Sunday marks one year since a heavily-armed group of men was involved in a lengthy standoff with police on an interstate highway in Massachusetts. The standoff on Interstate 95 in Wakefield lasted for nearly nine hours on July 3, 2021, causing part of the highway to be closed in both directions for hours. The situation began when a Massachusetts State Police trooper spotted two vehicles in the breakdown lane with their hazard lights activated on I-95 north at about 1:30 a.
m. and stopped to offer assistance. MSP Superintendent Col.
Christopher Mason said the trooper observed a group of eight to 10 men trying to refuel a vehicle and saw they were wearing tactical-style gear. They were armed with a combination of rifles and pistols. When the men were asked why they were wearing tactical-style gear, Mason said they told the trooper that they were traveling from Rhode Island to Maine for “training.
” The trooper asked the men for identification and firearms licenses and when the men said they did not have them available. The trooper then called for backup and a number of those men fled into the woods with their firearms. People in the areas of Parker Road, Elm Street and North Avenue in Wakefield, as well as those in the Parker Road and Ash Street areas in Reading, were advised to shelter in place.
Stoneham police, meanwhile, advised all of the town’s residents to use caution and avoid areas of town that are near Interstate 95. At approximately 6:10 a. m.
, two men were seen being taken into custody on North Avenue during a live report on WCVB. NewsCenter 5 reporter Josh Brogadir said the men, who were wearing fatigues, were walking near a staging area. Mason later said the standoff was successfully resolved an hour earlier and that nine additional men were arrested without incident, bringing the total number of suspects in custody to 11.
It was later revealed that those 11 men were part of Rise of the Moors, a group that is part of the sovereign citizen movement. “They believe the government, our government, has no jurisdiction over them at all,” Mark Pitcavage, the senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told NewsCenter 5 last year. According to Pitcavage, the sovereign citizen movement attracts a variety of people, including those who are frustrated with modern bureaucracy, as well as many who are financially desperate.
Several days after the standoff, some of the 11 men arrested in connection with the incident were arraigned in court on firearms-related charges. Those hearings were described as bizarre and chaotic , with some refusing to identify themselves to authorities and others claiming that they did not fall under the court’s jurisdiction. The Rise of the Moors group filed a lawsuit in U.
S. District Court in Rhode Island that challenged the Massachusetts court system’s jurisdiction over their case, but it was dismissed by a Rhode Island federal judge on Aug. 17, 2021.
On Sept. 1, 2021, a Middlesex County grand jury indicted a group of eight men associated with the Rise of the Moors in connection with the standoff. During an arraignment later that month , three of those men argued they are not subject to U.
S. law since they are descendants of a mythic Moroccan nation that once covered much of the world, including America. The first trials for the men charged in connection with last year’s standoff are scheduled to begin next month, August 2022.
.
From: wcvb
URL: https://www.wcvb.com/article/massachusetts-rise-of-the-moors-standoff-anniversary/40492443
