This is actually real. Story of the Killdozer
June 4, 2004
When Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado, reached a dead-end in his fight with the local zoning commission, the logical response would have been to petition them once again and await a future reply from them. After all, Marvin Heemeyer was known to have been a logical man, so it was expected that he would have taken a logical approach.
Instead, Marvin Heemeyer went home, outfitted his Komatsu D355A bulldozer with armored plates, a layer of concrete, and bulletproof plastic, and drove it through the town in a rampage, knocking down 13 buildings and causing $7 million worth of damage with his makeshift “killdozer.”
Anything but psychotherapy.
This dude was a special snowflake conservative who thinks the government owes him a free sewage system on his undeveloped lot.
City officials told Heemeyer that putting in a septic tank was a less expensive alternative, but he rejected both options and said that the government not paying for the sewage linehookup was “extortion by government fiat”.
Later someone bought the land he had been trespassing on as a shortcut, so he raged out that he didn’t get a payday from it.
Cracked had a good rundown of the messy details.
In the early '90s, Heemeyer got involved in a campaign to bring legalized gambling to the city, even launching his own newspaper to promote it. Patrick Brower’s paper had come out against the measure, which was eventually voted down. That’s the first time the local press and government wound up on Heemeyer’s bad side.
Around that time, Heemeyer bought a patch of land for $42,000 and opened another muffler shop there. Several years later, a group looking to open a concrete batch plant offered to buy the land for $250,000. Heemeyer reportedly agreed, then later bumped the price up to $375,000, and maybe went as high as $1 million. Instead, the buyers went to the city to rezone the land around the shop and build there instead.
Heemeyer attempted to start a grassroots campaign to fight the plant. The problem was that the new plant would cut off customer access to his shop completely – he apparently bought the bulldozer to create a new road, but permission for that was denied too. He lost his battle and was forced to sell the shop, at which point he immediately started building a Killdozer. The rampage would come a year and a half later; it was hardly done on impulse.
Did the zoning dispute go badly for him? No doubt. Did he have multiple chances to avoid that outcome? It seems like it. Did the city leave him no choice but to do what he did? Well, most schools of morality posit that even in the most bitter business disputes, there are always non-Killdozer options.
…
In addition to the newspaper, Heemeyer tore through the concrete plant, the town hall, a hardware store owned by another man he had a dispute with – he’d made a list. That’s where the noble vigilante story comes into play. He wasn’t out to hurt anybody, they say, just to do to others what they’d done to him.
But as Piechocki points out, the lack of a body count was down to pure luck. “When he attacked the town hall, the library is in there, and my son was in that library at that time. Gambles, the store he got stuck in, what happened if somebody was stuck in there?” In fact, most of the buildings were occupied right up until the inhabitants ran away screaming that a Killdozer was coming their way.
It was moving slow enough that everyone had time to get out of fhe way. It isn’t like he drive it 60mph jnto the buildings, nor did he go on a shooting spree.
Yes, he did a bad thing. No, we don’t have to wail about how everything anyone does that we don’t like is a danger to children or ‘what if someone got hurt’. We can just focus on how it was a bad thing on its own.
He tried to knock down buildings that were occupied (often by innocents unrelated to his feuds) until moments before he got to them. I don’t see why you’re downplaying his actions.
Glazer, angsty, admiration, desire to do the same to the people whove “wronged” them, and be vilified as a fuckin hero
Cant fantasize about doing it themselves if people are going to “drag the OG’s reputation through the mud” despite the OG being deranged and obviously deserving of criticism
If he busted through walls at random, he could easily hit a person on the toilet who didn’t know he was coming.
Do you not have experience feeling the approaching killdozer’s furious rumble through the porcelain and your ballsack??
Also the terletwater was probably looking like the glass of water in Jurrasic Park, admire the view once and a while jeez
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most schools of morality posit that even in the most bitter business disputes, there are always non-Killdozer options
Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
I wonder how long it took the town government to reject another citizen’s rezoning proposal after this event?
Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
I don’t think this guy was being reasonable
That was a quote from his manifesto.
This account is much different than the one I read back closer to when it happened. There’s no way to know what’s real anymore.
I’m surprised they didn’t just let him get away with it for being such a bad ass
They did. He shot himself. He actually sealed himself in before it started, so it was a suicide mission the whole time.
Honestly the entire story about that man is fucked up. And you honestly also barely know what’s true. There’s the city officials, who are telling one story, and then there are people close to heemeyer who tell another story. I don’t think we’re ever gonna hear about the truth.
Eh, Heemeyer was an asshole. He was given a few different perfectly reasonable resolutions and refused them all.
According to the city, he was an asshole. According to other people, the city was being bribed by the construction company (or whatever it was) to basically strongarm him out of his property. And with all the knowledge I have about corporate america, especially in times where the exact same thing happens for datacenters, I’m in no position to certainly say that that’s a lie.
I can’t imagine being angry enough to do what he did. Given that he did this and then took his own life when the killdozer got stuck, it seems he wasn’t well mentally. So perhaps that was the reason.
honestly, he was probably pretty mentally fit.
you destroy an entire town out of spite and you think you’re just getting arrested?
the man would have fell down a flight of stairs in a one floor police station and be found dead floating in a lake only for it to be called a suicide.
there are some crimes against society that can’t go unpunished and his suicide was the final “fuck you, won’t do what you tell me”.
Given his why, he was defo not mentally fit.
Everyone gets the story of Killdozer wrong. It was poop all along.
They probably could have stopped him a bit sooner by taking a grenade to the radiator…
Grenades aren’t exactly standard issue police equipment.
Okay, let’s pretend we don’t live in 2026… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police
But this was in 2004 right? Regardless, you got a homemade tank tearing down your town, what do?
I bet they had some grenades around, but were half busy pissing their pants while making the situation more complicated than necessary.
Fuck, they coulda just dumped 20 gallons of paint on it via helicopter to blind his cameras…
did you know that he not only had cameras on the outside to see a full 360° view, but had gunner slots where he had enough ammunition inside to hold off the police for at least a day?
Yes, yes I did. But even with 360° view, he still had somewhat limited shooting angles through the gunner slots…
But you make a mighty fine point. What’s the best defense against a homemade bulldozer tank with nothing but cameras to see from and drive with? Spray paint the cameras…
The thing had more than one weak point they could have used to their advantage…
…that would involve the police tossing grenades in clear view of the public. Even they don’t want that liability.
Climb on top the thing and drop just one grenade right behind the bucket, in front of the radiator.
That would also block like ~90% of the shrapnel, and with any luck, take out not only the radiator but the engine too.
No reason to go willy nilly tossing grenades at it, I mean hell, they did climb on top of it while he was still driving it to look for an entrance…
You sound like someone who believes they’d win in a fight with a bear.
If I had a grenade … yeah, probably …
Pretty sure he welded himself inside it.
Something like that yeah. He built the ~22 ton outer bulletproof shell with 22 tons of thick steel plate metal and concrete. He built it on some sort of hanging hoist over the bulldozer, only to be lowered once he was ready to go cause the destruction he did. He designed it without an entrance nor exit, it was a suicide mission and he knew it.
What finally brought his rampage of destruction to an early end was when the bulldozer ran over some of the debris of his carnage, that some chunk of debris managed to bust the radiator, which ultimately took out the engine. So, clearly the radiator was a weak point all along…
My thought regarding a grenade wasn’t about trying to take the dude out directly, but rather to disable the bulldozer and go from there.
If you haven’t seen the documentary movie about it, you really should…