Osmel Trevino woke up before dawn to a sound he thought was thunder. He walked outside to watch the storm. It was pitch black at the Scenic Riverview Mobile Home Park in LaPlace, but it wasn't storming the morning of Aug. 16.
Trevino saw three deputies hunched behind cars, the nearest maybe 30 feet from where he stood. "Pop, pop, pop," Trevino heard, and he threw himself onto the gravel. The next thing he saw was the red-orange flash from the muzzles of automatic weapons.
By dawn, two deputies were dead. Another two were injured. And the tangled tale of the seven people accused in connection with the shootings began to unspool.
Two were on federal domestic terrorism watch lists, linked to the growing anti-government "sovereign citizens" movement. It is less a cult than a loose collection of pariahs, united only in their shared beliefs: that there is little authority higher than their own, that they are not subject to laws and taxes, that Americans have been enslaved by their nation.
Their volatility frightens police who encounter them, for good reason. That family in the back of the LaPlace trailer park was no exception.
----------
Three months earlier and 300 miles north of here, a man named Michael Welch sat down on a suitcase at the side of a DeSoto Parish highway and raised his thumb high. He was begging a ride away from a family called the Smiths.
"I need to get the hell out of here fast," he told a sheriff's deputy who happened down the highway that morning in May. His in-laws, the Smiths, had run him off their camp just outside of Mansfield, a small town in north Louisiana, he told the deputy.
What Welch said next proved prophetic. It was a warning that leaves the DeSoto Sheriff's Office, months later, contemplating a slight twist of fate that saved them from mourning their own deputies.
Welch described his in-laws and their friend Kyle Joekel. When it was time to go, Welch stood. He put on his jacket, then hesitated and turned back to Detective Adam Ewing. "I'm just gonna tell you this," he said. "They've got a whole lot of guns and ammo. And they don't like the law."
----------
The morning of Aug. 16, Welch, a few trailers away from Trevino, awoke at 5 a.m. to the thunder of automatic gunfire just feet from his front door. He had reunited with the Smith clan at the LaPlace trailer park.
Welch would tell The Times-Picayune that afternoon that the Smiths had a "little arsenal," with two AK-47s, an AR-15, handguns and a shotgun.
Police also found two half-finished pipe bombs in a nearby trailer. They exploded them the next day in an empty lot, as neighbors looked on.
"I didn't see it coming," Welch said into a video camera. "If I would have seen it coming, I would have called the authorities."
He had, actually, told the authorities. Only it turned out he'd warned the wrong ones. Welch later declined to comment, citing advise from his attorney.
In the spring, just before he turned up alongside the highway in DeSoto Parish, Welch had lived with the Smiths at the Heart of Haynesville RV Park, a sprawling gravel lot just north of Mansfield. On May 22, the park reported that someone had pried open the change machine, for a total loss of $399 in damage and loose change.
Investigators suspected the Smiths, an unruly group with three trailers positioned in a loose triangle toward the back of the park.
Terry Smith, the patriarch, lived in a trailer with his wife, Chanel Skains. He had two sons in their early 20s -- Brian and Derrick, who lived in trailers nearby with Brian's girlfriend, Brittney Keith. Mike Welch and his wife, Skains' cousin, lived among them, along with a redheaded Nebraska man named Kyle Joekel, who had bought a trailer from Terry Smith and lived in it alone.
The small Sheriff's Office, five investigators in all, was busy, and stolen loose change seemed far short of an ominous crime.
But Ewing believes it sent Terry Smith into a rage. Infuriated that Welch, his hapless in-law, might have pried open that change machine, drawing police to their camp, Smith banished Welch, Ewing suspects. It drove Welch to the side of the highway, and then, by accident, to Ewing's office.
----------
Within hours of his meeting with Welch, Ewing had a three-ring binder dedicated to Joekel and the Smiths. "Sovereign Citizens," he wrote across the front cover.
The DeSoto Parish Sheriff's Office followed their paper trail -- from a warrant for Joekel out of Nebraska for threatening police officers, to a bulletin from Tennessee declaring Terry Smith a member of the sovereign citizens. Both men, Ewing found, were on federal domestic terrorism watch lists.
He and his supervisor, Lt. Robert Davidson, feared they had a well-armed militia setting up camp in their parish.
And it looked like they intended to stay. The men scrounged jobs as day laborers and welders. The women went to school at a local vocational college: Skains was training to be a welder and Keith was working toward her GED, Ewing said. Terry Smith had rented the second floor of a building downtown, above an antique shop facing the courthouse, and paid two months' rent, March and April, in advance.
He planned to open a gun shop, Ewing learned. Smith moved in a lathe and other machinery and applied through the Sheriff's Office for a federal firearms license.
It was not the sort of news that Ewing and his boss took passively, considering what they knew about the sovereign citizens movement and what they'd learned about the Smiths.
Self-proclaimed sovereign citizens are considered a threat of domestic terrorism by the FBI. They have proven themselves so deadly to police officers that departments across the county have trained their officers on how to defend themselves against them.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, estimates their numbers at around 300,000, with 100,000 serious believers and another 200,000 dabblers.
But they are difficult to track. They tend to be outcasts, operating alone or in small groups. They are loosely connected through thousands of Internet forums, the law center has found.
"Embrace Your Inner Outlaw!" one website encourages. "The English Language Has Been Deliberately Modified to Enslave Us!" another gripes.
The sovereign movement is considered a descendant of the now-defunct Posse Comitatus, a violent white-supremacist, anti-Semitic group that sprouted in the 1970s. The Posse Comitatus believed that the county sheriff was the highest authority, and that the tyrannical American government long ago overthrew a utopian "common law" ideal, in which man answered only to himself, paid no taxes and followed no laws, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League, which has also extensively tracked the evolution of sovereign citizens.
As Posse Comitatus died away, much of the racist teachings died with it. But the group's anti-government, common law conspiracies live on in the sovereign citizen movement.
The government, devotees believe, has tricked citizens into signing away their freedom on Social Security cards, driver's licenses and birth certificates.
Their leaders promise quick cash by mastering a secret code to outsmarting the government. They recruit those with money problems and feeble minds and teach them to file lawsuits and seek liens against the government.
There are online "law schools": "The Law is the Weapon; the Courtroom the Battlefield. The Judge is your Enemy, your Lawyer is an Enemy Spy," one teaches.
And sovereigns have complied, inundating courthouses across the county with cryptic yet distinctive paperwork -- many, for instance, refuse to capitalize the "U" in United States of America, fearing that acknowledging the illegal government as a true entity will legitimize it, according to the two research organizations.
True sovereign citizens decline to carry driver's licenses, and they often create counterfeit license plates and money. Some have copyrighted their own name and sued the government for infringement if they dare to use it. Fake law enforcement agencies are starting to organize, calling themselves "Constitution Rangers" and "u.S. marshals."
And when they are caught, they declare themselves sovereigns, not subject to the laws that govern ordinary people. They are obstinate, sometimes violent.
Terry Nichols declared himself a sovereign three years before he helped Timothy McVeigh blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
In the past decade, before the LaPlace deputy slayings, self-proclaimed sovereign citizens had killed six police officers, according to the FBI. In May 2010, Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son shot and killed two police officers and wounded two others in a shootout in West Memphis, Ark. Both the father and the son were killed by police.
"We were all of the opinion that we would have a shootout," Ewing said of the Smiths. "We expected shots to be fired."
----------
Over the next three days, the DeSoto Parish Sheriff's Office planned where and when they wanted that shootout to happen.
They flew an airplane over the camp and took photos of the trailers' positions -- mere feet from the thin aluminum walls of their neighbors' campers.
"We knew they had a trailer full of AK-47s. Those can slice through a trailer like a hot knife through butter," Ewing said. "The last thing you want is a shootout in a trailer park."
They chose their scraggliest-looking deputy to haul in a trailer and pose as an itinerant worker, like most of the others who came and went from the camp.
The plan was to arrest Joekel and the Smith sons, who all had outstanding warrants or probation violations.
The Sheriff's Office planned to shut down the only narrow highway leading out of the park, forcing the Smith gang onto a side street where the SWAT team would be waiting to apprehend them. A shootout there, at that intersection, would at least be out in the open.
But it never came to that.
Neither Joekel nor the Smith boys ever returned. Terry Smith and the two women remained at the camp for a few days, long enough to pack up and leave. The Tennessee bulletin declared Terry Smith wanted only for questioning; the sheriff never found the sex-abuse victim, so had not issued an arrest warrant.
Ewing said he believes the group was spooked when the cops arrived, and Terry Smith sent the most vulnerable away.
On May 26, Smith drove a rented one-ton Chevy into the park, fastened up the trailers and, one by one, hauled them away. He told neighbors he was headed south. He left his lathe in the second story of the building facing the courthouse and never returned to the Sheriff's Office to learn that his application for a federal firearms license was rejected.
"That our deputies didn't get shot to pieces is a miracle," Ewing said. "It could have ended right here."
----------
The next month, the Smiths and Joekel moved into the trailer park in St. John the Baptist Parish where, three years earlier, Terry Smith had thought himself a victim of the Sheriff's Office.
After a February 2009 traffic stop near the Marathon refinery, Smith filed a criminal complaint against St. John the Baptist Parish Deputy Nicholas Silvestri, declaring himself a sovereign and accusing the officer of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated robbery, false imprisonment, unlawful interrogation, obstruction of justice, racketeering, making terroristic threats, violating the U.S. Constitution and breaching his oath of office.
"I advised him that I was a sovereign invoking my Constitutional rights and that it appeared he was holding me against my will which constitutes an arrest and he had no cause to arrest me for I had committed no crime or property damage and there was no victim," Smith wrote in his 12-page complaint, onto which he listed himself as "victim" and Silvestri as "criminal."
Silvestri had been directing traffic and tried to check Smith's driver's license.
"I then told him that we had talked about this in the pass and he was putting me in harmsway, so I did not wish to do that," Smith wrote.
The officer opened the door of Smith's SUV.
"This is where the crimes started," Smith wrote.
The officer reportedly pulled Smith out of the vehicle where his sons, Brian and Derrick, sat inside.
"I told him that he needed to be careful with his actions because at this point he was committing felony offenses against me and if he assaulted me again I would have no other choice by to defend myself," Smith wrote.
Other officers arrived, one of whom "commenced to scream and holler at me as if he was about to attack me," Smith wrote.
He told them to "adjust their attitudes." They asked why he was being so difficult. He replied that Silvestri "was not an officer but a criminal" and insisted the other deputies were accomplices. Terry Smith was booked with disobeying a police office and driving on a suspended license.
"They said they would call my job and get me fired so I would not have a job anymore," he complained of the deputies, though he did not specify which plant he worked for.
His boss, he wrote, complied. Smith was fired.
----------
Three years later, just before 5 a.m. on Aug. 16, a black and red Chevy pickup drove through the Valero refinery's off-site employee parking lot on Louisiana 3217, near the corner of Airline Highway.
Five people were inside: Terry Smith, his sons Brian and Derrick, Kyle Joekel and a woman named Teniecha Bright, who would later tell neighbors that she'd simply caught a ride home from work with the Smiths.
Michael Boyington, a deputy with the St. John the Baptist Sheriff's Office, was in his car in the Valero lot that morning, working a security detail.
As the Smiths' truck drove by, 24-year-old Brian Smith allegedly rained bullets into the deputy's car with an assault rifle, and the truck sped away.
Three deputies radioed to report they were following the truck to the Scenic Riverview park and "receiving additional gunfire" along the way, according to court records.
Deputies Brandon Nielsen, Jeremy Triche and Jason Triche arrived at the trailer park. They started to question a man inside a trailer, police have said.
They noticed a second man inside, dressed but lying underneath a blanket. They asked both to step outside.
Then a third man roared out of the trailer, firing an assault rifle at the deputies.
Trevino, the neighbor lying on the ground 30 feet away, saw two shooters with guns, though he couldn't tell one from the other in the dark. He knew the Smiths and Joekel only in passing, he said. They worked the night shift at the refinery and he worked days there, so they rarely crossed paths.
Brian Smith and Kyle Joekel are the alleged shooters.
Trevino heard the officers shout for them to drop their weapons.
"No, you'll shoot me," one replied. The officers promised they wouldn't if the gunmen surrendered.
They fired again instead.
Trevino saw one officer fall onto the park's gravel drive. He dropped his flashlight and it rolled away.
Terry Smith's wife, Chanel Skains, ran from inside the trailer, Trevino said.
"Don't shoot him. Don't shoot him," she screamed and threw herself over the fallen deputy's body.
The gunmen fired again, shooting Skains through the arm. Bullets barreled through the park by the dozens, piercing living rooms and lodging in aluminum siding. Many were terrified, but no civilians were injured.
Another deputy, crouched behind a car, tried to run for his fallen colleague. He was shot there, too.
----------
The surviving deputy later told investigators that he saw one of the gunmen, either Brian Smith or Joekel, "actively shooting a sheriff's deputy, as he lay upon the ground, with a high powered rifle," according to court records. He caught the attention of a man in a nearby trailer and motioned for his keys. He backed the man's truck to his two fellow officers, dragged their bodies into the bed and sped away, Trevino said.
Deputies Jeremy Triche, 27, a husband and father of a 2-year-old son, and Brandon Nielsen, 34, a married father of five, were killed. The third officer, Jason Triche, 30, and Boyington, 33, shot in the parking lot, were injured but survived.
After 45 minutes and hundreds of rounds, Trevino said, all he could hear was screaming. Around him were more police officers, neighbors narrowly spared by bullets, the seven suspects in all who would later be arrested in connection to the shooting. One was found hiding in a camper still wearing the handcuffs that had presumably been put around his wrists before the shooting started.
One of the two gunmen was shot through both ankles and dragged himself shouting and moaning into a camper on the back edge of the grounds. The other gunman was shot six times in the chest, Trevino said.
Teniecha Bright ran shouting through the park, Trevino said. "Am I alive?" she wailed. "Am I dead? Am I alive? Am I dead? Am I alive?"