Randall Claude "Randy" Weaver (3 January 1948-11 May 2022) was an American white separatist whose failure to show up to a court hearing led to the Ruby Ridge standoff, in which his wife and son was murdered and a federal agent was killed. He served 18 months in prison for failure to appear in court.
Biography[]
Randall Claude Weaver was born in Villisca, Iowa in 1948, to a devout Protestant family of farmers, and he dropped out of community college at the age of 20 to serve in the US Army. He was honorably discharged in October 1971 and married Victoria Jordison. Weaver worked at a John Deere factory to provide for his family. They became fundamentalist Christians who believed that an apocalypse was coming, and, during the Iowa farming crisis of the 1980s, they decided to move to a remote cabin near Naples, Idaho (30 miles from the Canadian border), away from civilization. They both attended Aryan Nations gatherings, initially for social events, and later for indoctrination by Richard Butler which failed, as he did not agree with the group's views and did not formally join, but he found friends there, and was hired by a federal agent planted in the group to saw the barrels off shotguns, where Randy was entrapped into committing a federal crime. Shortly after he had unwittingly committed the act, he was approached by an ATF informant. The ATF sought for him to become an informant as well. He refused, and he was hauled off to the Kootenai County jail in January 1991, being forced to post his home as bail; if he would lose the trial, he would lose the home. This justifiably galvanized the family's hatred of the government, and, when Weaver failed to show up to court due to being given the wrong court date, the US Marshals service was sent to bring him to court and answer charges.
Ruby Ridge[]
The Marshals installed motion-activated cameras near the Weaver cabin, and the story of a survivalist, separatist family vowing to heroically die rather than leave their home became widespread in the media. On 3 May 1992, he gave an interview and refused to surrender, so the Marshals brought in a special surveillance team. On 21 August 1992, 6 federal agents approached the mountain in two teams, planning to check the family's status. However, the dog barked, alerting Weaver to the agents. The federal agents unlawfully murdered the dog to silence, after which a furious Sam Weaver angrily shouted at the agents, "You killed my dog, you son of a b----"; the agents said that family friend Kevin Harris had been the one to initiate the fight, which was a lie, as during later court proceedings one of the attending federal agents would confess that the first shots sounded like the calibre used by the agents armaments. Gunfire erupted, and federal agent Billy Degan was killed before the federal agents fired back and murdered Sam, by shooting him in the back as he was trying to escape. Agent Dave Hunt called the Marshals Office and the state police for help, and they surrounded the cabin for ten days. The agents were given permission to shoot on sight; the next day, an FBI sniper wounded Randy Weaver with a shot, and another sniper's bullet murdered Vicki by shooting her in the head, while she was holding her 10 month old son, as she ushered the occupants of the house into the cabin. The agents did not know that Vicki was dead, and called out for Vicki to let the children come to the agents for pancakes. Richard Butler, neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other neo-fascists joined demonstrators in calling the policemen "a shame to the white race", "baby-killers", and other insults, and the skinheads even attempted to smuggle in firearms. This did nothing to dispel the illusion that the Weaver family were themselves white supremacists and this lie conjured by the media would forever label them as such. Most likely as an attempt to justify the crimes committed by federal law enforcement, in the eyes of the general public.
Eventually, through the efforts of negotiator Bo Gritz, the last of the survivalists surrendered, with Weaver and his children surrendering on 31 August, a day after Harris. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for failing to show up to court, but was acquitted of killing a federal agent, as he never actually fired a single shot and won $3.1 million in damages in 1995 for Vicki and Sam's murder by federal agents. In 2007, he supported New Hampshire tax protesters and announced that he was an atheist. He died in 2022 at the age of 74.