After he'd been shooting at them, and after they lobbed tear gas canisters into the house.
His crime: owning illegal guns (by California's definition, which means that almost anything but a pea shooter that hasn't been registered through several different layers of bureaucracy is illegal).
Specifically, he was a convicted felon owning guns, impersonating a US Marshal, and threatening his neighbors. Let's not skip the nagging details.
The guy was a dirtbag liar who was potentially dangerous, but is that grounds for summary execution without trial?
I see I have a member of the James Beck fan club.
Your due process rights require you to actually submit to the due process in question, instead of shooting at the people involved in said due process. Until that time, whatever lethal force they employ against you is known as "self-defense."
Did Mr. Beck have grounds for capping off rounds at LA Sherriffs and BATF personnel attempting to serve a valid warrant? Or did you perchance forget that little detail?
I watched as they pumped flammable gas into his house and feigned surprise that it caught on fire and burned to the ground.
It's an occupational hazard with tear gas, but it's not a certainty. And ol' James Beck could've just come out with his hands up, and avoided that outcome. But you're ignoring that little detail.
I saw the extended fire hoses that were not allowed to put water on the fire.
Because the firemen were A BLOCK AWAY.
The LA County Fire Department's attitude is that if you shoot at the cops and get your a$$ lit on fire, YOU can f***ing well put it out yourself, they are NOT going to risk their necks over someone who likes to shoot at the cops--all too often, the shooter also likes to shoot at firemen, too. Seems that the rioters in South Central during 1992 tended to shoot at the firemen--FROM INSIDE BURNING BUILDINGS, NO LESS.
The firemen were only allowed to put water on neighboring houses, they weren't allowed to swing the boom around to hit the perp's house with water.
Please get this straight. They didn't WANT to go in close to put out the fire. They opted to spend their efforts saving the houses of people who were NOT actively shooting at the cops.
The remains of the house were bulldozed under within hours.
Gosh, I guess you missed your opportunity to worship at the Shrine of St. James Beck the Ignited.
They made sure the house fire burned until it burned itself out, the better to hide whatever evidence was present.
Now you're ASSUMING motives without proof, after ignoring previous facts.
But you don't have an agenda, do you?
The government didn't see a reason to collect material evidence or conduct a formal investigation.
BATF serves warrant on Beck, Beck shoots at BATF and Sherriffs, refuses to surrender after killing a sherriff's deputy, and dies in a fire.
Not much to investigate, is there?
They just bulldozed the remains and wrote it off as a psycho committing suicide after refusing to cooperate with the cops.
Change the end of that sentence to "shooting at the cops and killing a deputy responding to the emergency call."
There was plenty of sniping by the general public until Sept. 11th, which could have been prevented if the FBI and ATF weren't so busy declaring war on Americans that they considered radical.
Actually, among the vast majority of sane and sensible folk out here in CA, there wasn't much sniping at all.
In much the same way, the ideologues decry the enforcement of anything simple and mundane, such as parking ordinances, since a violator could get killed if he chooses to escalate his disdain for civilization to its logical conclusion; "You want to kill someone merely over a parking ticket?!" they will cry out in their hopeless albeit infinitely compassionate concern for anti-social barbarians.