This episode contains audio and descriptions depicting violence,

as well as some harsh language. Please take care when listening.

It's August 21st, 1992, almost a year before the government standoff at Waco, Texas.

A group of deputy US marshals are trudging along the forest road on a reconnaissance mission

in a remote part of Northern Idaho known as Ruby Ridge. What you're hearing is footage shot

by them on a video camera. The marshals are here to surveil a man named Randy Weaver,

a white separatist involved with the Aryan Nations. Two years before, Weaver jumped bail on a gun

charge, and ever since he's been holed up with his family in a mountaintop cabin here in these woods.

The marshals proceed quietly and with caution. Weaver and his family are known to be heavily armed.

They pass a fork in the road that leads up to Weaver's cabin when they hear a sound in the distance.

It's the Weaver family dog, a yellow lab named Stryker, and the barks are getting closer.

The marshals beat a retreat back to the fork and take cover as Stryker comes bounding toward them.

Randy Weaver's 14-year-old son, Sammy, isn't far behind the dog carrying a rifle.

As Stryker bears down on the deputies, one of them opens fire, killing the dog.

Sammy Weaver raises his rifle, taking aim at Marshall William Deegan, and pulls the trigger.

At that time in the American Northwest, the federal government was in the process of trying

to root out a growing problem, an increasingly organized and violent white supremacist movement.

Where once these groups existed on the fringes, without much of a network between them,

individual cells were starting to organize around a group called the Aryan Nations.

Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler told me, within the next five years there will be a great war

that will decide whether the white race continues.

We've offered ourselves to try to save America.

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