Family Leaves Freemen Ranch Departure Seen As A Break In Montana Standoff
Four people, including two girls, voluntarily left a barricaded farmhouse near here Thursday, giving federal authorities their first tangible break in a 74-day standoff with the anti-government freemen.
Gloria Ward, 35; her daughters, Courtney Joy Christensen, 10, and Jaylynn Mangum, 8; and her common-law husband, Elwin Ward, 55, emerged from the modest white building at 1 p.m. They are the first people to leave the ranch since April.
Authorities said no one in the group is facing federal charges. Gloria Ward had been charged with felony custodial interference in Utah for taking her children out of state against a court order. But the state agreed to drop the charge as part of the deal that persuaded the family to leave.
The girls, one wearing a blue bow in her hair and the other a cowboy hat, were taken away in an FBI van to be placed in the protective custody of the state Department of Public Health pending a state court hearing to determine where they should live.
The surrender came a week after the FBI began squeezing the Freemen by shutting off electrical power to their houses, moving three armored cars, two helicopters and SWAT teams to the edge of the 960-acre ranch, and scrambling their cellular phones and cable television.
It also coincided with the filing of a community petition urging the use of “reasonable force” to end the face-off.
“The FBI is finally doing what we’ve been calling for for 10 weeks,” said rancher Brent McRae, who delivered the petition to Garfield County Sheriff Charles Phipps on Thursday. “But I think the use of reasonable force had more to do with this surrender than my petition.”
Garfield County Attorney Nick Murnion, who has been threatened by the Freemen, put it another way.
“When a mother with two children sees armored vehicles, helicopters and SWAT teams come into position with her power cut off, she’s going to realize it’s getting dangerous,” Murnion said.
Smiling broadly, he added, “I don’t see this as a green light for the FBI’s tanks to roll in tomorrow. But this is a relief to everybody in this community.”
Still, no one here expects the confrontation that began March 25 when FBI agents surrounded the sprawling ranch and arrested two Freemen leaders to end anytime soon.
Attorney General Janet Reno has repeatedly vowed that the standoff would be resolved peacefully.
Beyond that, 17 heavily armed adults and a 16-year-old girl, Ashly Landers, remain holed up in the ranch complex, which has a considerable store of emergency provisions and fuel for electric generators.
Gloria Ward had come to the Montana group by a circuitous route. She had belonged to a tiny sect of ex-communicated Mormons in Utah who believed that girls were ready for marriage at puberty.
While Ward was living in Michigan last year, she reportedly pushed her oldest daughter, Leslie Joy, then 14, into marriage with the sect’s founder, John Perry Chaney, then 38.
Michigan welfare authorities last October placed the 14-year-old girl, then six months pregnant, in a foster home. Ward moved in with the Freemen group here in November, and once came out of the farmhouse to point a hunting rifle at a television crew.
More than a dozen of these tax protesters, who reject the validity of state and federal governments and hold white supremacist religious beliefs, are wanted on charges of filing millions of dollars in bogus checks and threatening to kidnap and kill a U.S. District judge.
They have declared the foreclosed wheat farm they call “Justus Township” a sovereign territory.
“You still have some hard-core people in there,” Murnion said. “It remains to be seen how hardy, courageous and ready to go into battle they really are.
“But the FBI can’t afford to have anyone hurt,” he said, “and I don’t want Jordan to be known as the place where (the Freemen) bought it.”
Montana U.S. Attorney Sherry Matteucci said the FBI is “continuing to urge the Freemen to negotiate in good faith, and, at the same time, intends to keep open all lawful options.”