Members of an Oregon-based ecoterrorism group have been indicted and accused of cutting a swath of destruction across the West, including conspiring to commit the 1998 Vail arsons.
The federal indictment, unsealed Friday, tells a story of 4 1/2 years of vandalism and arson. It contends that 11 suspects were responsible for 17 incidents in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.
“In all, their trail of destruction across the Pacific Northwest and beyond resulted in millions of dollars of property damage,” U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday in a written statement.
Gonzales called the suspects domestic terrorists who used firebombs made out of milk jugs to lash out at government and private businesses.
The members, based in Portland, carried out attacks between 1996 and 2001, according to the indictment. Using police scanners and radios to avoid detection, they targeted park ranger stations, lumber companies, a meat processing plant, wild-horse corrals managed by the government and a car dealership.
The indictment, issued by a federal grand jury in Oregon, for the first time publicly names the suspects in the Vail fires, which at the time were the most costly act of ecoterrorism in U.S. history, causing $12 million in damage.
The suspects in the Vail part of the conspiracy are Josephine Sunshine Overaker, Kevin Tubbs, Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach and unindicted co-conspirator William C. Rodgers, who killed himself last month in an Arizona jail.
Of the 11 people charged in the indictment, eight have been arrested, several of them in a sweep last month. Three people – including Overaker, one of the Vail suspects – have yet to be apprehended and are thought to be outside the U.S.
Those in custody will be formally advised of the charges at a future date in Oregon.
But while the indictment charges the suspects with conspiring to burn down the buildings at Vail, it does not charge them with actually committing the crimes.
For jurisdictional reasons, they would have to be charged with the actual crimes by Colorado authorities.
“The actual crime of arson has to be brought in the federal district where it occurred,” said Steve Peifer, an assistant U.S. attorney from Oregon who is working the case. “We don’t have venue.”
Jeff Dorschner, spokesman for the Colorado U.S. attorney’s office, declined to address whether the suspects will face arson charges in Colorado, indicating that he couldn’t comment on the investigation.
Peifer said the indictment makes clear that the Vail arsons were part of the conspiracy.
Vail’s Two Elk Lodge, along with the Ski Patrol headquarters and three ski-lift buildings, burned to the ground in the middle of the night as the resort was pushing a controversial expansion plan.
In anonymous e-mails, the Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility for the fires.
The e-mails said they were set because the planned 600-acre expansion would encroach upon lynx habitat.
Staff writer Alicia Caldwell can be reached at 303-820-1930 or acaldwell@denverpost.com.
