“It was all designed to kill someone and make an example out of them.”
It certainly appears that way. The cops had an ambush site picked out, fortified, ready and waiting with about a dozen shooters situated just off the road hiding in the trees. They are probably responsible for jamming the cell service at the ambush site as well.
The way it appears was that they’d attempt to pull the vehicles over before they reached the ambush site. If indeed at the original traffic stop the cops fired on them, then it is abundantly clear the intent was to scare and force them into the ambush site, where they probably figured LaVoy and others would come out of their vehicles with guns blazing, giving plenty of justification in the public eye for killing them all. The problem was that nobody in the pickup started shooting! The people at the ambush didn’t really know what to do because things didn’t go as they planned. The best they had, and have, is that LaVoy DID exit the pickup (drawing attention on himself and away from the others in the truck) but as he was plodding through the deep snow, NO guns visible on him, he didn’t obey their commands to lay down, if any commands to do that were even issued. That’s the BEST excuse they have for opening fire on all of them: failure to play Simon Sez with the cops.
But again, the place where the pickup truck went off the road was clearly set up as an ambush site, and quite possibly as a kill zone. The biggest question that remains is was the first place that they were pulled over meant to be a genuine attempt to bring them all into custody, or was that first stop meant to scare them all, hoping they’d flee into the ambush site where they’d be met with overwhelming firepower by guys fully expecting ‘those crazy ranchers’ to start shooting as soon as they stopped.
As USNBandit pointed out: a cell deprived area known as “most of Eastern Oregon.”
No need to jam, no service.
Deliberately selecting a cell deprived area is a snap, so is inadvertently selecting one. We'll probably never know whether it was intentional or luck of the draw.