Jack Cluff drove to the Weaver property and spoke with Weaver, posing as real-estate prospects.
Threat source profile Beginning in February 1991, the USMS developed a Threat Source Profile on Weaver. Agents' failure to integrate new information into that profile was criticized in a 1995 report by a subcommittee of the
Senate Judiciary Committee: The Subcommittee is ... concerned that, as Marshals investigating the Weaver case learned facts that contradicted information they previously had been provided, they did not adequately integrate their updated knowledge into their overall assessment of who Randy Weaver was or what threat he might pose. If the Marshals made any attempt to assess the credibility of the various people who gave them information about Weaver, they never recorded their assessments. Thus, rather than maintaining the Threat Source Profile as a
living document, the Marshals added new reports to an ever-expanding file, and their overall assessment never really changed. These problems rendered it difficult for other law enforcement officials to assess the Weaver case accurately without the benefit of first-hand briefings from persons who had continuing involvement with him. Many of the people the USMS used as third party go-betweens on the Weaver case—Bill and Judy Grider, Alan Jeppeson, and
Richard Butler—were assessed by the Marshals as more radical than the Weavers. When Deputy U.S. Marshal (DUSM) Dave Hunt asked Grider, "Why shouldn't I just go up there ... and talk to him?", Grider replied, "Let me put it to you this way. If I was sitting on my property and somebody with a gun comes to do me harm, then I'll probably shoot him." The Subcommittee said that the profile included "a brief psychological profile completed by a person who had conducted no firsthand interviews and was so unfamiliar with the case that he referred to Weaver as 'Mr. Randall' throughout". A later memo circulated within the Justice Department opined that: A review of Weaver's
DD-214 in an investigation after the events of Ruby Ridge revealed that Weaver had never been a Green Beret or a member of the Special Forces; it was possible he had received some general demolition training as a "combat engineer." That day in Idaho, U.S. Marshals were installing surveillance cameras overlooking the Weaver property. In a field report dated April 18, 1992, Marshal W. Warren Mays noted the sighting of a helicopter near the Weaver property but did not report hearing any gunfire. In an interview with a
Coeur D'Alene newspaper, Weaver denied that anyone had fired at the helicopter. When interviewed by the FBI, co-pilot Richard Weiss said that Weaver had not fired on his helicopter. The Ruby Ridge Task Force report said that when the "indictment [of Weaver] was presented to the grand jury, the prosecution had evidence that no shots had been fired at the helicopter." Media reports that Weaver had fired on the Rivera helicopter became part of the justification later cited by U.S. Marshal Wayne "Duke" Smith and FBI HRT Commander Richard Rogers in drawing up the Ruby Ridge
rules of engagement on August 21–22, 1992. Also, in spite of Weiss's repeated denials that shots had been fired at his helicopter, Howen charged that, as Overt Act 32 of the Weavers' Conspiracy Against the Federal Government, Randy, Vicki, and Harris fired two shots at the Rivera helicopter. Operation "Northern Exposure" was suspended for three months due to the confirmation hearings for
United States Marshals Service Director Henry E. Hudson. ==August 21 firefight: The deaths of Samuel Weaver and Deputy Marshal Degan==