On Thursday, two police officers pulled over a white van in West Memphis, Arkansas, for a traffic stop, and the driver opened fire with an AK-47, killing the officers, according to police.
The driver of the van was Jerry Kane, who traveled the country giving a debt-elimination seminar and had recently spoken of killing IRS agents and being stopped at a “Nazi checkpoint” in New Mexico. Kane and his 16-year-old son were killed shortly after in a shootout with police in a Walmart parking lot. Two other police were wounded in the second shootout.
Kane may have been an adherent of the sovereign citizen movement. A sheriff in Kane’s home state of Ohio told the AP that in 2004, angry at being sentenced to (or, in his words, “enslaved” in) community service for driving with an expired license plate, Kane “claimed he was a ‘free man’ and asked [the judge] for $100,000 per day in gold or silver.”
The Commercial Appeal reports on a recent seminar in which Kane discussed how to deal with the IRS:
In the YouTube video he said, “You have to kill them all. So what we’re after here is not fighting, it’s conquering. I don’t want to have to kill anybody, but if they keep messing with me, that’s what it’s going to have to come out. That’s what it’s going to come down to, is I’m going to have to kill. And if I have to kill one, then I’m not going to be able to stop, I just know it.”In that video, he and Joe joke about using a bat to “take care of” a problem with an IRS agent.
Kane reportedly spent three days in jail in New Mexico recently, charged with driving without a license and concealing his identity. And a TV station in New Vienna, Ohio, reports that the van Kane was driving was registered to the House Of God’s Prayer and, “Residents said the people who used the church said they were associated with the Aryan Nations and left about 10 years ago.”
Here’s a taste of his debt seminar:
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