CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Carl Drega, Folk Hero to Free Staters  Sat Aug 29, 2020 4:39 am | |
| Those of us who lived in northern New Hampshire when Carl Drega went on his murderous rampage see something like this and get the chills. The chills mixed in with some serious pissed off.
Carl Drega was a guy from Bow who had a small vacation place in Columbia—a small town near Colebrook. He was not a beloved member of the community. Drega was an angry man who was sure everyone was out to get him. He’d had code enforcement problems in Columbia. He wanted to use tarpaper as siding on his house. His house was on the riverfront, and a flood had washed some of his property away. His response was to dump a load of fill in, to “replace what he’d lost.” Dumping fill into the riverbank wasn’t met with applause. When there was an issue with a tax assessment, he shot over the heads of the selectwoman and tax assessor who came to speak with him. (The selectwoman was Vicki Bunnell)
After that, he started putting motion sensors up all over his property and stockpiling weapons. On August 19, 1997, he went out and started killing. He killed 4 people, and wounded several others. He killed 2 state troopers, Officers Scott Phillips and Les Lord. He killed Vicki Bunnell, the judge at Colebrook District Court, who was a Columbia selectwoman. Bunnell had a restraining order against Drega. When she saw him and his gun, she stopped to warn others in the building. Drega shot her eight times in the back. He also shot Dennis Joos, the editor of the Colebrook News and Sentinel. He tried to disarm Drega after he killed Vicki Bunnell.
Drega went on to wound N.H. Fish and Game warden Wayne Saunders, N.H. State Troopers Jeffrey Caulder and Robert Haase, and U.S. Border Patrol agent John Pfeifer, before he was finally killed by State Trooper Charles West and U.S. Border Patrol agent Stephen Brooks.
I remember all this. I was working the night shift at a restaurant, and we were glued to the news. This kind of senseless violence on such a big scale wasn’t something any of us were used to seeing in our relatively quiet and crime free state.
Time Magazine did a half decent story about Drega and his massacre.
Why am I bringing this up? In an email exchange last night, a friend mentioned Carl Drega while we were discussing the BearCat tank the Concord Police Department wants to get. I remembered the story, of course, but I googled Drega anyway, for a refresher.
What I found was that to a certain segment of the population, Drega has become a hero. One of those people who have turned Drega from a domestic terrorist into a poor heroic victim is a guy named Vin Suprynowicz. He penned the tome you see in the picture at right: The Ballad of Carl Drega.
A Google search of Vin Suprynowicz revealed something of great interest. Vin’s a Free Stater. That’s right—Vin is a signed member of the Free State Project. He signed up in 2002. In fact, in 2002, he proclaimed himself one of the most famous and respected FSP members, on the FSP internet forum where he was holding forth about how poor Carl Drega was a victim, a man who’d had too much and had “only one option to find justice.”
https://www.nhgazette.com/2020/08/28/carl-drega-folk-hero-to-free-staters/
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