Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family

by Jess Walter

  Randy didn’t see anything. But on the way back to the cabin, he stopped and stared full at the birthing shed. “I just gotta see Sammy one more time,” he said. He walked over rocks and brush, along the edge of the knob that faced the north ridge. Randy Weaver stood at the door of the birthing shed for just a breath, and then, as he reached for the handle with his right hand, there was a crack. Splinters leaped off the side of the shed.

  The bullet ripped through the fleshy part of Randy’s upper arm and came out his armpit.

  When she heard the shot, Sara spun around and ran toward her father, branches and weeds crackling beneath her feet. Damn! If she had been shielding him, the way she was supposed to, this never would have happened. She darted around the birthing shed and saw her father holding his armpit.

  “What happened?”

  “I been hit!”

  “Get to the house!” she yelled. “Get to the house!”

  Randy was running in front, and Sara ran behind him, as close as she could get, trying to shield him, expecting any second to be dropped from behind as Sammy had been. If the bastards were going to shoot someone, she was going to make sure they killed another kid. She winced in terror and ran as fast as her dad could move ahead of her, but the cabin—a few yards off—seemed miles away.

  Kevin Harris was bringing up the rear, running and ducking, his rifle dangling in his hand. Vicki had heard the shot as well, and she ran out of the house, holding Elisheba under her right arm, her pistol holstered on her hip. Oh, blessed Yahweh, it was happening again. A few feet from the door, she saw Randy running toward her. “What happened?”

  “Mama, I been shot!” Randy yelped as he rounded toward the house.

  As she moved back toward the door, Vicki yelled at the hill where the shot had come from: “Bastards! Murderers!” She threw open the heavy door—which had a curtained window at eye level and swung out—in the direction of the hill where the shot had come from. Vicki stood behind the door. Randy and Sara were bursting through the doorway onto the wood floor, and Kevin was gathering himself to dive into the cabin, at the same time trying to push Randy and Sara out of the way.

  “You bastards!” Vicki yelled. And then there was another shot.

  LON HORIUCHI FELT THE RECOIL from the second shot and had to put the ten-power scope back up to his eye to see if he had killed his target this time. Nothing. The man was gone. He spoke in a low tone into his headset radio that he had fired two shots and that he may have gotten a hit. Two hundred yards from the cabin, he watched the door, but there was no movement. Someone started screaming, a girl or a woman, he couldn’t tell. And he couldn’t make out any words. The screaming lasted about half a minute. And then it was quiet again.

  In the coming year, Horiuchi would testify several times about what happened. “It was overcast, but the visibility was excellent,” he said. With the scope, Horiuchi could see both the back and the front of the house, where the old washing machine sat. He could see the blue water tanks and the birthing shed. He could see everything on the north side of the house and anyone who came out either door on the ends of the cabin. He could even see under the stilted back porch that overlooked the steep meadow and the valley beyond.

  Horiuchi heard the rumble of an armored personnel carrier at the bottom of the hill, and just as they’d been briefed, the dogs started barking. And just as they’d been briefed, Randy Weaver sent one of his children out to check on the noise. With his scope, Horiuchi picked up an unarmed young girl with a ponytail, running down toward one of the rocky outcroppings and then back to the cabin. Then she ran out again, this time with two men, who ran in and out of Horiuchi’s sight, toward the water tanks, then back to the birthing shed. They seemed to be searching the area for something. One of them took a stick and scratched at the ground. Horiuchi heard the sound of a helicopter nearby, he testified later. The chopper “was not in front of me … I’m assuming it was somewhere behind me, either to my right or left.”

  Horiuchi saw a man in his sights whom he assumed was Kevin Harris (and was in fact Randy Weaver), possibly reaching up on the birthing shed and grabbing it to swing around behind it. “He seemed to be looking for the helicopter. He seemed to be moving, trying to get back on the other side of the [birthing shed]. By being behind the [shed], he could take a shot…. I perceived that he may be getting ready to take a shot at the individuals in the helicopter.” At least two other snipers said later that Weaver and Harris were running as if they were planning to do something aggressive. The snipers also said the helicopter was in danger although neither agent fired his weapon.

  Horiuchi testified later that he was too far away to call out “Freeze!” or “You’re under arrest!” He figured that as soon as he began firing, the other snipers would shoot, too. With his shouldered .308-caliber Remington model 700 resting on a tree branch in front of him, he took aim at the man’s spine just below his neck. Like all shots an FBI sniper is trained to take, this one was intended to kill. But in the flash between the mind’s command to pull the trigger and the tiny muscle reflex in his index finger, Lon Horiuchi saw a shudder in his scope and, after the crack of the gun, realized the target had made a sudden move. The shot missed Randy Weaver’s spine, and Horiuchi saw it splinter the wall of the birthing shed.

  Horiuchi—trained to hit a quarter-inch target every time from this distance with this single-shot, bolt-action rifle—had missed. Still, he figured he must have grazed the man in the back. Horiuchi brought the scope back up to his eye and picked up the three people running for the cabin. He took aim again, this time correctly identifying Harris, but mistaking him for the man he’d shot at the first time. With his big 30.06 in his right hand, Kevin ran six feet behind Sara and Randy toward the door. Horiuchi decided to finish what he’d attempted at the birthing shed and to neutralize the male and his rifle.

  Horiuchi didn’t want him back in the house, where he would be protected and would be able to hide behind the children, he testified later. From the cabin, Horiuchi would testify, he believed that the man could shoot at the snipers or the people in the helicopter. Better to drop him outside.

  In an instant, Horiuchi estimated Kevin’s speed and the distance between them. The target had paused on the porch and looked to be pushing the two crouching people in front of him. He swung his rifle around, gave the target a little lead—one notch, or mildot, from the crosshairs on his scope—and just as Kevin reached the door, Lon Horiuchi squeezed the trigger again. The firing pin slammed forward and detonated the primer, causing an explosion that launched a bullet whose grain and weight were carefully measured for the utmost accuracy, a.308-caliber bullet, somewhat like a hunter might use to drop a 1,000-pound elk, a soft-jacketed, boat-tail bullet designed to travel 2,600 feet per second, to cover that 200 yards in a quarter of a second, to hit, expand and tumble, so that, by the time it made its way out of the target, it had taken with it several times its size in flesh and bone.

  In that instant there was a flinch—possibly a hit—the diving man disappeared from Horiuchi’s sight, and the recoil from his rifle kicked at Horiuchi again.

  FOR JUST A SECOND, everyone inside the cabin was quiet. The crack of the last shot echoed through the house, and they all turned back to the door. Vicki was on her knees. Randy looked back and saw her lying there, her head down on the floor, right next to the kitchen door, as if she were praying. Randy figured she was hit, but he was afraid to look, because she wasn’t moving at all.

  Rachel screamed. She had been standing near her mother, facing the door, when Vicki was shot. Blood hit the ten-year-old, flecks of red in her long black hair. Sara, Randy, and Kevin had all squeezed through the door about the same time, bottlenecking and then bursting through. Sara had felt something whiz by and then blood splattered on her cheek as she hurtled through the doorway and tripped over Kevin, who had been pushed in front of her. Now Sara looked back over her shoulder at her mother, slumped in the doorway. What struck Sara was that there were no reflexes, no movemen
t at all. Her mom—their strength, their warmth, their prophet—was gone. Sara cried out, “No-o-o-o!” They screamed and tore at their hair, until Sara couldn’t make any more noise and she realized that they should be quiet, that her mother would warn them all to be quiet.

  Vicki Weaver was folded over like a tent, resting on her knees, arms and head, just inside the door. Her hands were still cradling Elisheba, so tightly they had to pull Vicki back and pry the baby out of her grasp.

  Randy, wincing from his own wound, turned his wife over. It was as if her skull had exploded. She was almost unrecognizable. Her jaw was blown half off, and blood seemed to be pumping out from everywhere on her head. Elisheba was covered in blood, so Randy and Sara checked all over the crying baby, but found no wounds. She was okay.

  Kevin was lying there, too, quiet, a silver-dollar-size hole in his left upper arm. Sara assumed he was dead as well. The blood pearled and pulsed from his wound and ran down his arm. He was already turning pale. The bullet that had torn through Vicki’s head was lodged in Kevin’s upper arm, near his shoulder. His chest and arm were pockmarked with bits of bullet fragments and the bones from Vicki’s face.

  They pulled Vicki’s body all the way into the cabin, yanked the door shut, and cried for hours, as quietly as they could. “I don’t want to live without Mama,” Rachel said.

  They waited for the raid that would end them all, probably in the coals of a great government bonfire. They figured earlier that the feds would at least offer them a chance to surrender, but apparently they weren’t going to Clearly, Sara thought, they wanted them all inside the cabin, until they were ready to drop them and then, one by one, the government agents would make them watch each other die. It was the most torturous thing she could imagine. Her eyes raw from crying, Sara picked up her rifle, cradled it, and sank to the floor.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in two days, Mike Johnson felt as though everything was under control.

  His deputies were off the mountain and the experts, the Hostage Rescue Team snipers, were up there. The negotiators would be on their way up soon, and Johnson figured this thing was about to end, one way or another. He stood outside the command post trailer and watched state and federal agents scurrying in and out of the meadow, moving into positions around the ridge.

  And then Johnson heard two shots in quick succession. Bang. A pause. Bang. Johnson leaped back into the command post and looked around wildly. On this sound-bending ridge, with a canyon on one side and the long valley on the other, he still guessed the shots had come from on top of the mountain. Johnson had heard them, clear as if they had been fired right in front of him. People were running in and out of the command post, phones were ringing, faxes were faxing, until, after a few minutes, an FBI agent finally found time to brief Johnson on what had happened.

  A sniper had seen someone outside the cabin and had fired to protect a helicopter that was surveilling the mountain, the agent said. The sniper thought he’d killed Kevin Harris but wasn’t sure. “He didn’t see anybody drop because Kevin dove behind the door,” the agent told Mike Johnson.

  THE HELICOPTER LANDED in the meadow, and Richard Rogers jumped out into the drizzle. He ducked the whirring blades and ran across the field to the Hostage Rescue Team’s command post, the off-white, hard-walled tent set up at the edge of the meadow. Inside, he found the sniper coordinator, Les Hazen. Rogers had been flying over the ridge to get a look at what they were up against when he’d heard radio traffic that two shots had been fired.

  “What happened?”

  Hazen told him Lon Horiuchi had fired the two shots.

  “Was anybody hit?”

  Hazen said he didn’t know. Rogers turned and ran to the overall command post and found Special Agent-in-Charge Gene Glenn. The two men agreed that they needed to get up there as soon as possible. The family knew now they were surrounded, and the FBI had to get the armored personnel carriers up to the cabin, identify themselves, and demand the Weavers surrender.

  It was 6:00 p.m., and the agents still hadn’t rigged up a radio system that could communicate between the two APCs. Forget it, Rogers said. He climbed in the lead APC with a handful of other agents and with Fred Lanceley, the hostage negotiator, and they started out.

  The low-riding tank grumbled through the meadow and more slowly up the old logging road, a vehicle so wide it crunched the brush on either side. Near the cabin, Randy’s red truck blocked the road, and so the APC went around it, but higher up, the driveway was blocked again, this time by a cable gate stretched between a steel I beam and an old trailer. They tried to push the I beam away with the APC, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, the hatch opened and several camouflaged agents jumped out, checked the gate for booby traps and explosives, moved the cable, and climbed back in the APC. The vehicle rumbled up to the house, until it was twenty or thirty feet away. Again, the hatch opened, and this time a telephone with a long cord connected to the APC was lowered to the ground. The hatch closed and at 6:45 p.m., the engine on the APC was shut off, and with the light fading in a low, overcast sky, an easy, authoritative voice intoned over a bullhorn.

  “Mr. Weaver? This is Fred Lanceley of the FBI. You should understand that we have warrants for the arrest of yourself and Mr. Harris. I would like you to accept a telephone so that we can talk and work out how you will come out of the house without further violence. I would like you or one of your children to come out of the house, unarmed, pick up the telephone, and return to the house.”

  An hour after firing at the family, the FBI was finally making the surrender announcement. There was no answer from the cabin.

  The APC sat in the driveway for another twenty minutes or so and the voice called out again that they should surrender and go through the court system. The voice said they were leaving a telephone near the cabin, and they needed to set up some communication to end the standoff peacefully. The voice said he would personally be on the other end of the telephone. “Randall,” the voice said. “We need to communicate with you to end this thing peacefully.

  “Vicki,” the voice said, “maybe one of the children could run out and grab the telephone.” But there was still nothing from the cabin.

  THEY MUST THINK he’s crazy. After what they did to Sam and Vicki, did the ZOG devils really think Randy was going to send one of his daughters skipping out the door to pick up a telephone? So they could shoot a little girl, too? Did the One World Government snipers need more target practice?

  Perhaps they would set fire to the cabin now. Maybe it would be a ground assault. Or tanks. Helicopters, perhaps. Whatever, it was only a matter of time before the cabin was surrounded and they were all murdered, as Gordon Kahl had been murdered, and now, as Sammy and Vicki had been murdered. Sara knew she was going to die soon. There was no way out now; they were going to be shot dead one at a time.

  The family could hear the tank moving around the house, like a cat toying with an injured bird. Rachel and Sara held tightly to their rifles and sobbed as quietly as they could. Kevin moaned and grimaced with pain, and Sara sneaked across the room to take a look at his wound. Elisheba cried and squirmed in the arms of whoever held her, trying to find her mother, who lay in a heap on the kitchen floor, her heart having pumped most of her blood into a pool around her. Vicki’s legs, covered by the long denim skirt, protruded from underneath the table, and so they had covered her with an old, green army blanket.

  THE APC BACKED ALL THE WAY down the hill, trailing the telephone line from the cabin. The going was slow and it took an hour and fifteen minutes to play out a mile of cable from the cabin. They reached the meadow about 9:45 p.m. and hooked up the telephone. There was no one on the other end.

  The snipers were soaking wet and exhausted, and the temperature was knifing toward freezing. Dark and overcast, there was nothing more for them to see, and the HRT officials worried about them getting hypothermia. Besides, Rogers wanted to talk to them about the shots that had been fired. So, about 8:00 p.m., they had called the snipers on their radio
s and ordered them back to the meadow.

  The snipers came into the HRT command post, changed their wet clothes, and gave their reports to the team commanders. Rogers grabbed Horiuchi, pulled him outside the tent, and asked what had happened.

  According to Rogers’s testimony, Horiuchi told him about the people running outside the cabin and about the helicopter he’d heard over his shoulder. He said the two men were moving into position to fire at the helicopter and so he shot at one of the men, whose movement caused him to miss. He got another clear shot, fired, and saw someone flinch, but he didn’t actually know if he hit anyone. There were ten other snipers up there; he’d expected at least one of them to start shooting as soon as he fired his weapon, but no one else had fired.

  That’s not what struck Richard Rogers first. He couldn’t believe that one of his snipers had missed from 200 yards. Maybe even twice.

  KEVIN WAS GOING to die next. That was obvious to Sara, who watched him in the last glow of dusky sunlight that seeped through the heavy curtains. He was in the worst shape, and Sara didn’t figure he’d last the night. Randy noticed it as well. Kevin was pale as a sheet. Clearly, the fragments had gone into his lungs; he was coughing up pools of deep, crimson blood, and the pain was almost more than he could bear. Usually strong and quietly jovial, Kevin grimaced and drifted in and out of consciousness while Sara poured a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over the blackening wound and it boiled over with infection. She dressed and cleaned the wounds, but Kevin was losing a lot of blood and was in agonizing pain.

  Finally, about 9:00 p.m., three hours after he was hit, Kevin asked Randy to shoot him again, this time to put him out of his misery.

  “Through the head.” He winced. “Don’t tell me when it’s comin’. I want you to finish me off.”

  Sara and Rachel began crying again. Randy, too. “Kevin, I can’t do that.”