Marvin Heemeyer construiu um tanque. Ele construiu um tanque , nivelou uma boa parte de uma pequena cidade anteriormente tranquila nas Montanhas Rochosas com ele, então imediatamente ganhou uma certa fama por causa disso, e quase imediatamente encontrou um fim inglório.
Mas aqui é onde a história fica estranha (como se já não fosse). De alguma forma, durante os últimos 17 anos desde então, Heemeyer se tornou uma espécie de lenda. Um patriota, mesmo, aos olhos de algumas pessoas. Um herói para nossos tempos conturbados.
O que, para mais de uma testemunha deste capítulo bizarro da história americana moderna, está simplesmente errado. Simplesmente errado.
Um homem com rancor construiu algo, instantaneamente batizado de "killdozer", para destruir uma cidade: como ele é um herói?
"É a narrativa predominante; que Marv foi ferrado por essa pequena diretoria da cidade que estava atrás dele, que a comunidade local estava atrás dele", diz Patrick Brower, autor de um livro sobre Heemeyer e seu tanque . "As pessoas se concentram nisso, que Marv foi vítima da cidade. Mas a ideia, de alguma forma, de que Granby era sofisticado o suficiente para lançar essa campanha para pegar Marv realmente desafia minha imaginação."
O começo de tudo
A história de Heemeyer, pelo menos a parte interessante, começa em Granby, uma cidade em uma bacia alta das Montanhas Rochosas no norte do Colorado. Granby , altitude em torno de 8.000 pés (2.438 metros), é pequena. Menos de 2.000 pessoas vivem lá agora, e não era maior do que em junho de 2004, quando Heemeyer abriu caminho para a história.
O turismo é uma atração na área, embora Granby dificilmente seja o centro dela. Mas o Parque Nacional das Montanhas Rochosas fica a menos de 32 quilômetros de distância. Denver fica a menos de 160 quilômetros ao sul. Se você quer ver a grandiosidade das Montanhas Rochosas, em qualquer época do ano, e quer fugir das multidões, passar por Granby não estaria fora de questão.
"Não é como uma cidade de turismo boutique, como Aspen ou Vail. Não é nada disso", diz Brower. "É realmente uma mistura entre isso e apenas uma cidade de serviços", com alguns bancos, uma fábrica de concreto, uma cooperativa elétrica e muitas empresas que atendem à indústria do turismo.
Granby também é como muitas pequenas cidades nos Estados Unidos, pois é um lugar onde é relativamente fácil conhecer as pessoas e as pessoas conhecerem você. Goste ou não.
“Tem gente nova entrando e saindo muito aqui, mas definitivamente tem seu bom e velho elemento local também”, diz Brower, “um elemento que Marv realmente tentou capitalizar”.
Quem foi Heemeyer?
Heemeyer havia se mudado para uma cidade nos arredores de Granby no outono de 1991 e administrava uma loja de silenciadores que abrira em Granby anos antes. Por todas as contas, ele era um mago como soldador. Ele era, por conta própria ( em gravações que fez nas semanas antes de embarcar em seu tankcapade ), um empresário de sucesso. Ele estava feliz, andando de moto de neve com seus amigos, fazendo hidromassagem em sua cabana e trabalhando duro em sua loja.
Mas, como qualquer proprietário de pequena empresa em qualquer cidade pequena em qualquer lugar da América lhe dirá, a burocracia pode ser um urso. E Granby teve sua parcela de burocracia. Heemeyer se viu em desacordo com outros na comunidade, tanto no governo quanto fora dele, depois de comprar algumas terras em leilão (para, ele diz, descontentamento de pelo menos uma pessoa). Então ele tentou obter uma servidão para uma linha de esgoto. Heemeyer não estava disposto a pagar muito dinheiro para ligar a linha de esgoto existente, e os problemas causados com o governo da cidade floresceram em um desentendimento de vários anos.
Heemeyer complained to the town council about neighboring businesses, lashed out at other land and business owners, and generally railed at anyone who he felt was trying to take advantage of him. He sued, and sued again. Finally, after more than a decade of bad blood between Heemeyer and the town and some of his fellow business owners, he sold his property (for about 10 times what he bought it for) and did what he felt he had to do.
"Basically, what all this is going to prove when it's all over with — if it's ever all over with, which I doubt — it's going to prove, I hope it's going to prove to people, that meddling in your neighbors' business is destructive for the most part," Heemeyer said on one of his pre-tankcapade recordings. "It's going to come back to haunt you ... And it can come back to haunt you in spades. And the only person you have to blame is yourself."
Marv Heemeyer took all that money he made on the sale of his property and the welding skills he had honed over a lifetime and, surreptitiously over the course of more than a year, built himself a tank on a bulldozer body. A tank, complete with thick steel-plated walls to ward off attackers and a couple of guns to inflict some harm.
And June 4, 2004, Heemeyer took that tank to the streets of Granby to exact his revenge.
A Smoke-spewing Apocalypse
The whole ugly Friday is recounted in Brower's book, "Killdozer: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage," and it's the subject of a 2020 documentary, now available on Netflix , called "Tread." A ton of videos of that day, too, are available online, many of them containing archival news footage of the rampage.
Heemeyer, behind the controls of his steel-and-concrete reinforced killdozer, began his attack on the town and his enemies at about 3 p.m., bursting through a wall of the secret shop where he constructed his monstrosity.
First, he flattened a couple buildings at a close-by concrete batch plant that he had complained about to the town council. And then, with what seemed to be a clear plan, he got even with others on his list. By the time he was finished, he had demolished 13 buildings, including the town hall and the library within it, the police station, the home of the ex-mayor, a bank, numerous vehicles, the newspaper where Brower worked and the local hardware store.
During the rampage, law enforcement tried to stop Heemeyer and his dozer with volleys of gunfire. Nothing worked. Heemeyer, with powerful rifles mounted inside the tank, shot at police and at least one of his rival business owners. He aimed his guns at propane tanks and fired, apparently trying to set off a major explosion (with what could have been a great loss of life). He plowed down buildings with people still in them. Others gathered in the streets to watch the odd spectacle.
Brower was in the newspaper offices that afternoon when Heemeyer came by, sending the walls tumbling and Brower running into the street.
"Right from the start, the day of the rampage, and I was running for my life from my building that he was destroying ... I knew, right away, I said, 'I'm on the wrong side of this story,'" says Brower, who had been covering Heemeyer's interactions with the town government for years and had met with him to hear out his beef against the paper.
"There was a woman talking on the local radio station as Marv was going through town ... she was sitting there saying, 'Marv is just a gentle giant, he's a teddy bear of a guy, he would only hurt people who hurt him ... ' It's just galling."
The wrecking spree went on for some 90 minutes, but miraculously — despite the machine's meme-made name and Heemeyer's best if ultimately inept efforts — no one was killed. No one, that is, except Heemeyer, who took his own life not long after his not-quite-lethal weapon bogged down in the middle of razing Gambles hardware store. "The idea somehow that Marv didn't want to hurt anybody is absolutely absurd," Brower says. "He just failed."
After hours of trying to get into the stalled-out dozer, police finally cut through a steel door and pulled out Heemeyer's body in the darkened morning hours of June 5. Heemeyer was 52 years old.
"Had they not meddled in my business," Heemeyer pronounced in his pre-rampage manifesto, "this whole thing would have turned out completely different."
A Martyr Is Born
Granby has been rebuilt, including a new town hall. These days, when the curious roll through the town, they look for wrecked buildings and bulldozer tracks, or some other sign of the tank, but only the stories remain. The killdozer itself was cut into pieces and scrapped.
Meanwhile, Heemeyer has become, to many people who inhabit the fringes of the internet, an example of someone who stood up for his beliefs, who took on a corrupt establishment and, when he couldn't beat it, did his machine-welding best to bring it down.
As often is the case, the true story has little to do with the internet legend.
"I'm happy being the person that kind of wants to dissuade people's perception of it," Brower says now. "But I can tell you that the vast majority of comments that I get, either on my blog or anonymously through email or whatever, are that I'm a SOB, that I'm an a******, all kinds of negative language. That Marv is a hero, that the town tried to screw him, and that I'm a liar.
"It's just disturbing. These people want to embrace this, 'Attacking government ... with firearms in a tank,' and make it sound like a good thing. That he was justified. Without really knowing the truth."
The indisputable truth is that Heemeyer destroyed a lot of public and private property that day — he caused a reported $7 million in damage — and could have killed several people, whether he intended to or not. The truth is his actions, even if blurred into the category of some kind of righteous civil disobedience, were hardly heroic to a lot of people in Granby.
And the truth, too, is that in the minds of many others who know Heemeyer only through his internet legend, the truth just doesn't matter. To them, Marv and his killdozer will continue to live on, triumphantly.
NOW THAT'S INTERESTING
De acordo com o Online Tank Museum , a engenhoca de Heemeyer foi baseada em um trator Komatsu D355A de 49 toneladas (44,4 toneladas) que, uma vez terminado, pesava 61 toneladas (55,3 toneladas). Estava equipado com três fuzis semiautomáticos, e Heemeyer carregava duas armas laterais, incluindo uma Magnum .357 que ele usou para cometer suicídio. A máquina - aliás, tinha ar condicionado - também estava equipada com várias câmeras externas para que ele pudesse ver os arredores enquanto se agachava na cabine. As câmeras foram protegidas por acrílico à prova de balas.
