[Vision2020] Constitutional Sheriff Candidate & Militia Member Murders 4 -- Including Baby -- Before Killing Self

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Fri May 4 17:33:31 PDT 2012


  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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May 3, 2012
Vigilante Leader Was Among Five Shot Dead in Arizona By FERNANDA SANTOS

GILBERT, Ariz. — The police confirmed Thursday that a former Marine and
aspiring politician who led a vigilante border militia group was among five
people shot to death on Wednesday in what apparently was a murder-suicide
at a home in this suburban Phoenix town.

The leader, Jason Todd Ready, who was called J. T., was known as a
gun-carrying, camouflage-clad extremist who preached violence to stop
immigrants and drug smugglers from crossing the Arizona desert into the
United States from Mexico.

“I firmly believe in having a minefield across the border,” he once said.

The police were awaiting the results of an autopsy to identify the gunman,
but at a news conference on Thursday, Sgt. Bill Balafas, a Gilbert police
spokesman, said signs pointed to Mr. Ready. “The gunshot wound locations,
just the scene itself, the condition of the victims, how they were found at
the scene — they all lead to him,” Sergeant Balafas said.

The shooting occurred after 1 p.m. on a placid dead-end street here.

A neighbor four doors away heard gunshots and called 911. Sergeant Balafas
said another call came from the shooting’s sole survivor, a teenage girl
who told the police she had heard an argument, and then gunfire. She said
she emerged from a back room to find the bodies.

The bodies of Mr. Ready, 39, and another man, Jim Franklin Hiott, 24, were
found just outside the home’s front door. The bodies of Mr. Ready’s
girlfriend, Lisa Lynn Mederos, 47; her daughter, Amber Mederos, 23; and her
15-month-old granddaughter, Lily Lynn Mederos, were inside.

Inside the house, the police recovered two handguns, a shotgun and six
projectile grenades, which Tom Mangan, a spokesman for the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix, said are strictly for
military use. Officers also found two 55-gallon drums containing an unknown
chemical. Sergeant Balafas said federal agents were investigating the
origin of the weapons and the nature of the chemical, as well as why they
were there.

The police gave no motive for the shooting, but said there was no
indication that it had been planned or was connected to Mr. Ready’s beliefs
or his work along the border. “At this time,” Sergeant Balafas said at the
news conference, “it appears to be a purely domestic situation.”

Mr. Ready moved into the house to live with Ms. Mederos in the last year,
according to neighbors, who on Thursday recalled him as pleasant and
peculiar, always wearing camouflage clothing and a military vest.

To Harry Hughes, regional director of the National Socialist Movement, the
largest neo-Nazi group in the United States, Mr. Ready was “a patriot” — “a
sincere and compassionate man,” he said in a telephone interview. Mr. Ready
had been a member of the movement, Mr. Hughes said, but resigned two years
ago to found the U.S. Border
Guard<http://usborderguard.com/US_Border_Guard.html>,
an armed group that conducted expeditions in the Arizona desert to search
for migrants and drug smugglers.

Mr. Hughes said he had joined one of those expeditions. “We’d come across
people who have been out in the desert for eight or nine days, we’d give
them water and then we’d notify the Border Patrol,” Mr. Hughes said.

Mr. Ready, though, described the group in a 2010 interview as “the Minuteman
Project <http://www.minutemanproject.com> on steroids,” made up of “people
with assault weapons” willing to use “lawful, deadly force when
appropriate.”

His was one of a number of private border-enforcement groups to sprout in
recent years, unique because of its ties to the white supremacist movement.
Kat Rodriguez, a director at the Coalición de Derechos
Humanos<http://www.derechoshumanosaz.net/>in Tucson, which opposes the
militarization of the border, said that the
two created a dangerous intersection, with one group serving as fertile
recruiting ground for the other.

Mr. Ready pleaded guilty to assault after he was arrested in 1992 for
helping another man destroy a car mirror with a baseball bat. In the
Marines, he faced two courts-martial, one for an unauthorized absence and
another for assault and other charges, which prompted his discharge,
according to a biography compiled by the Southern Poverty Law
Center<http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/jt-ready>,
which tracks hate groups in the United States.

“J. T. Ready has a long history of thuggish and violent behavior,” Mark
Potok, a senior fellow at the center, said in an interview. “He really
typified the ugly racism and violent attitude of a lot of people that we
see in the nativist movement.”

In recent years, Mr. Ready tried his hand at politics; in 2007, he was
photographed at a rally against illegal
immigration<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>with
Russell Pearce, a former State Senate president and the architect of
Arizona’s contested immigration law, known as S.B. 1070.

“At some point,” Mr. Pearce said in a statement, “darkness took his life
over, his heart changed and he began to associate with the more despicable
groups in society.”

Mr. Ready ran for office without success as a Republican contender for a
State House seat in 2004 and for a City Council seat in the neighboring
city of Mesa. This year, he began an effort to run as a Democrat for Pinal
County sheriff.


On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Saundra Lund <v2020 at ssl1.fastmail.fm>wrote:

> Riigght . . . these "Constitutional Sheriff" candidates & militia members
> are just ordinary folk.  Not!  And, do be sure to check out this whacko's
> Facebook for a more . . . complete picture of this miscreant:
> http://www.facebook.com/pages/JT-Ready-for-Sheriff/327457743953277
>
> Note, too, that we have a local "Constitutional Sheriff" candidate running
> in Latah County -- attached see what we found on our doorstep several days
> ago.
>
> SL
> _____
>
>
> http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/gilbert/article_438ac440-94a1-11e1-bd
> f9-0019bb2963f4.html
>
> Police ID victims, believe J.T. Ready to be shooter in Gilbert incident
>
> Posted: Wednesday, May 2, 2012 2:53 pm | Updated: 5:01 pm, Thu May 3, 2012.
>
> Tribune
>
> Prominent East Valley political figure J.T. Ready is the man police believe
> shot and killed four people Wednesday in a Gilbert home before taking his
> own life.
>
> Gilbert police believe Jason Todd Ready, 39, was the gunman in the incident
> that occurred shortly after 1 p.m. at a home at 530 W. Tumbleweed, near the
> intersection of Warner and Cooper Roads.
>
> Ready is a former Marine known for his neo-Nazi ties, as well as for his
> efforts in organizing desert militia groups to find illegal immigrants and
> drug smugglers. He most recently had announced intentions to run for the
> office of Pinal County Sheriff, and previously had run for a Mesa City
> Council seat in 2006
>
> In addition to Ready, Gilbert police have also confirmed that Lisa Lynn
> Mederos, 46, her daughter, Amber Nieve Mederos, 23, and her granddaughter,
> 15-month-old Lily Lynn Mederos were among those killed in the shooting.
> Also
> killed was Jim Franklin Hiott, 24, Amber Mederos' fiance.
>
> Police, who arrived in the neighborhood to see Ready's black Chevy Impala
> parked with its nose pointed at the front of the house, still are putting
> together the pieces of how the day unraveled that shocked what residents
> described as a "tranquil" neighborhood, made national news and stirred a
> range of emotions from Ready's friends, adversaries and neighbors.
>
> Balafas has said that the evidence points to the shooting being related to
> domestic violence. Officers have recovered two handguns and a shotgun.
>
> Sandi Wilder, a neighbor of the home where the shooting occurred at 530 W.
> Tumbleweed, said a woman who lived at that residence was the girlfriend of
> J.T. Ready.
>
> Wilder's husband, Chip, president of the Lago Estancia HOA, told the
> Tribune
> that over the past few years, he had often seen Ready and a few other men
> dressed in full camouflage gear come to the home. He said they always
> looked
> as if they had been in the desert or were part of a survivalist group.
>
> "I'm a little shaken up with what's happened in our neighborhood," Chip
> Wilder said Wednesday afternoon. "It's just a terrible tragedy."
>
> "On arrival, officers found several victims within the household," said
> Balafas.
>
> Balafas said police believed only one suspect was involved in the shooting,
> and was one of the five dead.
>
> "We do not believe there are any suspects at large," he said.
>
> Police were also interviewing someone Wednesday believed to be a witness,
> Balafas added.
>
> Lily Mederos was transported to the hospital shortly after police responded
> to the home, but was pronounced dead en route. The bodies of the four
> adults
> involved in the incident remained in the home into Wednesday evening as
> police waited for the go-ahead to continue investigating.
>
> Assisted by the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Mesa Police
> Department's bomb squad and the Department of Defense, police discovered
> two
> handguns and a shotgun inside the residence and two 55-gallon drums
> containing an unknown liquid in the backyard that delayed investigators of
> going into the home until it was examined as a precautionary measure.
>
> The FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force were at the scene because of the
> amount of military-grade munitions found in the house, and chemicals found
> in 55-gallon drums in the backyard of the home, Balafas said.
>
> On Thursday, the FBI was continuing to assist Gilbert police in the
> investigation.
>
> Authorities close to the case said that Ready's activities had caused him
> to
> be a "person of interest" and on their radar for quite some time and by
> closely watching him, they said it wasn't known at this time where it could
> lead in the way of his possible involvement with other domestic terrorism
> groups.
>
> Investigators obtained a search warrant for the residence and located
> hazardous chemicals and military grade munitions. The Gilbert Fire
> Department Hazardous Materials Team and the Department of Defense assisted
> in removing the items.
>
> Police had cordoned off a large area of the neighborhood surrounding the
> home in northwest Gilbert.
>
> Two Gilbert schools were locked down Wednesday, according to a message on
> the Gilbert Unified School District website.
>
> At the request of the police department, Gilbert Elementary School, 175 W.
> Elliot Road, and Mesquite Junior High School, 130 W. Mesquite, were placed
> in a modified lockdown and classes continued inside the schools. People
> were
> unable to enter or leave the building during the lockdown.
>
> Shortly before 2 p.m., Gilbert Police recommended the schools resume
> regular
> activities, an update on the website said. Students at both schools were
> never in any immediate danger.
>
> A representative from the district was unavailable for comment.
>
> In a statement issued by Gilbert Mayor John Lewis said, "Our community is
> deeply saddened by the tragic loss of life that came as a result of
> yesterday's events here in Gilbert. I have the utmost confidence in our
> police department's capabilities to handle this ongoing investigation. I
> have been so pleased with the cooperation from all local and federal
> agencies involved with this matter. We send our heartfelt condolences and
> support to the family and friends of those involved and I urge you all to
> join together to support our Town during this difficult time."
>
> Tim Hacker, Stacie Spring, Mike Sakal and the Associated Press contributed
> to this report.
>
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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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