Randy Weaver

Weaver's daughter Sara posted online that he had died on May 11, 2022, after being sick since at least mid-April. A cause of death was not given. He was 74 years old.

On June 18, 2007, Weaver participated in a press conference with tax protesters Edward and Elaine Brown on the front porch of their home in Plainfield, New Hampshire. He declared, "I ain't afraid of dying no more. I'm curious about the afterlife, and I'm an atheist."

In 1999, Weaver married Linda Gross, a legal secretary, in Jefferson, Iowa.

In 1998, Weaver published The Federal Siege at Ruby Ridge: In Our Own Words, which he partly sold in person at gun shows.

In April 1996, Weaver accompanied Bo Gritz to Jordan, Montana, where Gritz was to attempt to negotiate a conclusion to the Montana Freemen standoff. However, Weaver was not allowed by the FBI to enter the Freemen's holdout.

In August 1995, the US government avoided trial on a civil lawsuit filed by the Weavers by awarding the three surviving daughters $1,000,000 each, and Randy Weaver $100,000 over the deaths of Sammy and Vicki Weaver.

Weaver testified about his racial beliefs before a U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee in 1995, saying, "I'm not a hateful racist as most people understand it. But I believe in the separation of races. We wanted to be separated from the rest of the world, to live in a remote area, to give our children a good place to grow up."

In 1995, Weaver was interviewed by New York Times reporter Ken Fuson and expressed regret about not appearing in court for his 1991 gun charge, saying "I'm not totally without fault in this."

Ruby Ridge was the site of an 11-day siege in 1992 in Boundary County, Idaho, near Naples. It began on August 21, when deputies of the United States Marshals Service (USMS) initiated action to apprehend and arrest Randy Weaver under a bench warrant after his failure to appear on a firearms charge. He had attempted to sell a pair of illegal sawed-off shotguns to a federal informer within the Aryan Nation white supremacist group. Weaver refused to surrender and remained at home with his family and friend Kevin Harris. The Hostage Rescue Team of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI HRT) became involved as the siege developed.

On August 22, 1992 FBI sniper/observers in the Hostage Rescue Team were dispatched to Ruby Ridge. The team used specified "Rules of Engagement" which allowed them to shoot any armed adult male exiting the cabin.

In 1989, Weaver met Kenneth Fadeley at an Aryan Nations meeting. Fadeley was actually an undercover ATF agent investigating the Aryan Nation complex under the alias "Gus Magisano". Weaver agreed to sell Fadeley two sawed-off shotguns. In December 1990, Weaver received felony weapons charges in connection with the 1989 transaction. During the initial encounter with Fadeley, the Weaver family relocated from a rental house to a cabin near Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in the Selkirk mountains. After charges were pressed against her husband, Vicki Weaver wrote to U.S. Attorney Maurice O. Ellsworth, addressing him as "Servant of the Queen of Babylon" and writing, "The stink of your lawless government has reached Heaven, the abode of Yahweh our Yashua", and "Whether we live or whether we die, we will not bow to your evil commandments."

In 1988, Weaver decided to run for county sheriff using the slogan "Get out of jail – free" and was adamant about his decision not to pay taxes.

Partially as a result of reading the 1978 book The Late Great Planet Earth, the couple began to harbor more fundamentalist beliefs, with Vicki believing that the apocalypse was imminent. To follow Vicki's vision of her family surviving the apocalypse away from what they saw as a corrupt civilization, the Weaver family moved to a 20-acre (8.1-hectare) property in remote Boundary County, Idaho, in 1983 and built a cabin there. They paid $5,000 in cash and traded their moving truck for the land, valued at $500 an acre.

A month after leaving the Army, Randy Weaver and Vicki Jordison married in a ceremony at the First Congregationalist Church in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in November 1971. After a semester at the University of Northern Iowa, Randy dropped out after finding well-paying work at a local John Deere factory. Vicki worked first as a secretary and then as a homemaker.

In 1970, Weaver returned to his hometown for a visit while on leave. During this leave, he first met his future wife, Victoria "Vicki" Jordison, introducing himself as "Pete", rather than his "hated" given name Randall. By the time he was honorably discharged from the military, he had attained the rank of sergeant.

After graduating from Jefferson High School in 1966, he attended Iowa Central Community College before dropping out in 1968 after enlisting in the United States Army during the height of the Vietnam War and assigned to a Special Forces unit the Green Berets in a support role. He was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Randall Claude Weaver (January 3, 1948 – May 11, 2022) was an American survivalist, former Iowa factory worker, and self-proclaimed white separatist. He was a central actor in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff at his cabin near Naples, Idaho, that resulted in the deaths of his wife and son. Weaver was charged with murder, conspiracy, and assault as well as other crimes. He was acquitted of most of the charges, but was convicted of failing to appear in court on a previous weapons charge and sentenced to 18 months in prison. His family eventually received a total of $3,100,000 in compensation for the killing of his wife and son by federal agents.

Randy Weaver was born on January 3, 1948, to Clarence and Wilma Weaver, a farming couple in Villisca, Iowa. He was one of four children. The Weavers were deeply religious and had difficulty finding a denomination that matched their views; they often moved around among Evangelical, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches.