Hmmm, OK. I thought the FBI was on the scene at the cabin almost immediately. There were numerous agents in the woods who had been surveilling them for months.
While federal officials have claimed that the violent confrontation between the Weavers and the government began when the Weavers ambushed federal marshals, the report tells a very different story. A team of six U.S. marshals, split into two groups, trespassed onto Mr. Weaver’s land on Aug. 21, 1992. One of the marshals threw rocks at the Weaver’s cabin to see how much noise was required to agitate the Weaver’s dogs. A few minutes later, Randy Weaver, Kevin Harris, and 13-year-old Sammy Weaver came out of the cabin and began following their dogs. Three U.S. marshals were soon tearing through the woods.
At one point, U.S. Marshal Larry Cooper “told the others that it was [’expletive deleted’] for them to continue running and that he did not want to ‘run down the trail and get shot in the back.’ He urged them to take up defensive positions. The others agreed.... William Degan ... took a position behind a stump....”
As Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris came upon the marshals, gunfire erupted. Sammy was shot in the back and killed while running away from the scene (probably by Marshal Cooper, according to the report), and Marshal Degan was killed by Mr. Harris. The jury concluded that Mr. Harris’s action was legitimate self-defense; the Justice report concluded it was impossible to know who shot first.
Several places in the report deal with the possibility of a government coverup. After the firefight between the marshals and the Weavers and Mr. Harris, the surviving marshals were taken away to rest and recuperate. The report observed, “We question the wisdom of keeping the marshals together at the condominium for several hours, while awaiting interviews with the FBI. Isolating them in that manner created the appearance and generated allegations that they were fabricating stories and colluding to cover up the true circumstances of the shootings.”
http://www.stormfront.org/ruby.htm