Drug War Blowback: Vegas Murderers Were Police Informants

William Norman Grigg
Jun. 19, 2014

Jerad and Amanda Miller, who were banished from Bunkerville by supporters of Cliven Bundy, had worked as informants for Nevada law enforcement agencies. After the Millers murdered three people — Las Vegas Metro Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo, and Joseph Wilcox, an armed citizen who heroically tried to stop their rampage — their former handlers claimed that they were unaware of the couple’s “anti-police sentiments.” That claim is difficult to credit, given that Jerad Miller had a lengthy criminal record, and the fact that the couple had made itself very prominent in protests associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Jerad Miller, who was mired in the probation system because of narcotics convictions, was precisely the kind of person whose vulnerabilities make him valuable as an informant and provocateur.

The Millers were among many hundreds of people who traveled to Bunkerville, Nevada to support rancher Cliven Bundy in his confrontation with the BLM. They may well have been the only volunteers who were asked to leave because of concerns regarding what was described as their "aggressive nature and volatility." During their brief visit, however, Jerad was interviewed by the local NBC affiliate, which meant that he was depicted as representative of the people who had rallied to the Bundy family's cause.

Predictably, following the couple’s subsequent killing spree critics of Cliven Bundy claimed that the rancher, his supporters, and the entire “insurrectionist right” shared collective responsibility for that crime. Honest people who aren’t imprisoned in collectivist ideology would recognize that rather than being radicalized by so-called anti-government extremists, Jerad Miller is more properly seen as a living example of "blowback" in the government's war on drugs.