Patrick Brower was the publisher and managing editor at the local newspaper in the small town of Granby, Colorado, when rumors started swirling in town about “gunplay and a tank.” Then, on June 4, 2004, those rumors came true. Someone had fortified a bulldozer with concrete and was headed his way. Brower remembers the day vividly.
Brower nicknamed the bulldozer the “Killdozer” and has written a book about that day its driver, a local man named Marv Heemeyer.
So, what led Heemeyer to build his tank? Three years prior, he protested the building of a concrete batch plant next to his muffler shop. He had tried to sell his own land to the concrete plant owners but never could make a deal.
When it finally fell through, Heemeyer vowed to fight the plant through city hall.
It’s a tragedy that grabbed headlines because of its oddball nature. A man was so outraged by his town’s government, that he literally bulldozed the town.
Well, in the wake of the incident and his death, Heemeyer aso became something of a folk hero in anti-government circles. And that’s what Brower says disturbs him most.
To him, it was the beginning of the so-called “post-truth” era that we’re living in now, where facts are not accepted as facts, and government is assumed to be the enemy.
That was author Patrick Brower, whose book "KILLDOZER: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage" is out now.
