Free Republic

Wednesday, June 4, was the 21st anniversary on the bulldozer attack in Granby. The attack was carried out by Marvin Heemeyer, a Granby business owner, in armored Komatsu D355A bulldozer. Several buildings were damaged in the rampage, including the Sky-Hi News office, a bank, a hardware store, a concrete company, a utility service center, the town hall, the police department, and a former mayor’s home. He targeted those who he felt had dealt him an injustice, the crux of which was a zoning dispute. The rampage lasted two hours and seven minutes, ending when the bulldozer got stuck attempting to...

GRANBY, Colo. — Twenty years ago, a man bent on destroying the town of Granby for perceived wrongs got into his modified bulldozer and went on a rampage that thrust the small mountain town into the national spotlight.

Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado was a profoundly frustrated muffler repair man. In the late 1990s–after years of protests, petitions, and town meetings–it became obvious to the 52-year-old that he was entwined in a gross miscarriage of justice. His business was ruined by some shady zoning changes, and Heemeyer contended that mayor and city council were corrupt. Even as he was forced to give up his legal fight and sell his land, he hatched one last plan to secretly retool his muffler shop to serve a single malevolent purpose: to construct a machine that would allow him to exact his...