Dear Nation, When Kurt Aho shot out the tires of the cars of the two investors, a swarm of Phoenix police officers descended on his residence, including an armored-car unit, a SWAT unit, and sniper teams on adjacent rooftops. According to police, Aho was told to come out of the house, drop his weapon, and approach the armored car with his hands over his head. He appeared in his doorway, half-dressed, pistol in one hand, a beer in the other. There was a round of negotiations. Aho refused to depart from the premises. Youre gonna have to kill me, he said. Tammy Aho raced to her fathers house and pleaded with officers to let her talk with him. She had recently lost her own house to foreclosure, and she was in the process of moving in with her father. Not only would he be homeless if we lost this place, Tammy told me—my kids and I would be homeless. The cops rebuffed her. I told the police, if youre gonna shoot him, shoot him in the knees—buckle his knees. But they didnt listen. An hour passed in the standoff. Kurt drank his beer. What happened next is disputed. Police claimed that Kurt opened fire, and the police answered with rubber bullets, hitting him in the arm and knocking him down. Tammy Aho says the cops fired without provocation, and that only then did Aho squeeze off several rounds, hitting the armored car. A well-placed bullet in his chest killed him instantly on his front lawn. After they killed him, Tammy told me, the cops sat around eating pizza and taking pictures of each other and laughing like it was no big deal. But the officers were totally unprepared for the chaos that followed. An armed crowd, shouting curses about police murder, emerged like grubs out of the ground and opened fire. The two investors who had taken Ahos home, accompanied by a Bank of America vice president, were shot in the back, and men from the neighborhood carrying axes and shovels leaped on them and finished the job by crushing their skulls. The armored car was overwhelmed, its officers fleeing. Thousands of citizens converged at the Aho home, armed with shotguns, AR-15s, Kalashnikovs. The police, surrounded, outgunned, outnumbered, surrendered within minutes, and not a few of them—more than wed like to admit—joined the nascent Citizen Homeowners Militia, which declared the neighborhood a Bank-Free America Zone. Sincerely,
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 06:27:16 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015