Four remaining occupiers of a federal wildlife refuge in OR have been indicted over the monthlong armed takeover, along with a dozen others.
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The indictment includes four people who remain at the wildlife refuge as of Thursday: Sean Anderson, David Lee Fry, Jeff Wayne Banta and Sandra Lynn Pfeifer Anderson.
Additional security officers have been sent to national wildlife refuges in southern OR, northern California and Nevada amid the ongoing armed occupation of a sister refuge in southeastern OR that has caused tensions in the region and is showing no sign of ending soon.
A USA federal indictment was unsealed on Thursday against 16 militia members involved in the occupation of a wildlife refuge in the northwestern state of Oregon. The FBI quickly released video footage of the shooting and said it showed Finicum twice reaching toward where he had a holstered handgun.
Also at the funeral was Ammon Bundy’s father, Cliven, a Nevada rancher who was at the center of a 2014 armed standoff with federal authorities over grazing rights on government land. After his arrest during a traffic stop late last month, he repeatedly has called on the holdouts to go home to avoid bloodshed.
Ward had repeatedly asked the occupiers to leave and, after Finicum’s death, said in emotional remarks at a news conference that it “didn’t have to happen” and again said he wanted “everybody in this illegal occupation to move on”. On Oct. 5, it says, two of those charged traveled to Harney County, where the refuge is located, “to warn the Harney County sheriff of “extreme civil unrest” if certain demands were not met”.
Shortly after his arrest last week, Bundy released a statement through his attorney asking the remaining occupiers to go home.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation declined comment Thursday, but the lack of movement in recent days indicates that negotiators were not offering amnesty.
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The group was denied bail last week after a judge ruled that the Bundy brothers, in particular, posed flight risks. “This is what you get when government officials ignore the people”, Bundy said in the message, arguing that the occupiers had “exhausted all prudent measures to get government officials to investigate the abuses to the Hammond family”.
