Minuteman Group Members Murder Young Girl and Father

A couple minuteman group members took it upon themselves to murder a man and his nine year old daughter in their home in Arivaca, a border town in Arizona.

The trio are alleged to have dressed as law enforcement officers and forced their way into a home about 10 miles north of the Mexican border in rural Arivaca on May 30, wounding a woman and fatally shooting her husband and their 9-year-old daughter. Their motive was financial, Dupnik said. (Source).

There was some interesting analysis on Imagine 2050 here and here. In particular, "Child Killer Represented National Anti-Immigrant Group" discusses what other media have not touched, which is that Shawna Forde, said to be the mastermind of the murder/robbery, was a representative of FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), a group that pretends to have no associations with white supremacists and other extremists. The two articles discuss the fact that these kinds of incidents are not aberrations: that what happened here and in other cases of violence is very closely tied to the ideologies of the anti-immigrant movement.

Despite Forde having been heavily involved in the anti-immigrant movement, including sharing a state with Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist, the media is falling over itself to make sure we know that the folks involved in this crime do not represent the minutemen in general or the minuteman civil defense corps (although some articles include "minuteman" in their titles). But notice that the reasons given for the distance other minutemen are putting between themselves and Forde are not about what she has advocated, but that she has a problem following orders.

Hal Washburn, vetting officer for Washington state chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, said Forde was encouraged to leave the group over questions about honesty and her inability to follow orders, according to the story. (Source).