SEATTLE — A federal judge has set a July 2016 trial date in a lawsuit filed against the Army by the parents of a Marysville man and his girlfriend killed by a group of renegade soldiers in Georgia in 2012 to protect a plot to assassinate President Barack Obama.
The wrongful-death lawsuit, filed in December in U.S. District Court in Seattle by the parents of Michael Roark, 19, and his girlfriend, 17-year-old Tiffany York, of Georgia, alleges the Army allowed a secret militia called “FEAR” — Forever Enduring, Always Ready — to “form and fester within its ranks” at Fort Stewart, Ga., where Roark was stationed as a private.
It also claims the Army had plenty of warning that the leader of the group, Pvt. Isaac Aguigui of Cashmere, was a “dangerous and mentally unstable” soldier — including evidence that he had murdered his wife, an Army sergeant, just five months earlier.
The lawsuit alleges that, despite suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Sgt. Deirdre Aguigui in July 2011, the Army paid Isaac Aguigui $500,000 in death benefits, which he used to finance his plan, including the purchase of $32,000 in assault-style rifles and handguns.
