Harney County Sheriff David Ward has finally drawn a line in the sand, and the dumb criminal of the week just crossed it.
Start an armed standoff at a refuge 30 miles outside of the county seat of Burns, Ore., and he will ask you to leave, politely, and offer you safe passage out of the state to make that happen.
Turn Sheriff Ward down and he will not, in the normal course of events, be especially vindictive about it. He has drawn heat for saying the occupiers are free to come and go as they please (especially the “go” part), including coming into town for more supplies.
But do that in a vehicle owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and you just might spend the night in the clink, or worse.
State police arrested a man in the parking lot of the Burns Safeway, just off of Oregon Route 205 which leads to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. This parking lot was the one place where the Washington Examiner noted a visible law enforcement presence in town when we visited there last week.
Cops found two vehicles with federal plates from the occupied Refuge in the parking lot, a pickup truck and a passenger van, reports the Oregonian. They found Kenneth Medenbach, 62, in one of the vehicles. The driver of the other rig had already gone into the supermarket, never to return.
Medenbach was arrested for having a stolen automobile, a felony that carries up to five years in Oregon prisons. He may end up spending that much time and more behind bars. He faced charges in Medford, Ore., and had been ordered not to occupy any federal lands as a condition of his release there.
Previously, the standoffer had been convicted of illegally occupying the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in neighboring Washington state in 1995 and of “attempting to protect his forest campsite with fifty to a hundred pounds of the explosive ammonium sulfate, a pellet gun, and what appeared to be a hand grenade with trip wires,” according to the appellate court.
Medenbach also tried to squat on federal land in Southern Oregon, claiming the Constitution gives the federal government no jurisdiction over anything outside of military installations and Post Offices.
The Oregonian wryly notes that it was U.S. District Court Judge Michael Hogan, the same judge who initially decided ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond should not serve five-year jail sentences for a controlled burn that got out of hand, who handled that case. Presumably, it was Judge Hogan who ordered Medenbach to knock it off with the occupations.
Signage on the man’s boosted vehicle had been altered to read “Harney County Resource Center.” This week saw copious news reports that standoffer-in-chief Ammon Bundy has tried to rebrand Malheur thus, replacing it on the roadside sign and the vehicles which he claimed were now the people’s property.
His grandiose action may also have made it easier for cops to arrest one of his standoffers, and to return a few of those seized vehicles to the federal government.
