What his neighbors didn’t know was that Allen was getting ready to put his words into action.Īllen’s girlfriend told agents that Allen had been learning to manufacture explosives by studying videos on YouTube. He allegedly voiced outrage over the Muslim terror attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and was angry that “Crooked Hillary” was “openly running on disarming the American people.” He told another neighbor that the Somalis at the National Beef packing plant in Liberal were “taking all our jobs” and needed to be gotten rid of. Last summer, when Allen planted a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN sign in front of his mobile home, his neighbors-most of them Hispanic immigrants-couldn’t help but notice. He also met Wright, who had gone from working at a meatpacking plant to selling mobile homes to house the influx of new immigrants. He worked at a tire shop in his hometown of Ashland for a while before drifting west to Liberal, where he fell in with a series of militia groups. Curtis Allen, who had served in Iraq and returned with PTSD, sank into a hatred of Muslims. The Crusaders, a terrorist group formed by (from left) Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Patrick Stein, thought of themselves as patriots resisting a Muslim takeover of the United States. “Garden City saw ethnic diversity as a commodity they could exploit,” says Donald Stull, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Kansas who led a study for the Ford Foundation of the town’s shifting demographics. The new residents provided cheap and uncomplaining labor for the beef industry, a source of tax revenue for the town, and a steady stream of customers for local businesses. On the town’s main street, Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal Church, Bad Boyz Boxing Club, and Lam Gia Thai Restaurant all shared a parking lot. NPR described the town of 27,000 as a hopeful bellwether-“ a meatpacking town that embraces its new cultures.” The Somalis joined earlier waves of Cambodian, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Hispanic refugees drawn to the region’s beef-packing plants, and the town had gone out of its way to welcome the newcomers, rezoning lots for new housing, providing city services, and incorporating the workers into the life of the community. “America’s future arrived early in Garden City,” declared the Wichita Eagle. When the Somalis first began arriving, back in 2006, they had been hailed as the vanguard of a more diverse and tolerant era. The drab, one-story units were inhabited primarily by Somalis and other refugees, who had come to Garden City to work at the nearby Tyson meatpacking plant. Their plan was to detonate two cargo vans loaded with massive amounts of ammonium nitrate in the parking lots of the Garden Spot Apartments, a sprawling complex straddling both sides of West Mary Street. As their inaugural act, the FBI said, the men were plotting to carry out a Timothy McVeigh–style bombing in Garden City, Kansas, about an hour north of Liberal. The three men were the founders of a new anti-Muslim white supremacist group that called itself the Crusaders. It turned out that the bureau had been tracking Allen and Wright, as well as a third suspect named Patrick Stein, for months. Soon after, Liberal’s police chief was contacted by the FBI. Police later estimated that the trailer contained nearly a metric ton of bullets. When Sergeant Jeffrey Wade from the Liberal Police Department arrived to take a statement at the mobile home park where she and Allen lived, the woman showed him something unexpected: a room packed with handguns, gunsmithing tools, and boxes of ammunition stacked to the ceiling. Less than an hour earlier, Allen’s girlfriend had called 911 to report that he had beaten her during an argument. After the trucks turned onto the highway, the officers signaled for both drivers to pull over. When the men left in separate vehicles, police believed that Allen was in the Yukon-but it was getting dark and they had to be sure. His GMC Yukon was sitting in the parking lot, so the officers felt certain that he was one of two men they could see moving around inside. The mobile home dealership where Allen worked was nothing more than a prefab trailer hauled onto a patch of scrub grass along a remote stretch of Highway 83 on the outskirts of town. On October 11, 2016, less than a month before Election Day, police in Liberal, Kansas, sat in their cruisers outside G&G Home Center, waiting for Curtis Allen to emerge.
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