Growing anti-government movement raising alarms

Kevin Boney faces numerous felony charges including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon on a family member and aggravated assault. Kevin Boney faces numerous felony charges including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon on a family member and aggravated assault. Photo: Liberty County Sheriff's Office, . Photo: Liberty County Sheriff's Office, . Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close Growing anti-government movement raising alarms 1 / 18 Back to Gallery

ROMAYOR - When Liberty County sheriff's deputies responded to a 911 call for a man shooting at his wife on a lone country road 70 miles northeast of Houston, they knew he was armed and dangerous.

But they didn't expect him to charge out of his trailer with a ballistic helmet, body armor - including advanced ceramic plates, able to stop high-powered rifle bullets - and two semi-automatics, complete with an extra drum of ammunition.

"I don't recognize your authority," Kevin Boney allegedly told deputies before a tense standoff that had officers crouching behind their patrol cars for nearly 90 minutes while the 34-year-old spewed anti-government vitriol.

"You can't arrest me," yelled Boney, a self-described "warrant officer" in the Texas Militia. "I don't recognize your laws. You can take my guns from my cold dead body."

After surrendering, Boney said he should have just "(expletive) killed" the deputies, remaining so violent that they subdued him with pepper spray. The Feb. 14 incident and another Texas Militia standoff in March involving Boney's cousin - where deputies found enough explosives to alert federal agents - is the latest in what officials here say has been a considerable uptick in confrontations with anti-government extremists, mirroring a troubling nationwide phenomenon.

"We have dealt with people like that a lot more in the past year than before," said Capt. Rex Evans, a Liberty County sheriff's spokesman. "They are, maybe not always violent and confrontational, but certainly argumentative whenever we try to arrest them, stop them, write them tickets, go on their property, anything. They believe we have no authority."

Sovereigns on rise

From San Antonio to Seattle, Albany to Atlanta, law enforcement agencies are witnessing the resurgence of a dangerous anti-government movement that peaked with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported so-called "patriot" groups, including militias and sovereigns, skyrocketed from 149 in 2008 to 1,274 in 2011, the highest it has ever been. Texas topped the list with 76 groups, up from six in 2008. Mark Potok, who tracks extremist groups for the center, called the growth "astounding."

"We've never seen anything like it," he said. The previous high was 858 in 1996, the year after Timothy McVeigh, a militia sympathizer, and Terry Nichols, a sovereign, killed 168 people, the nation's deadliest terrorism attack after Sept. 11.

Fueling the rise is a long list of grievances: the shoddy economy; the foreclosure crisis; Barack Obama's presidency; income inequality; concerns about the Second Amendment; fear Hispanics will overtake whites as the majority; and unease about the role of white working-class men in the U.S. "It's as bad as it was in the 1990s, if not worse," said Mark Pitcavage, intelligence director for the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors extremists.

'Failed' by government

Liberty County, where 79 percent of residents are white and per capita income is just over $15,000, is a case study in this fractured movement's roots.

"We're hearing a lot of 'the government has failed us' type of stuff," Evans said. "The socioeconomic situation seems to be the biggest driving force."

In February, the FBI called a national press conference highlighting the danger of sovereign citizens, a "domestic terrorist movement" claiming to exist "beyond the realm of government authority." Federal convictions of such extremists, mostly for white-collar crime like fraud, doubled from nine in 2009 to 18 in each of the last two years.

Locally, numbers of affiliated citizens are hard to come by as law enforcement doesn't classify them; many fly under the radar until they explode. In February, a Tarrant County jury sentenced James Tesi, an admitted sovereign, to 35 years for a shootout with officers after a traffic stop. Since 2002, sovereigns have slain six police officers.

Texas militias hark back to the beginnings of the state itself, from Stephen F. Austin to volunteer cavalries, which morphed into Texas Rangers. Militias are protected by the U.S. Constitution. But since the 1990s many have been tied to violence.

Boney, who is in Liberty County Jail, could not be reached. And on this remote County Road 2134 where he and his family live - where residents said monthly training for this militia chapter is held and which is dotted with signs warning trespassers that they'll be shot - nobody wanted to talk. Or, they feigned ignorance.

Said a neighbor of Boney's, "Y'all are dropping your bucket into an empty well." Added his wife: "They don't trust the government. Why should they talk to you?"

lomi.kriel@chron.com