Sometimes, people just boil over. Sometimes it's just a temper tantrum, a word snapped out in haste, and sometimes it's fisticuffs.
And sometimes it's worse. Sometimes, someone makes a tank out of a bulldozer and wrecks a town with it.
Twenty years ago, a man bent on destroying the town of Granby for perceived wrongs got into his modified bulldozer and went on a rampage that thrust the small mountain town into the national spotlight.
It's been called the "Killdozer" rampage, and on June 4, 2004, it played out on the streets of the Grand County town of Granby to the horrors of residents and business owners alike.
The armored 85-ton bulldozer, modified and driven by Marvin Heemeyer, knocked down 13 buildings and destroyed a large portion of Granby’s business district, causing more than $5 million in damages.
Twenty years ago, my wife and I lived in Colorado, on the east side of the metro Denver area. I spent most of my days back then listening to 850 KOA-AM radio, Denver's talk radio giant, and I remember the non-stop coverage of Heemeyer's rampage. There are a few things I remember very clearly about the event, which could arguably be described as an incident of by-gosh domestic terrorism, unlike some other events we could name that were honestly no more than hooliganism.
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First, Granby. I know Granby well; I've done a lot of hunting and fishing in the area, and I know people who live there today. It's a small Colorado town of the old, pre-Californication style, with no big famous ski resorts nearby, although it's on a crossroads of US Highways 40 and 34, the former of which is the route west to Kremmling, Rabbit Ears Pass, Steamboat Springs and points beyond; the latter is the route north to Grand Lake and Rocky Mountain National Park. It's a quiet little town, a cluster of businesses lining both sides of Highway 40 and houses on the side street behind.
On June 4, 2004, I started hearing about Marvin Heemeyer's rampage on the radio. I was in my office upstairs, my wife in hers on the ground floor, but I alerted her so we could both listen in. What struck me at first was the level of preparation that had gone into this. Heemeyer had constructed an unstoppable wrecking machine; armored, with cameras mounted to facilitate steering. We learned later that he had welded himself into the machine, indicating he had no notion of coming out on the other side of his rampage.
Initial reports said he would pause the Killdozer outside a building and repeatedly gun the engine to give people a chance to flee before he flattened the building. I was not able to confirm this directly, but since there were no human casualties other than Heemeyer himself, that would seem to be plausible.
At one point, the governor — Colorado's last good one, Republican Bill Owens — was reportedly in the air in a Colorado State Police helicopter, watching as the rampage went on. There was a rumor that he had called the Colorado National Guard for help, requesting anti-tank weaponry to be deployed, to which the Guard replied, "We don't just keep that kind of stuff lying around." I seem to remember a call going out to the regular Army at Ft. Carson, but don't remember what the result was, if there was any.
Eventually, Heemeyer, after resisting gunfire and attempts to stop him with other heavy equipment, got stuck in the foundation of the Gambles store and terminated the rampage by terminating himself. It took the authorities another 12 hours to break into the Killdozer, where they found Heemeyer dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
A few days later, my wife and I loaded the kids into the truck and drove through Granby. Some cleanup had been started, and the Killdozer hauled away, but it was a real mess. The little Colorado town looked like it had been barraged by an artillery battery.
The moral of the story? I guess it's that you never know what someone might do when they snap.
I won't go into Marvin Heemeyer's issues with the town. The people I know who live in Granby described him as something of a prickly character; I remember one friend of mine who simply said, "He was an a**hole." But he had access to that enormous bulldozer, to concrete and sheet metal, and he made the most of it. And that's the real lesson of the Killdozer event, I think: If you think the lefties of Antifa and so on can cause trouble with their LARPing in black clothes and balaclavas, with some frozen water bottles and batons, consider the Killdozer and remember what people with actual skills and resources can do if they snap.
It's a chilling thought.
