Las Vegas couple who spread freedom and liberty by shooting to death two police officers, and a third person delivered a anti-tyranny message as they left home before the ambush with a shopping cart of weapons, a neighbor said.
“We gotta do what we gotta do,” Jerad Miller told Kelly Fielder, adding that he and his wife, Amanda, were departing for an “underground world.”
Amanda Miller then embraced the neighbor and said, “I am so sorry.”
Fielder said she had heard the husband make anti-government statements in the past — including a desire to overthrow the government and President Obama and kill police officers — but was not alarmed by them.
This is so sickening that I’m just going to post the rest of the story verbatim:
“I thought he was just all talk,” Fielder, who described herself as Amanda’s “best friend,” told NBC Los Angeles.
In retrospect, Fielder said, she wishes she had alerted the authorities when the couple took off on foot from their Spruce St. home early Sunday with an arsenal in their red cart.
“I should have called the cops right then. I thought he was talking outside of his neck.”
Jerad Miller had two guns and “all kinds of ammunition,” Fielder said. His wife carried a .38 caliber handgun in her purse and also had an AR-1 rifle, she said.
“They said they were going to go to an underground world and they needed protection,” she said.
“I should have called the cops right then. I thought he was talking outside of his neck.”
Less than six hours later, the couple barged into CiCi’s Pizza a few miles away, yelled “This is the start of a revolution!” and started firing, witnesses told police.
The officers, Alyn Beck, 42, and Igor Soldo, 32, were inside having lunch, and both were mortally wounded, Sheriff Doug Gillespie said.
Authorities said the suspects stripped the dead officers of their weapons and ammunition. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported they covered the dead officers with the Revolutionary War-era Gadsden flag, which depicts a coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread On Me.”
The shooters then headed to a Walmart, where they yelled, “Everyone get out!” before unleashing a hail of bullets.
“They just said, ‘The revolution’s begun,’ they said that they shot some officers, and basically get out of the store if you don’t want to get hurt,” said Tyrone Ellis, who works at the store.
The couple sprayed bullets, hitting a third person, who was identified Monday as Joseph Robert Wilcox, 31 of Las Vegas.
When cops arrived at the store, they found Wilcox at the front entrance and exchanged fire with the suspects, who fled further into the store, Gillespie said.
Officers then heard more shots: The Millers apparently killed themselves, in what officials described as “some kind of suicide pact.”
The motive for the entire episode was unclear.
Fielder portrayed Jerad Miller as the dominant partner in the relationship — “He was a very controlling person” — and suggested his wife was not happy about his anti-government rhetoric.
She said that he had boasted about killing police officers and putting swastikas on their body. The couple had traveled with her to the ranch where Cliven Bundy led an armed standoff with federal rangers, but Fielder said she didn’t stay.