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The Endgame
By dawn on Labor Day, 120 law enforcement officers were on the scene, many along the perimeter of Rainbow Farm. That morning,
Brandon Peoples, an 18-year old neighbor and regular at the campground coffee shop, decided to walk onto the farm thru the cornfield
and managed to slip past the cops. He was determined to convince Crosslin to turn himself in. Crosslin was pissed off to
see him but said he could use help on an errand: He needed company on a mission to scrounge up some food from a neighbor's abandoned
cabin about a quarter mile away. Crosslin carried his Ruger and a two-way radio and stepped outside. Peoples, holding a
feather - he said it was for good luck - joined him. The two men stood by the door and listened for something, anything.
A snap of a twig. A cough, perhaps - any sound that would give away the position of FBI snipers. The pair stepped down
a two-track path to the south running parallel to the oiled dirt of Pemberton Road and left Rohm behind inside the farmhouse, also
with a two way radio.
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Peoples walked in silence behind Crosslin, who had told him falsely that the roads were mined and set up with trip wires. Peoples
tried his best to walk exactly in Crosslin's footsteps.
They headed down and traversed acres of swamp bottom. Crosslin shouldered-in the front door of a small cinder-block cabin belonging
to Carl "Butch" McDonald. The old man called Crosslin a "damn good neighbor" and had cleared out days earlier when Crosslin warned
him there might be trouble. Crosslin and Peoples grabbed a coffeemaker, coffee, steaks, bread, five cartons of cigarettes and other
supplies and put them in plastic trash bags. McDonald's house was also full of guns. Crosslin offered Butch's .22 rifle to
Peoples to replace the feather. "Don't you want to stick around and have fun?' he asked. Peoples refused the gun.
When they returned to the farmhouse they realized they had forgotten the coffeepot. So they went back to McDonald's house and while
returning stopped on the steep knoll dubbed Mount This, a favorite spot of festival security workers because of its expansive views of
the house and road. Crosslin was catching his breath. Peoples bent down to tie his shoe. Then Crosslin hushed him:
"I heard a noise," he whispered. Crosslin called Rohm on the radio to tell him they were almost back, saying, "incoming."
As he crept across the clearing, Peoples followed, looking down. He again tried to walk in Crosslin's footprints and clutched the
Bunn coffeepot fiercely. Crosslin looked into a garbage can, then stepped slowly around the rocks of a fire pit.
Suddenly he tensed and stared intently at the dense underbrush.
In the next instant, People heard shots and shouting. FBI snipers Richard Salomon and Michael Heffron popped up and shot simultaneously,
Salomon hitting Crosslin above the right eye with a .308 that blew thorough the back of his skull, killing him instantly. He nearly
fell on Peoples, and his brain landed two feet away from his shattered head. Skull fragments raked People's face, and he went down
on hands and knees, shuddering and screaming, "I'm hit!" The agents moved in quickly and place him under arrest. The last thing
he saw as he was carted off was his plaid shirt lying in the woods, paces away from Crosslin's lifeless body. Crosslin never fired
his gun.
Rohm waited in the house alone.
Rohm's son saw the news on his foster parents' TV. He knew that Crosslin had been killed, and jumped to the phone and called Tammy Brand,
the mother of his best friend Dairik, yelling, "Don't let them kill my dad!"
"We had high hopes that Rohm was going to walk out of there," says Lieutenant Mike Risko of the Michigan state police, "because he was talking
to us adamantly and strongly."
Robert agreed to write his father a letter. "Hey, Dad," it read. "Please come out so no one gets hurt."
What happened on that Tuesday morning doesn't make much sense. It might have been a tragic miscommunication or the final statement from
a man who felt he had nothing left to lose. State troopers in an LAV tossed Rohm a phone during the night, and Rohm agreed to surrender
at seven o'clock Tuesday morning if he saw his boy. "We agreed to bring Robert out there," says Risko. But just after six A.M.,
an upper room in the house caught fire, and Rohm emerged, carrying his Ruger.
According to the state police, troopers stormed up in the LAV and told Rohm over a bullhorn to drop the gun. He seemed frightened and
confused. Suddenly he turned back into the house. ( "Possibly for the dog," Risko says. ) He re-emerged on the run and
took cover under a small pine tree 10 yards from the house. The LAV moved forward. "At that point he shouldered the rifle,"
Risko says, "and he was taken out by a sniper." One bullet went through the butt of his rifle and his chest. Like Crosslin, he never
fired a shot.
Robert was halfway down the road at the time. He saw the smoke and heard the gunfire, which he believed was ammo ignited by the
fire. Then he was ushered back to the car. By the time he got home, a detail of caseworkers, counselors and FIA officials -
his new family - was already on its way to give him the news. That night a harvest moon rose over the destruction at Rainbow Farm,
and then it rained.
Epilogue
During the standoff, a small crowd had gathered at a makeshift protest camp along M-60. A typical sign read OUR GOVERNMENT IS KILLING
AMERICANS.
"This was a Waco-like event," says Rick Martinez, Michigan editor for the South Bend Tribune. "You have individual rights, but then
there's the specter of illegal drug sales. They're parallel events, but it's apples to oranges to grapes."
"You could see this whole thing as Scott's fault," says Lorraine Jaffee, an outspoken foster-parent advocate from Edwardsburg who has had
run-ins with Teter. "If he hadn't taken Robert Rohm, none of this would have happened."
The official version of events - that Crosslin and Rohm both raised their rifles - was soon disputed. Within days, investigations were
launched by the families, the prosecutor, the state's attorney general, the state police, the FBI, even the Michigan Militia.
The lawyer handling a wrongful-death civil suit for Rohm's estate says the state police account of Rohm's death is seriously flawed.
"Our forensic experts are the guys retained by the defense team at Ruby Ridge," says attorney Christopher Keane. "Among other problems,
there's no way Rohm could have been facing the LAV in a ready-to-shoot position at the time he was shot. The police case is forensically
baseless. Usually, the cover-up is worse than the crime. Here, it is just as bad."
