Update 12-11
http://www.thecarolinachannel.com/news/2696793/detail.html Abbeville County's Highway 72 was still wide open. The phones hadn't started blaring yet. Police radios were cackling, but the messages were not yet as dire. It was just before 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 8, and a legal assistant in the South Carolina Attorney General's Office was checking her voice mail.
Rita O'Neal punched the keys on her phone that led to a waiting message.
"Yes, Rita, this is Rita Bixby." The voice on the record message was familiar.
"I live at 4 Union Church Road at the junction of 72 and the corner of Horton Drive. I've talked to you before, and they have, the state has decided they were going to come in and take our property."
"My husband and my son are there and there is a shootout going on because they're not going to take our land. No one has approached us and asked us if they could negotiate or anything. They just simply came onto our land and started taking it and there is a shootout there."
O'Neal eventually remembered who Rita Bixby was. She was the mother of a 36-year-old man who had been fighting extradition to his home state of New Hampshire. O'Neal had last spoken to the Bixby family in September.
But now it was Dec. 8 and if what the voice on the message said was true, something very wrong was happening in Abbeville County.
----snip---
Within minutes, Senior Assistant Attorney General Sonny Jones had listened to the message. Minutes later, O'Neal was on the phone with Abbeville County Sheriff Charles Goodwin. She told him what the Bixby woman had said in the message. As she talked, Goodwin interrupted her.
In a report she submitted to her superiors later, O'Neal wrote, "He...said he would have to call me back...there was an officer down."
”Live Free Or Die!”
Rita's son Steven Bixby had a lot of love for the state of New Hampshire. Or, at least, he said he did.
Just a day after the Abbeville County coroner took two beloved law enforcement officer into the morgue, the squat 36-year-old alleged killer stood in a magistrate's courtroom and declared, "I'm originally from New Hampshire where the motto is 'Live Free or Die!'"
Bixby would go on to cite from the New Hampshire constitution and use it as source material for his perceived right to revolution. What he did not tell the assembled law enforcement officials and reporters was that if he had been living in New Hampshire, he would not be as free as he might have wanted.
The fact was, the state of New Hampshire wanted Steven Bixby and had for many years.
As early as March 1, 1994, Bixby had been in New Hampshire's Grafton County Superior Court facing charges of operating a motor vehicle on a revoked license. Bixby had a drunken driving conviction on his record, as well as several other moving violations. They were nothing serious, but his convictions eventually warranted a jail sentence. A judge sentenced Bixby to a few months in jail, a $500 fine, and a year on probation.
According to the assistant sheriff of Grafton County, Capt. Paul Leavitt, Bixby failed to ever pay the fine. Leavitt said Bixby also failed to show up at a state probation office to begin his year of probation. The county issued a warrant for Bixby's arrest.
Leavitt said investigators eventually discovered that Bixby was living in South Carolina. The state issued a fugitive arrest warrant and began to try to extradite Bixby back to New Hampshire,
According to the South Carolina attorney general's spokesperson, Trey Walker, South Carolina will not extradite a person to serve a sentence in another state of less than one year. Walker said New Hampshire wanted Bixby to serve a nine-month sentence.
The South Carolina Attorney General's Office dealt with the case from 2000 until 2003.
During those years, few people had reason to suspect that within a few months some of the top members of South Carolina government and law enforcement would be in the middle of a brief but violent attempt at revolution on a back country highway.
A Letter From Union Church Road
Many of those people were about to receive letters from the Bixby family, but most of the letters were going to arrive too late. At least one state office received its copy while the shootout was in progress.
In less than 900 words, Arthur and Rita Bixby stated their case.
----snip---
“The military is scattered all over the world allegedly protecting our rights. Wrong! … The military should be in this Country (sic) defending OUR RIGHTS!” the letter read.
Full text of the Bixby letter here:
http://www.thecarolinachannel.com/news/2696748/detail.html Rita Bixby Phone Call Transcript
http://www.thecarolinachannel.com/news/2696610/detail.htmlLooks like Steven Bixby graduated from scofflaw ideologue to cold-blooded murderer.