PORTLAND — Fish biologist Linda Beck, an eight-year employee at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, said she returned to her office after the occupation of the federal wildlife sanctuary and found her office in the refuge headquarters a mess.
“I would describe it as completed trashed,” Beck testified Monday.
Beck said her usually slightly cluttered office was “very disorganized” with “piles of stuff” and belongings that were not hers strewn about.
Her testimony came on the start of the second week of trial in the federal conspiracy case against Ammon Bundy and six co-defendants charged with federal conspiracy. The trial stems from the 41-day occupation of the refuge in Harney County.
Beck identified her desk and belongings in the refuge headquarters, as prosecutors presented multiple photos to jurors of the Bundy brothers and co-defendant Shawna Cox using Beck’s office as their own.
One photo showed Ryan Bundy leaning up against Beck’s desk as brother Ammon Bundy sat in her desk swivel chair with arms folded. In another, Ammon Bundy had propped his hat on boot warmers in Beck’s office, as he kneeled on the floor beside the desk praying, with Shawna Cox also on her knees, her head and arms resting on another chair.
In one photo, Beck pointed out boxes of ammunition on top of a blue cooler. The cooler sat beside her desk and belonged to a biological technician. In another photo, black assault rifles were seen propped up against white pillars in Beck’s office. The pillars read in green stenciled-lettering, “Carpe Carp,” inspirational words for Beck meaning, “Seize the Carp!”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Barrow asked Beck if the firearms were hers?
“Those are not my guns,” she said. “I’m not allowed to have guns in my office.”
Beck testified that a big fishing event was planned for January to allow commercial fisherman to fish out the carp, an invasive species at the refuge that for years has threatened the habitat of the migratory birds that stop at the refuge. The commercial fisherman planned to use the carp for organic fertilizer on alfalfa fields, she said.
But after a December vacation to her home state of Montana, Beck said she wasn’t allowed back to the refuge until Feb. 17. She had planned to return to the refuge Jan. 4 to retrieve two reference books she needed to report to a two-week assignment in Vancouver, but she wasn’t allowed to, she said.
She didn’t return to the refuge until Feb. 17, which was 17 days after she said FBI agents swept the property for explosives. Then, she said she also discovered “No parking” signs at the refuge boat launch road knocked down, and a small cement block “was all shot up.” She testified that she also found “hundreds and hundreds” of pink FBI evidence marker flags at the boat launch road, signifying the hundreds of spent bullet rounds recovered from the site.
A barricade of sorts also prevented her from accessing the second floor of her office, Beck testified. There were metal map boxes on one side of the stairs, cardboard boxes on the other side. Upstairs she found two mattresses with a huge wad of cash, she said.
Beck identified a shelf in her office that she described as “My Wall of Death,” which held a collection of bones that she has saved. It included bones of a bat, a blanched fish head, a pelican bill and a stuffed raven.
She testified that the stuffed raven was gone when she returned to the office in February. “And it meant a lot to me,” Beck said, intending to explain but the prosecutor cut her off, “That’s OK.”
Beck, a Montana native who obtained a graduate degree from Montana State University studying fish health and fish diseases, said she and her husband had moved to the Burns area to help her father-in-law, who needed assistance on his ranch. She started volunteering at the refuge then was hired in April or May 2012 as its fish biologist.
During cross-examination, defense lawyer Per C. Olson suggested that the planned commercial fishing event to help reduce the carp population at the refuge actually had been scheduled for April, not January.
Beck said she was encouraging the commercial fisherman to come to the refuge in January.
Olson attempted to attack the refuge’s decades of efforts to control the invasive species, noting, with Beck’s acknowledgement, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has used poisons, dynamite and electric shock to try to destroy carp eggs.
“Sufficient to say there’s been millions of dollars spent to control carp over several decades?” Olson asked. Beck agreed.
But U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown curtailed further questions about the carp reduction plans. “The merits of the carp issue are not relevant here at trial,” Brown said.
Defense lawyer Marcus Mumford asked Beck if it’s possible the FBI agents could have caused the mess she found in her office on Feb. 17.
“I see no point in them making this mess,” she replied.
“But it’s possible?” Mumford asked.
“Yes,” she said.
Mumford also had Beck read writing on her office whiteboard as depicted in a photo, noting one of the words mentioned, “adverse possession,” the principle that his client Ammon Bundy said he was pursuing to gain control of the federal property.
Beck said the writing on the board wasn’t hers or any of her co-workers.
When it was Ryan Bundy’s turn to cross-examine Beck, he started, “I’ve heard your name. I’ve seen your name. It’s good to finally meet you.”
Under cross-examination, Beck said she was paid throughout the refuge occupation. “I never stopped working,” she testified.
Earlier Monday, prosecutors showed jurors a video of Ammon Bundy speaking from the refuge on Jan. 4, in which he said, “We feel we have exhausted all prudent measures and have been ignored,” after telling reporters how he spent the previous two months trying to get the attention of state and county officials to the plight of Harney County ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steve Hammond.
He said the intent of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom was to “unwind the unconstitutional land transactions” that had taken place.
Asked during the news conference at the refuge what it would take for he and his supporters to leave, Ammon Bundy replied, “For the federal government to remove its unconstitutional presence here in the county.”
Prosecutors also played a video that independent broadcaster Pete Santilli filmed the next night, on Jan. 5, of co-defendant Jon Ritzheimer, dressed in full combat fatigues and holding a rifle, at the refuge entrance.
Ritzheimer said, “We got word they’re coming out here,” referring to law enforcement. He mentioned that occupation spokesman Robert “LaVoy” Finicum was seated nearby beside a blue tarp, and added, “he is not going to let them come through.”
“We will never fire unless fired upon,” Ritzheimer said on the video.
Federal prosecutors also played a video from co-defendant Jason Patrick’s camera of a meeting led by co-defendant Ryan Payne in the refuge bunkhouse Jan. 7. During the meeting, Payne relayed the message from Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward that the sheriff had offered to escort them out of the county and state.
“He should be telling the feds to get the hell out of this county,” Payne told the crowd of about 25 people assembled. Payne also remarked that the sheriff lacked courage, bluntly noting to laughter that he “doesn’t have a set between his legs.”
