Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Idaho rancher killed by deputies over a wounded bull.

If what the report state is correct, he kept the bull after hand-raising him. A bull can be good phenotypically but not really good as far as performance goes. Also, if the guy decides he has a decent calf he can keep intact and not have to spend $4500 - $5000 next Spring for a bull, he might do that.

There are hundreds of thousands of breeding bulls produced every year. And there might be one or two that make it into a stud and prove to be a really successful AI bull. Hundreds are bought or leased by studs and of those, a very few make it more than a couple years as a marketable prospect.

no one I know would Dink.

It's not unusual for officers who get fired elsewhere to get hired in Bumfuk. Any other profession, for that matter. That doesn't mean they're all bad though, some just want to stay home or retire to a place where there's not much to do. You get what you pay for.

In my experience a 2200 lb bull with one shattered leg is worth about the same as 800 lb of hamburger.

We have multiple witness accounts that Mr Yantis asked for his rifle before the deputies ever started shooting his bull. He asked for the rifle for just one reason, and that reason was to put a crippled animal out of its misery.

A supposed value of a critically wounded animal to some imagined AI program is a Red Herring at best.

More than once, I've heard a city councilman say that (name of town) is such a great place to live in, any (public servant) should feel privileged - no, honored - to be paid a salary considerably below the state average.

Long read but good.


rule of bureaucratic crisis management is: “Find someone else to blame.” This is true even in agencies as small as the Adams County Sheriff’s Office.

Sheriff Ryan Zollman would have an insuperable conflict of interest were he to conduct the official inquiry into the November 1st killing of Jack Yantis. He could have avoided that conflict by firing the deputies, charging them as private citizens, and then turning the evidence over to a special prosecutor.



This would have provoked trouble with the Fraternal Order of Police and precipitated a grievance with the Idaho State Industrial Commission, but it would also have demonstrated to Zollman’s constituents that the killing was being investigated as a criminal homicide, rather than a suspected “assault on law enforcement.”

The inquiry was handed over to the Idaho State Police, an agency that reliably botches investigations of this kind – whether they deal with a previous officer-involved homicides, or pervasive corruption within Idaho’s prison system. Attorney General Lawrence Wasden has now invited the FBI to conduct its own investigation.

“We want to be deliberate and thorough,” insists Wendy Olson, the U.S. Attorney for Idaho. “ISP will be thorough, the FBI will be thorough.” In the meantime, “people need to be patient” as official procedures are followed.
Thoroughness is not the summum bonum in an investigation of this kind: Anybody engaged in a cover-up is certainly motivated to be thorough. Richard Nixon expected his “plumbers” to be thorough in their efforts to prevent transparency and accountability.

Furthermore, the objective in staging multiple investigations is not thoroughness, but diffusion of responsibility. There is a vanishingly small possibility that the still-unnamed and still-publicly compensated killers could be put on trial for criminal homicide, or face federal civil rights charges in the event no state charges are filed. On previous performance it’s more likely that the two “independent” investigations, which will be sharing the same evidence, will both rule the killing “justified.” Should that happen, Yantis’s family and friends will receive the familiar condescending lecture about the need to “respect the process.” In less elevated language this means, essentially, “Sucks to be you.”

Wasden

The officials presiding over the “independent” inquiries operate on a sliding scale of zealousness. Lawrence Wasden displayed great zeal in pursuing felony charges against Carol Asher, a retired schoolteacher who frustrated a prosecutor by acting as a conscientious juror.

In her ardor for what she pretended was justice, Wendy Olson set aside the findings of a local investigation and threatened to send Bonners Ferry resident Jeremy Hill to federal prison for the supposed crime of shooting a grizzly bear that threatened his family. She eventually extorted $1,000 from Hill to end her vindictive and unwarranted prosecution.



Neither of those “offenses” involved actual crimes of violence against human beings. But neither of those “suspects” was swaddled in the habiliments of the state’s punitive priesthood, or invested with “qualified immunity.” And besides, Jack Yantis was “no stranger to the police,” as the Washington Post archly observed, taking note of an inconsequential record that included a traffic infraction, two DUIs and a charge of “resisting and obstructing,” the last of which should have earned him a commendation, rather than a citation.

The Post and other state-centric media outlets continue to insinuate that Yantis was in some sense responsible for his own death. This is true only to the extent that if Yantis hadn’t cooperated with a request to help the over-matched deputies deal with the wounded bull, which underscores the wisdom of avoiding any contact whatsoever with the state’s privileged purveyors of sanctified violence.

Media coverage of the Yantis killing, predictably, is freighted with intimations of potential violence against Sheriff Zollman and other officials from the rural “anti-government extremists” who populate Adams County. Sheriff Zollman, who seems like an earnest and decent man, reports that his family has received death threats, and he has refused to disclose the names of the deputies who killed Yantis in order to spare them similar treatment. This wouldn’t be a problem if the deputies had been charged with a criminal offense and taken into custody – or even released on bail once charges had been filed. Threats of the kind Zollman allegedly received are precipitated by frustration over the privileged status of law enforcement officers implicated in wrongful deaths or other acts of criminal violence.

Any evidence that Yantis assaulted or threatened the deputies would have been provided to the public within hours of the incident. If two Adams County citizens had shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy, they would have been incarcerated without bail, and their names would be known.



Despite Sheriff Zollman’s reticence, Adams County residents have identified two of his deputies as the shooters. If those men (whose names have been made known to me) are not the would-be suspects, the sheriff is doing them no favors by withholding the names of the deputies who killed Yantis. In either case, the pretense of secrecy cannot continue much longer in the age of social media.

Whenever law enforcement agencies investigate each other, the priority is to uphold “order” and vindicate “authority,” rather than to impose accountability for official misconduct. Stipulating that the “official” authority claimed by any government functionary is entirely fictitious, Sheriff Zollman could have exercised moral authority in the service of ordered liberty by filing charges against the deputies and requiring them to undergo the same process that would be endured by similarly situated defendants who were not part of the state’s enforcement caste.

Since Zollman has abdicated his responsibilities, the task of carrying out a truly independent investigation should be carried out by a citizens’ grand jury. That panel would act as a fact-finding body, taking testimony from witnesses and, if suitable evidence is found, delivering a “presentment” against the deputies to the county prosecutor.

The State of Idaho’s official judicial guidelines describe a Grand Jury as “a panel of citizens called together to hear evidence and determine if criminal charges should be initiated.” There is no requirement that the panel be “called together” by the sheriff, prosecutor, or the local courts.

Were a citizens’ grand jury to be assembled in Adams County, the air will be clotted with frantic warnings about “vigilante justice,” the Southern Poverty Law Center will denounce the development as a manifestation of the much-dreaded and little-defined “sovereign citizen movement,” and sanctimonious chin-pullers will insist that matters of this kind are best handled by “professionals.” This will make sense only to people completely ignorant of the original purpose of the grand jury.

As legal scholar Roger Roots points out, the “grand jury in its primal, plenary sense … was a group of men who stood as a check on government, often in direct opposition to the desires of those in power.” Far from being an instrument of the political elite, “American grand juries initiated prosecutions against corrupt agents of the government, often in response to complaints from individuals.”



When the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure were adopted in 1946, the grand jury – which had always been a non-government entity – became the “total captive of the prosecutor,” in the words of former federal Judge William J. Campbell.The Advisory Committee on the Rules of Criminal Procedure, significantly, was an appointed body without legislative authority, popular mandate, or accountability: It was assembled by the FDR regime out of people representing the prosecutorial class. The result was a “grand jury” procedure that effectively ended the public’s role in the administration of justice. By organizing an independent grand jury to investigate the Yantis killing, Adams County citizens would be acting to restore the rule of law, rather than to subvert it.

Like all “official” investigations of its kind, the inquiry into the killing of Jack Yantis is a liturgy intended to reinforce the “legitimacy” of the agency that employed the killers. This is why the pursuit of actual justice is a task that cannot be entrusted to the “professionals."

Now that i have been here in Cousil Idaho, the community where Jack Yantis was killed by police....I believe the names of the officers involved are Brian Wood and Cody Roland. I believe Brian Wood has some skeletons in his closet from a prior department. I believe Sherriff Ryan Zollman may have found out Brian Wood lied on his application for employment and didn't do anything about it. I believe some of the citizens in this town are afraid to say what needs to be said. I believe the officers body camera footage needs to be at least partially realeased to validate it exists. I believe if it doesn't exist there is enough evidence to charge the officers.

This Brian Wood?


Valley County man, who said he was roughed up by McCall Police during a traffic stop in July 2011, was paid $14,500 by the City of McCall's insurance carrier.

This morning's McCall Star News reports that 79-year-old Rodney Whaley filed the claim following the incident, in which he said he was "forcefully seized by the arms and slammed to the hood of a police car, causing him to lose consciousness." Whaley was taken by ambulance to St. Luke's Hospital in McCall and was later booked into the Valley County Jail for resisting and obstructing officers. The charges were later dismissed.

The Star News said Whaley claimed to have suffered four bruised ribs and later developed pneumonia and a staph infection.

McCall Police Officer Brian Wood was involved in the incident. Wood left the department in November 2011, but city officials said his departure was a confidential personnel matter.

It doesn't sound like he has much respect for his elders now does it.

Still waiting on info from the Sheriff and Idaho State Police.

You think they read the 24HCF?

To the best of my knowledge, hand-raised bulls are the most dangerous. Seems they view humans as part of their own dominance hierarchy, hand-raised deer do the same thing.

One thing about a bull, they can hurt you and not be trying too. Maybe swinging their head at a fly or something. People that have not been around them, have no idea of the power they have. miles

Only if the people that raised them failed to establish their position at the top of the pecking order. Also hand raised doesn't nessecarily mean "tame" depending on the amount of human contact.

Despite your understanding a wild Ill tempered bull is by far more dangerous.

Not as clear cut as you think IMHO. I bet the office that tried to stop Mr. Yang is from shooting will claim that there were people in front of the bull as the rancher lined up to shoot the bull in the back of the head. The deputie either pull Yantis around or the the ranchers spun around, the rifle fired either on purpose or by accident, the officers felt they were fired and fired at Yantis

I'd wager that is what the report will indicate when complete

Knew a farmer who was very badly injured when he was a young man. Not sure of all the details, but the bull got him trapped in a pen in barn/big shed and started battering him against the wall and stomping on him..

The walls were pref fab sheet metal and the bull hit him that hard one of the sheets came loose and the guy was able to crawl to safety through the gap.

His old fella heard all the commotion on the yard and came out of the house to look and on seeing the mess his son was in, promptly had a fatal heart.

Ain't gonna argue with experience, but in the places I grew up (NY, England) it was dairy bulls that had the reputation for killing people.

It was a Frisian bull that "turned" in my post above..

That in itself opens another can of worms in my opinion.

Glad you dished out the names,I left them out knowing to many of there friends and as I mentioned in an earlier post,Adams county has a history of hiring Valley county officers.In this case,both of the officers in question.

TFF...I just read your "location".