weemadando wrote:Look, I'm going to address two points here:
1- Shooting of the dog. The ATF agents were within their rights to be shooting the dog. If an animal was looking like it would a) compromise the operation or b) attack one of the officers, then they have the right to shoot it. From what I understand of the circumstances the shooting the dog though arguably not a neccessity was certainly a decision made well, based on available information. Any animal that has been trained as a guarddog or similar is classed as an offensive weapon. It would be the same as if someone had pulled a gun on the officers. They have the right to fire if they feel that their lives are threatened. You might say: what threat is a dog to a group of officers in body armour? Should that dog bark, it would alert the occupants of the house before the officers are in position, thus opening them up for an attack. Also, a dog can still cause you a lot of pain and hassles even IF you are in body armour.
As such, the shooting of the dog was justified. Don't confuse this with someone shooting your dog with a rifle for the hell of it. This was a warranted raid situation and the dog presented a clear and present danger to the safety of the officers.
Anyway, this is what happened:
August 21,1992
"You three know where you're going?" Deputy Marshal Arthur T. Roderick, Jr.
asked the members of the other three-man team. "The north peak?"
"Yeah, no problem."
"Looks like it's going to be a hot one. You guys going to wear body armor along with all that camo gear?" one of the group asked.
"Screw that. It's a big enough pain in the ass we got to lug around all this other shit every day, 'specially in the heat."
"That's the truth."
The six deputy marshals all decided to forego body armor that day.
What was going on that morning was nothing new. Federal marshals from the U. S. Marshal's Service had
been spying on the Weaver house for eighteen months, ever since Weaver had failed to show up for his
court date in February of 1991. For the first year, the Weaver 'mission' had been run by the northern Idaho
office of the U.S. Marshal's Service.
In March of 1992, however, control of the federal operation was handed over to the Marshal's Service
headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, two thousand miles away. In that month,
Deputy Marshal Arthur T.
Roderick, Jr., a member of the Marshal's Service's Special Operations Group, was sent from Arlington
headquarters to Idaho to take command of the Weaver operation.
Roderick was heading a six-man unit. He had split the group into two three-man teams. One team's job was
to watch the Weaver cabin from the distant vantage point of a mountain peak. The other team, which
included Roderick, planned to penetrate the dense woods immediately below Randy Weaver's house.
The other two members of Roderick's team were William Degan and Larry Cooper.
Although Roderick
himself had made over two dozen clandestine trips to the area around Randy Weaver's cabin in the past six
months, Degan and Cooper were new to this part of the operation. Roderick's plan was to move an
undercover agent onto the land adjacent to Weaver's, and, over the next few months, have him gain Randy
Weaver's confidence. Degan and/or Cooper were potential choices for this role, and Roderick intended to
familiarize them both with Weaver's property and the land around it.
"All set?" Arthur Roderick asked.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Hope it doesn't get too hot, with all this gear."
The three men on the penetration team wore camouflage over their entire bodies. On their heads were night
vision goggles. In their packs they carried still cameras, movie cameras, and electronics gear for
surveillance. Clipped to their harnesses were secure-voice radios. Roderick, Degan, and Cooper each
carried both a pistol and a machine gun. Roderick and Degan had Colt Ml6s, while Cooper's machine gun
was a 9mm with a sound suppressor. Between the three of them, the marshals were carrying four NFA
weapons.three machine guns and a silencer. None of the three men had filled out any registration forms
or paid any taxes on any of the four NFA weapons they carried, nor were any of the agents special
(occupational) taxpayers.
Randy Weaver had been under constant federal surveillance for eighteen months. The cost of this operation
would exceed what the government would spend on intelligence-gathering before the invasion of Haiti.
Federal agents carrying machine guns and over $50,000 worth of surveillance gear (but no search or arrest
warrants) were once again about to invade Weaver's property. All this was due to the feds' claim that a
piece of wood had been 3/8" too short, and Weaver had not paid a $5 tax on it.
The appalling irony of this situation was lost on Deputy Marshals Roderick, Degan, and Cooper.
"Oh, shit," Larry Cooper said. The three of them were in the woods below the Weaver family's cabin. It
was a little before 11:00 in the morning, and a dog had just started barking.
"Must've caught our scent," William Degan said.
"Let's get out of here," Arthur Roderick suggested. "Your machine gun has
a silencer," he said to Cooper.
"You shoot the dog." The three heavily armed deputy marshals began to
run down the hill.
"Sounds like Striker's found a deer," Kevin Harris said to Sammy Weaver.
Harris was a twenty-five-year-old logger, a family friend who spent much of his time at the Weaver cabin. Sammy and Kevin grabbed
their rifles from the wall rack and ran out the door towards the sound of Sammy's yellow Labrador
retriever.
As the dog approached, the three feds crouched down in the heavy brush and remained still. They were all
but invisible, for they wore not only camouflage clothing from head to toe, but also camo face paint. The
three men watched as the dog approached.
The yellow lab was much more of a pet than a guard dog. Striker had been around people all his life, and
because of the constant federal surveillance, the land around the Weaver cabin had been loaded with traces
of human scent for over a year. The dog had a good nose for birds and animals, but human scent did not set
him off. Striker had started barking not because he had smelled the deputy marshals, but because he had
heard them moving through the brush below the house. Now they were silent.
Roderick, Degan, and Cooper watched as the dog approached where they were hiding. Sammy Weaver and
Kevin Harris followed about sixty yards behind the yellow Lab.
No point in shooting now Cooper thought as the dog walked past the hiding place and continued down the
mountain. The Lab was no threat, and the 9mm machine gun Cooper carried, even with its sound
suppressor, would easily be heard by the two approaching young men. Best to wait here until they all go
away Cooper told himself as he watched the dog walk away from him and his two companions. Larry
Cooper was completely unprepared for what happened next.
Why doesn't he kill it? Deputy Marshal Arthur Roderick thought as the Labrador passed by their hiding
place. Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris were almost to the three agents when Roderick stood up, flipped
the selector lever of his M16 to 'semi', shouldered the rifle, and shot Weaver's dog in the rear.
The animal yelped once loudly enough to be heard over the rifle's tremendous muzzle blast, then died. Its spine had
been shattered by the high velocity rifle bullet.
"Sammy! Kevin! What's going on?" Randy Weaver shouted from above when he heard the shot.
Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris were taken utterly by surprise as the sound of the .223 blasted in their
ears. The Weaver boy had been watching Striker, and when he saw his dog killed, he whirled towards the
source of the shot and instinctively fired two quick rounds from his rifle in that general direction, then ran
towards the cabin. Neither shot hit anything other than brush.
"I'm coming, Dad!" the boy yelled. He had taken three steps before two rifle bullets slammed into him. The
first struck him in the upper arm, very nearly severing the limb from his body. The second hit him in the
back. Sammy Weaver's legs carried him two more steps before he fell on his face, dead. He had just
recently turned fourteen.
Randy Weaver, up on an adjacent logging road, was carrying a shotgun when he heard the shots ring out. A
shotgun was useless at that distance, so he started firing the weapon in the air as he ran towards the cabin.
He hoped to distract the feds from Sammy and Kevin and allow the two boys to escape. Randy Weaver did
not realize that his son was already dead.
Kevin Harris watched in horror as the boy he had known for nine years died before his eyes. Instinctively,
with his rifle held at waist level, Harris fired from the hip at the man who had killed Sammy, then turned
and ran. Kevin Harris proved to be more proficient at point shooting than his young friend had been. The
bullet hit Began in the rib cage, smashing several ribs and exiting behind his armpit. The bullet caused
massive trauma and hemmorhage into Degan's lung, killing the man.
Kevin Harris made it back to the cabin
safely.
As a terrified Roderick and Cooper stayed hidden in the bushes, the weather turned colder and it started to
rain. The two deputy marshals huddled by the body of their dead companion, shivering in the cold rain as
they waited for someone to come save them.
Finally, after nightfall, an Idaho State Police SWAT team
rescued the two men and recovered the dead marshal's corpse.
When sworn testimony was taken, Roderick and Cooper would repeat their initial statements that they had
made to the FBI. The two men said that Harris had fired the first shot, hitting Degan in the chest, and only
after Harris had killed their fellow marshal did the two feds return fire.
There would be several problems with this claim: The first was that both 14-year-old Sammy Weaver and
his yellow Labrador had been shot from behind. The second was that if Harris had fired the first shot of the
firefight, killing Began, it was certainly an odd response for Roderick to shoot the dog and let the young
man who had just killed his partner get away.
The final and most troubling fact that did not square with the marshals' claim was that seven pieces of .223
brass would be found next to where Began's corpse had fallen. These fired cases had come from Began's
M16 which, according to Deputy Marshal Cooper's sworn testimony, had been set on 'semi-automatic'
when Cooper later picked it up.
William Began had fired seven shots before he died. Many would claim
that Began could only have fired these rounds before Kevin Harris fired the single shot that tore through Began's chest and killed the marshal. Others quickly countered that Began had held his fire, then pulled the
trigger of his weapon seven times as fast as he could before falling down dead.
Another deputy marshal, a man named Jack Cluff, would do his part to exonerate Marshals Roderick and
Cooper by giving the Salt Lake Tribune yet another version of what had happened on that morning. In an
article that the Utah newspaper published two weeks later, Cluff explained that after Began had been shot,
Roderick and Cooper '...dove into a natural depression in the ground...held their guns overhead and cranked
off rounds blindly in front of them. Presumably, Samuel Weaver was killed in the exchange.'
Though Cluff would fail to mention it, presumably the dog was also killed in this panicked spray-and-pray
maneuver. Cluff would also fail to mention how he came by this proprietary knowledge about the incident,
given that he was not present when the shooting occurred.
