Ozark County found itself in the national news spotlight 30 years ago this week as local, state and federal law enforcement officers descended on a white-supremist military-style compound at Price Place, Arkansas, just over the state line south of Pontiac. A story in the May 1, 1985, edition of the Ozark County Times, written by longtime publisher and editor Ruby Robins, reported that a three-day standoff resulted in the “peaceful surrender of the leader of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord and four others” on April 21.
More than 300 officers reportedly participated in the standoff and raid. Participating law-enforcement organizations included local sheriff James Shaw and his deputies, the Missouri State Highway Patrol (including local trooper Steve Bartlett), the FBI, ATF, Arkansas State Police, Baxter County (Arkansas) Sheriff’s Office, Marion County (Arkansas) Sheriff’s Office, Missouri Water Patrol, Minneapolis (Minnesota) Police Department K-9 unit, U.S. Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal officers and the Missouri Conservation Department. They found “some 100 long guns, machine guns, handguns, about 40 boxes of ammunition and many boxes of explosive devices and homemade explosives,” Robins reported.
A CSA article by Jonathan Ford of the Arkansas Army National Guard on the websiteEncyclopediaofArkansas.net says the CSA “was one of many militias that supported the American Christian Patriot Movement” whose followers “support hostility against any form of government above the county level, vilify Jews and non-whites as children of Satan, obsess about achieving religious and racial purification of the U.S., believe in a conspiracy theory that regards Jewish leaders as controlling important financial and media positions within the U.S., and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government.”
Ford provides this update about those arrested in the raid: CSA leader James Ellison, who was charged with conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government, was not convicted of sedition but was convicted of illegal weapons and racketeering charges.
The Times article said then-Sheriff James Shaw said the racketeering charges included “arson, arson for benefit and a bombing.” The arson charges stemmed from attempts made in 1983 against the Metropolitan Community Church in Springfield, where most of the members were homosexual, and against the Beth Shalom Jewish Community Center in Bloomington, Indiana, the Times reported, adding, “The arson for benefit was the burning of a residence near Tecumseh in 1980 belonging to Ellison’s sister and her husband, along with a mail fraud scheme to collect money from the insurer. The bombing was of a natural gas line over the Red River.”
Ford wrote that, after serving 20 years in prison, Ellison negotiated a reduced sentence by testifying against key leaders of the Aryan Nations of Idaho. CSA member Richard W. Snell, who was charged with capital murder for killing an Arkansas State Police trooper during a 1984 traffic stop, “was executed by lethal injection on April 19, 1995, twelve hours after white supremacist Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb destroying the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma,” Ford wrote in his website article.
“Many suspected that McVeigh selected April 19 as the day of his attack because of Snell’s execution and the anniversary date of the 1993 federal raid at the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas—an event that has become a central theme in anti-government rhetoric,” Ford wrote.
The Times could not independently verify facts shared in Ford’s article.
Source: http://www.ozarkcountytimes.com/news/article_7e6bc790-e9ca-11e4-a948-0b9eb5d5de58.html