Ruby Ridge; The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family by Jess Walter

Author:Jess Walter [Walter, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061959851
Published: 2016-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

KAREN DEGAN GRIPPED TIGHTLY the hands of her two sons and walked into the slate-roofed Sacred Heart Church, where nineteen years earlier she’d married a strong, quiet football player. Now, on Wednesday, August 26, 1992, she was going to his funeral.

The streets were filled with mourners—3,000 cops, federal agents and judges, Marines, football players and old friends—escorted by dozens of police cars and motorcycles. Billy Degan’s funeral gripped Quincy, a shipyard town just south of Boston that, for a couple of hundred years, produced more than its share of big boats and Irish cops. Somber officers walked past brick businesses and beer-and-shot taverns until they reached the church, where 200 deputy U.S. marshals stood ten deep in dark suits and sunglasses, their badges striped in black. Six Marines carried the casket into the church while a customs agent played “The Marine Corps Hymn” on bagpipes on the church steps.

Dave Hunt was fogged in by a painful cold he’d gotten on the mountain, and he watched Degan’s wife through bleary, tired eyes, amazed by her poise and strength. The boys were slices of Billy, one eighteen, the other fourteen, both tall and earnest in their dark blazers and cop-kid haircuts. Hunt had never seen such a funeral. Degan was a lifelong Marine and deputy U.S. marshal—two outfits that knew how to send someone off with full honors. The Marines had to bury heroes all the time, thousands of them. The U.S. Marshals Service had lost its share, too, three hundred men in two hundred years, but rarely one with Billy Degan’s reputation and abilities. They shut down the Boston federal building, and among those at the funeral were the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts. In a cop town like Quincy, in the belly of three centuries of civilization, it was hard for Hunt to imagine the place they’d just come from, that damned twilight zone of a mountain, where people were threatening federal officers, cheering on neo-Nazis, and holding signs that celebrated Degan’s murder. It was such a shame. Hunt watched the pain in Larry Cooper’s face as he listened to a parade of people talk about Billy.

“Bill Degan died in the company of his best friends,” said Henry Hudson, “performing the duties he enjoyed best in the job he loved most.”

The mayor of Boston, Ray Flynn, said, “It is a sad day. This is a personal tragedy for all the people in the state. We lost a dedicated law enforcement officer and somebody who had devoted his whole life to defending and protecting others.”

Outside, Quincy police patrolled the church in bulletproof vests, in case Weaver supporters tried to strike at the funeral. They jumped when a nearby transformer blew, popping like gunfire, then relaxed when they realized what it was.

Inside the church, Degan rested in a steel-gray casket while the Reverend Cornelius James Heery, pastor of Sacred Heart, praised him as a family man and a good marshal. The pastor said it was okay to be troubled

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