LAS VEGAS, June 10 (UPI) -- Jerad Miller hailed the "dawn of a new day" in his final Facebook posting before he and his wife Amanda set out to ambush two Las Vegas police officers.
The couple shared extreme right-wing views. Mark Pitcavage, a senior researcher for the Anti-Defamation League, the kind of violence the Millers displayed has been growing.
"It's showing no sign of slowing down," Pitcavage told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "It's almost inevitable there will be more confrontations between right-wing extremists, and law enforcement needs to be prepared for that."
The Millers shot Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck as the two officers ate lunch at CiCi's Pizza. They took their guns and badges, left a manifesto with the bodies and went to a nearby Walmart where they gunned down Joseph Robert Miller, 31, who was armed with a handgun and tried to stop them.
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Investigators believe Amanda Miller, 22, carried out all the shootings. As police closed in, she shot her husband and herself.
"The dawn of a new day. May all of our sacrifices be worth it," Jerad said on Facebook.
Pitcavage said that the election of President Obama in 2008 was followed by a surge in extremist activity. Since then, he said, there have been 43 incidents of domestic terrorist violence in the United States, 38 of them carried out by white supremacists and other anti-government right-wingers.
Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the standoff at Cliven Bundy's ranch north of Las Vegas emboldened the movement. Bundy and his supporters threatened violence if the U.S. Bureau of Land Management seized his cattle for non-payment of grazing fees.
The Millers spent time at the ranch, although Bundy's family said he did not meet them. Pitcavage believes the couple acted alone when they went on their killing spree.
Todd Woodruff of Lafayette, Ind., blames Jared Miller for his daughter's move into extremism and her death.
"She was my sunshine and now she's gone, and I just don't think that I'll be able to get over it," Woodruff told the Chicago Tribune. "That son of a bitch took my sunshine. He ought to be glad he's dead or else I'm chasing him down."
The Millers met in Lafayette, and Woodruff said Jerad, 31 when he died, converted Amanda to his political views.
"I begged her not to marry him, I begged her not to move to Las Vegas. He was into all this Patriot Nation and conspiracy theory stuff, and the next thing I know her phone was getting shut off and she was getting isolated from us," Woodruff said. "The whole world was against him and he was just, he was just nuts. He got kicked out of his family's house, they wouldn't talk to him, it was just that far out."
