The FBI says the elderly Utah man had threatened the president and they shot him when he aimed a gun at them. His friends and family say he was killed for his political beliefs.
Go Tell the Crocodiles: Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique.“Hey Merrick Garland, You Demented Weasel,” he wrote on Facebook last fall. “Send your FBI Swat Team to my house.”Nyla Rollins was about to take her dogs outside when she heard explosions coming from the direction of the brownish purple split-level on the other side of her back fence — one, then another and, after a while, a third. It was around 6 a.m. on Aug.
The official reason for the FBI raid on Robertson’s home emerged later that day in the form of a federal criminal complaint originally filed under seal and detailing alleged threats Robertson made against Democratic political figures on social media. A few days earlier, in what appeared to be his final Facebook post, Robertson had written: “I HEAR BIDEN IS COMING TO UTAH,” in his customary all-caps, describing the president’s anticipated Aug. 9 visit to Salt Lake City.
To his friends and family, Robertson was an overweight retiree who walked with a cane and drove the half-block to church every Sunday and slept in a recliner because he found it difficult to get out of bed. He hadn’t gone to New York to carry out his threat against Bragg. It seems he hadn’t even driven the hour to Salt Lake City in years.
Robertson’s kitchen was tidy but close to overflowing. A tall wire shelf held multiple pancake batter dispensers still in their boxes, saucepans, strainers, skillets and a generously provisioned spice rack. The meal Frank remembers most vividly from his childhood was his father’s Dutch-oven pheasant, brought home from hunting trips and cleaned in the backyard , then cooked on the embers of a fire built in a section of steel pipe from a job site.
Frank walked me down a short flight of stairs from the kitchen to his father’s office and small gunsmithing shop, where a crumpled Make America Great Again hat sat on a high shelf. The FBI had taken a lot; Frank had the receipt. The workbench that once housed Robertson’s reloading supplies and tools was all but empty. Straps dangled from the walls where close to a dozen AR-15s had hung.
Frank, who identifies as an independent, knew his father had been an avid consumer of far-right blogs and podcasts but he couldn’t name them. He knew that his father loved to watch YouTube videos known as “First Amendment audits,” which he described as going “to a place to film to create a confrontation with the police.
A man stood just outside the crime scene perimeter established after Robertson’s death, holding a large “Fuck Biden” flag. | Chris Samuels/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP Robertson didn’t buy his ammo new. He was a “reloader,” carefully measuring out the primer and gunpowder, and crimping each new projectile in place.
In August 2018, two workers adding Google Fiber service to a neighbor’s home were working on a utility pole in Robertson’s backyard when he came out of the house wielding a handgun. The Terrys were seated on a beige couch in their living room in an upscale subdivision south of Provo. Their RV was parked out front, and horse motifs and mementos of Robertson’s woodworking decorated the walls. Every fall, Robertson and Steve built handmade Christmas presents for the Terrys’ grandchildren — rocking horses one year, wooden gum ball dispensers the next. They’d agreed to meet with me in part because they couldn’t believe the media had gotten their friend so wrong.
The Terrys, too, struggled to articulate their friend’s political views beyond saying he was a strong believer in the Constitution and individual liberties. Steve says he didn’t pay much attention to Robertson’s social media posts; like Frank Robertson, Patti had unfollowed Craig years ago.
Robertson’s daughter, Shanda, who lives in Virginia, is not on social media at all, and still hasn’t seen her father’s posts online. But they spoke by phone every Sunday in recent years, praying and reading the Book of Mormon together. “When we talked politics, oftentimes it was in relation to things we read in scriptures of a lost and fallen world,” she told me, recalling a part of the Book of Mormon that deals with a government which collapses under the weight of its own corruption.
The reaction from official sources in Utah was either silence — not a single member of Provo’s City Council or the Utah County Commission agreed to speak to me about the incident — or something closer to One America News Network anchor Jack Posobiec: “If you make posts like that, you better expect a knock on the door from law enforcement, but the question is: Was the pre-dawn raid the only way to go about...
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