This is actually real. Story of the Killdozer
June 4, 2004
When Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado, reached a dead-end in his fight with the local zoning commission, the logical response would have been to petition them once again and await a future reply from them. After all, Marvin Heemeyer was known to have been a logical man, so it was expected that he would have taken a logical approach.
Instead, Marvin Heemeyer went home, outfitted his Komatsu D355A bulldozer with armored plates, a layer of concrete, and bulletproof plastic, and drove it through the town in a rampage, knocking down 13 buildings and causing $7 million worth of damage with his makeshift “killdozer.”
Cracked had a good rundown of the messy details.
In the early '90s, Heemeyer got involved in a campaign to bring legalized gambling to the city, even launching his own newspaper to promote it. Patrick Brower’s paper had come out against the measure, which was eventually voted down. That’s the first time the local press and government wound up on Heemeyer’s bad side.
Around that time, Heemeyer bought a patch of land for $42,000 and opened another muffler shop there. Several years later, a group looking to open a concrete batch plant offered to buy the land for $250,000. Heemeyer reportedly agreed, then later bumped the price up to $375,000, and maybe went as high as $1 million. Instead, the buyers went to the city to rezone the land around the shop and build there instead.
Heemeyer attempted to start a grassroots campaign to fight the plant. The problem was that the new plant would cut off customer access to his shop completely – he apparently bought the bulldozer to create a new road, but permission for that was denied too. He lost his battle and was forced to sell the shop, at which point he immediately started building a Killdozer. The rampage would come a year and a half later; it was hardly done on impulse.
Did the zoning dispute go badly for him? No doubt. Did he have multiple chances to avoid that outcome? It seems like it. Did the city leave him no choice but to do what he did? Well, most schools of morality posit that even in the most bitter business disputes, there are always non-Killdozer options.
…
In addition to the newspaper, Heemeyer tore through the concrete plant, the town hall, a hardware store owned by another man he had a dispute with – he’d made a list. That’s where the noble vigilante story comes into play. He wasn’t out to hurt anybody, they say, just to do to others what they’d done to him.
But as Piechocki points out, the lack of a body count was down to pure luck. “When he attacked the town hall, the library is in there, and my son was in that library at that time. Gambles, the store he got stuck in, what happened if somebody was stuck in there?” In fact, most of the buildings were occupied right up until the inhabitants ran away screaming that a Killdozer was coming their way.
Everyone gets the story of Killdozer wrong. It was poop all along.
I’m surprised they didn’t just let him get away with it for being such a bad ass
They did. He shot himself. He actually sealed himself in before it started, so it was a suicide mission the whole time.
They probably could have stopped him a bit sooner by taking a grenade to the radiator…
did you know that he not only had cameras on the outside to see a full 360° view, but had gunner slots where he had enough ammunition inside to hold off the police for at least a day?
Yes, yes I did. But even with 360° view, he still had somewhat limited shooting angles through the gunner slots…
But you make a mighty fine point. What’s the best defense against a homemade bulldozer tank with nothing but cameras to see from and drive with? Spray paint the cameras…
The thing had more than one weak point they could have used to their advantage…
Grenades aren’t exactly standard issue police equipment.
Okay, let’s pretend we don’t live in 2026… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police
But this was in 2004 right? Regardless, you got a homemade tank tearing down your town, what do?
I bet they had some grenades around, but were half busy pissing their pants while making the situation more complicated than necessary.
Fuck, they coulda just dumped 20 gallons of paint on it via helicopter to blind his cameras…
Most police departments also don’t generally have helicopters and paint bombs.
The real world isn’t GTA where you get a 5-star rating and suddenly all the cops can instantly appear with missile launchers and shit.
I work for a small city in the same building as the police department. And yeah, they have AR-15s and body armor now, but grenades and helicopters are a different story. They’d have to get the closest major city, or more likely the National Guard to deliver that kind of firepower.
And it’s not that the police didn’t try whatbthey could in this case. They jumped on top of the machine, and even dropped a flashbang (which SWAT teams do have) into the stovepipe to try and disable it.
The governor reportedly considered sending in the national guard with an attack chopper, but a hellfire missile does a lot of damage and theocal decision to try and block his escape from the hardware store with a different dozer worked. He wasn’t able to back out after ramming the shop, and was forced to try and drive through, getting stuck in the process.
