How a SWAT Team Killed an Innocent Man Outside His Childhood Home

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/how-swat-team-killed-innocent-man-outside-his-childhood-home

In the middle of the night of May 31, 2012, a SWAT team arrived at a house deep in Oregon’s coastal forest, searching for two men suspected of a brutal beating in nearby Yachats. They were confronted by a man holding a rifle, and shot him dead.

The man they killed that night was Sam Mullane. He was not one of the two wanted men. Those men, Matthew Hubeny, 27, and Justin B. Wood, 25, had gone to Sam’s house to hide. They continued to hide in the house while Sam stepped outside, was confronted by the police and was killed. Sam died in the driveway of the house where he was raised, the house he had just 10 months earlier, on his 18th birthday, inherited from his father.

The Mullane house is located seven miles from the Pacific Ocean, in a place known as Tenmile Creek, Oregon. Tenmile is a narrow valley bordered by two national wilderness areas: Cummins Creek and Rock Creek Wilderness. Together they form the largest intact coastal temperate rain forest in the continental United States. The valley is mostly native forest: spruce, hemlock and Douglas fir trees with an understory of ferns, berries and wildflowers. It is a reminder of a former world, a lush world of beauty and biodiversity. Throughout the late 1980s and ’90s, its residents had engaged in a protracted struggle with the Forest Service, which had slated much of the Tenmile forest to be clear cut. By 2012 most of the valley had, as a result of their work and against all odds, been protected from logging.

Years ago, when someone asked Sam Mullane’s mother why she had come to this remote place, she said she came because nobody was watching you here. A few years later her son was killed by four men wearing night vision goggles. Most of us didn’t move to Tenmile to avoid police, although our reasons turned out to be as ironic as hers. We had moved to that remote, hidden place to garden, raise our kids, build a house and create a community. We moved there for a simple life and found ourselves in the middle of the war over the Northwest Forest. The last house on the road, the Mullane house, wasn’t part of our community, although in the early days we were friends with its caretaker and in later years the boy, Sam, played with some of our kids.

[hobbit709]

1. He was harboring fugitives and in the eyes of the law that makes you guilty of something.

[demwing]

3. well, it makes you suspect of harboring fugitives...

so he should have been arrested and tried, not murdered.

[hobbit709]

4. I guess I should include the sarcasm thingie on everything.

[Lochloosa]

2. I think there is way more to this story than this.

Like two sides of it.