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Park County Shooting: Political Activist Shoots Cops Trying To Evict Him, Killing One

By Shelley Hazen
Published on: 00:01 PST, Feb 25, 2016

A recluse and anti-government activist living in the mountains of Park County, Colorado, shot three sheriff’s deputies Wednesday, killing one.

The shooting death of Cpl. Nate Carrigan, a 13-year veteran of the Park County Sheriff’s Office, is the first time an officer has been killed in the line of duty in the department, the Denver Post reported.

Carrigan and two other deputies were shot while serving an eviction notice on a man named Martin Wirth, 58, who’d had many run-ins with the law over the years and had been embroiled in a property dispute in Park County since 2013.

A statement from the Occupy Denver movement said that he’d told friends recently that police had been harassing him. Others who knew him called him a time bomb and a conspiracy theorist.

The shooting occurred at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday morning in the Friendship Ranch subdivision where the gunman lived. According to KRDO, he’d had a number of eviction disputes in Park County, one in 2010, then in 2011, and the latest in 2013. That year, he defaulted on the property and had since been facing foreclosure and eviction.

On Wednesday, eight members of the Park County Sheriff’s Department, including their sheriff, stormed the three-acre property to deliver what they later described as a “high-risk writ of restitution.” Such a writ orders a sheriff to physically remove a person and his possessions from a property.

When officers arrived, Wirth reportedly came out onto his deck and then went back inside. Officers followed him and then he began shooting, armed with a rifle; “officers returned fire,” the sheriff’s department said.

The shooter was killed.

In addition to Carrigan’s shooting death, Master Patrol Deputy Kolby Martin was shot multiple times in the legs and is in critical condition. Captain Mark Hancock suffered a grazing shot to the ear and was treated at the hospital and released.

The Colorado Foreclosure Resistance Coalition and Occupy Denver movement had previously stood beside the shooter in his property battles, calling the man an “invaluable part” of the movement in its early days. Later, Occupy Denver released a statement on Facebook saying they couldn’t “in good conscience as an organization support the tactics he is proposing.”

After the shooting, the group stated, also on Facebook, “We are sorry to share that Martin Wirth, so long active working to end fraudulent foreclosures and evictions, is reported to have died in a shootout with police this morning.”

He was known in this Park County community for his anti-government views, said neighbor and pastor Terry Rogers.

“He was kind of a loner — a recluse.”

In 1994, when he was 37, Wirth was arrested for allegedly shooting a man in the chest during a birthday party at a trailer park. He reportedly lost a game of chess, got angry, and then allegedly shot the homeowner twice in the chest. He was charged in connection with the crime but never convicted; the case has been sealed.

Back in 2005, a man named Daniel Spykstra believed he was dangerous enough to seek a permanent order of protection, the Denver Channel added. At the time, Wirth was receiving counseling at a center where Spykstra worked and said he’d made “very specific and very serious” threatening comments to him and his employees.

He called the man a conspiracy theorist and time bomb, and when given the news that he was involved in the Park County shooting, he wasn’t surprised in the least.

“I told someone back when he threatened me, ‘if something crazy were to happen in the community, he would be the first guy I would look at.'”

[Image via 9News]

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