Nevada rancher’s son tells US jury militia ‘saved my life’
LAS VEGAS — The eldest son of a Nevada rancher and states’ rights figure told a federal jury on Wednesday he believes protesters and self-styled militia members saved his life when they arrived in April 2014 after government agents used dogs and stun guns against his family members ahead of a gunpoint showdown that ended a cattle roundup.
“We didn’t know who they were,” Ryan Bundy said of the hundreds of people who answered a family call for support after news reports and internet accounts of family scuffles with agents and contract cowboys collecting cattle from hardscrabble rangeland northeast of Las Vegas.
“Yet here they were, protecting my life,” he said. “They were heroes.”
Bundy, who is serving as his own lawyer in the trial in Las Vegas, spent more than an hour speaking with a projected image of his wife and eight children on the courtroom screen. He told his family history, declared his belief in states’ rights over limited federal government, and professed his love of family, the land, God, Americans, liberty and freedom.