It doesn’t get much more blatant than this.
“This defendant is being held accountable for attempting to violently eliminate the entire LGBTQ community in a small Montana town,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
John Russell Howald of Basin, Montana was convicted this past Friday of a March 2020 shooting attack on the home of a 71-year-old Lesbian woman in Basin. Armed with five guns, Howald fired 11 rounds into the woman’s home (from an “AK-style ‘assault rifle'”) while the woman was in the home. “Several rounds” went through the fence per the DOJ, with one round being lodged in the woman’s wall. While the victim was unharmed, she says “she was forever scarred by the experience”:
The victim, who wished to remain anonymous, was unharmed, but said she was forever scarred by the experience. Only now, she told The Monitor, does she feel some sense of closure. Perhaps with a verdict reached, she can patch the four bullet holes in her walls.
“They’ve been a reminder of how lucky I am to have survived,” she said. “I’m grateful.”
Monitor Online
Howald was not done after firing upon one Lesbian’s home, however; Howald reportedly said that he was setting out to “get rid of the lesbians (and) gays” in the town. He began to walk toward the homes of other queer citizens of Basin, but was interrupted by a church service.
Pastor Floyd Oliver had just finished his Sunday morning service when Howald went by the church. Pastor Oliver decided to go outside to speak to the gunman and happened, by serendipitous chance, to get the exchange on tape:
A man’s voice can be heard on the tape saying “I just started a revolution” and later, after talking with Oliver, the man says “There is no God, there is no f**king God.”
Oliver said the man told him he wanted to rid the town of “its sickness.”
The pastor was asked if he was fearful of the man and the shooting.
“At that moment my the focus was on the man and not the event,” he said.
Oliver said the man asked him to walk away because he did not want to hurt him.
MontanaRightNow.com
According to the DOJ, “The recording captured Howald making statements that he might have killed a lesbian and that he hoped he had, and that he was going to get rid of lesbians and queers in Basin. The recording also captured Howald firing off several more rounds during his interaction with these individuals.”
It was at this point that Howald was intercepted by police, who were responding to a 911 call at the scene. And then, in perhaps the piece de resistance:
When deputies told him to put his weapons down, he refused, pointed a rifle at a deputy and ran, firing at least one more round. He was taken into custody the next day with multiple guns and knives in his possession.
LawAndCrime
Emphasis is mine. He refused to put his weapons down, pointed a rifle at a cop, fired off a round and ran – and was taken into custody the following day? Like he went home after that? To even read those words with eyes buried inside of a brown skin-covered skull boggles my mind. I find it hard to even imagine any person of color getting out of that situation with the same outcome.
Howald faces a maximum of life imprisonment, a $250,000 fine and five years of supervised release on the hate crime conviction; he will receive a mandatory minimum 10 years to life imprisonment for the firearm conviction.
Sentencing is set for June 15.
One would be naive to think that Howald was alone in his thinking. He was only the one that “snapped”. This time. We have to watch out for ourselves and each other.
