Sounds like the Jerry and Joe Kane story, which I wrote about in 2010.
Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Dennis Quaid Team for Crime Thriller ‘Sovereign’ (Exclusive)
Concourse Media is launching the film, the feature directorial debut of Christian Swegal that follows a father and son who belong to a group of anti-government extremists as they venture across the U.S., at the EFM.
I wrote the article to bring law enforcement up to date on the dangers of the sovereign citizen movement, which was really taking off in 2009-2010.
http://www.seditionists.com/sovcitkane.pdf
I had been tracking the father and son duo for months prior to the shooting, watching videos of their seminars, and hanging out on the website/forums/listervs where they were desperately trying to market sov cit theories.
They were failing miserably and in financial straits when they were heading back across the country to Florida. If Jerry didn't have a girlfriend in Florida, they'd have been living in their van.
Joe Kane (the teenage kid) murdered two police officers during a routine traffic stop, and since the sovereign movement was all but unheard of in 2010, I called the police department to offer what I knew about the Kanes and the movement in general.
The PD switchboard patched me right through to the Chief of Police, Bob Paudert. His son was one of the officers who had been gunned down.
It was an emotional conversation.
Anyhoo, I wish I'd been involved in this project. There was a lot of nuance in the situation that was swallowed up by the fact that this father-son team shot four cops, killing two before dying in a gun battle.
The father wasn't the violent one; he was all wrapped up in the Byzantine paperwork that defines the sovcit movement. His 16 year old son was the killer and his father decided to die in a gun battle with his child after the initial two officers were dead.
I had been monitoring the father but didn't focus on the sidekick son. Second generation sovereigns, it turned out, sometimes skip right past the paperwork phase into the violent phase because they see the paperwork fail over and over and over when their parent(s) try to use it.
@jjmacnab that's scary but it matches for me. I worked as a teacher for ten years in a North Clackamas County school district, where there are a LOT of sovcits, and...very scary vibes with some of those kids. I never knew for sure, but I had my suspicions about some kids being second gen sovcit.
@jjmacnab
That's awful.
And, I hate to say it, but boys that age tend to skip past paperwork and into violence far too easily. I have two teenage boys. I love them so much and feel like I have some insight. The age + that upbringing? Does not surprise me. 💔
We became friends but I didn't meet Bob in person until a couple of years later when we visited his son's gravesite together during the filming of a Canadian documentary.
It took a very long time for the American press to catch up with the movement. Foreign new orgs were on it from the beginning. When I pitched sovcit movement stories to American reporters, they got shut down by editors who didn't find them interesting enough to print/air.
Imagine thinking that sovcits were uninteresting...