In the infamous Ruby Ridge standoff, federal agents killed his wife and son.
Randy Weaver died Wednesday, just three months shy of what would have been the 30th anniversary of the 1992 standoff that thrust him into the national spotlight. He was 74. Born in Iowa in 1948, Weaver enlisted in the Army at age 20, near the onset of the Vietnam War. He was sent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he became a Green Beret, but he was never sent overseas. While he was home on leave in 1970, he reconnected with an old girlfriend, Vicki Jordison, whom he would marry the following year, after leaving the military. Randy and Vicki had each been raised religious, but together they grew more radical. By the early 1980s, they were speaking of the endtimes, warning that the government would soon be trying to kill all Christians, and exhorting friends and family to move off the grid to escape the coming dictatorship. In 1983, the Weavers did just that. The family, which at that point included children Sara, Samuel, and Rachel, left behind a comfortable suburban life to build a modest cabin on a bluff in the northern Idaho panhandle about 40 miles south of the Canadian border. The bluff was called Ruby Ridge. By the time they got to Idaho, the Weavers‘ beliefs meshed with those of the racist Christian Identity movement. During the 1980s, Randy showed up at some meetings of the white supremacist Aryan Nations organization, and at one of these meetings he met and became friends with „Gus Magisano“, a motorcyclist and gun trafficker. „Gus“ was actually Kenneth Fadeley, an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF). By Weaver’s telling, Fadeley repeatedly pressured him to illegally saw down two shotgun barrels; after initially refusing, Weaver, hard up for cash, acquiesced. (Fadeley would later claim at trial that Weaver had approached him.
