Incident Update

More FUBAR

Let us open by wishing you a Merry Christmas. Behind the celebrations, parties, jolly men-in-red, and all else marking the season is the gratefulness due Father God who gave His one unique Son for our salvation. We implore you to find a good, Reformed Church to attend this Christmas season.

Now, we must move on to a bit of unpleasantness - a bit more, that is. Since the time of the last situation update regarding the shots fired at our home, and which passed uncomfortably close to me, we have not made much progress on the legal or investigative fronts. Local police did not come around or conduct an investigation. The office of the AG declined to investigate unless the local PD did so first. Federal authorities made inquiries with locals but nothing more. However, once contact information was sorted out I was able to get a request to the local chief who did act on it, and forwarded a request to the State Police to assist and look into the situation. That was in early November, and no further contacts have been had since - until this past weekend.

I was heavily criticized, not just by the typical trolls and enemies on the Left, but by quite a few on the Right who found my description of the circumstances uncompelling. They even raised the fact that in this incident, like some others before it, and which included nearly losing a wheel on the highway into the House for a critical vote as my lug nuts fell off en route, suffered from a total lack of incriminating evidence pointing to a perpetrator. The suggestion was that I was merely overly sensitive or paranoid, that perhaps I installed my own wheels and lug nuts wrong leading to a near-accident, and that, perhaps, I was misinterpreting the “crack” of nearby bullets passing somehow - it was youth hunting weekend, after all.

Of course, this criticism never made a ton of sense, as these events did not happen in a vacuum. They were accompanied by multiple other events for which ample evidence does exist, such as the launching of an explosive firework at my home that caused me an auditory injury and which was captured on video (this story was covered by national Blaze Media), as were multiple thefts and minor vandalisms captured on video, and electronic fraud documented, etc. Further, very many of the threats received, both those ostensibly meeting criminal requirements and those too vague to be considered criminal, were received in writing - mail, social media, etc, and they have been shared with all on social media to see. So, viewing the totality of circumstances, there has never been a lack of evidence in general for the threats and attacks faced by my household over my political office and duties.

Now, we have yet another circumstance that builds on the shots-fired incident, and one that comes replete with undeniable physical evidence: I discovered an arrow embedded in the ground in my backyard just feet from a family rest and play area - an area we spend an awful lot of time sitting, camping, fishing, reading, playing, and resting. A brief search yielded another arrow about 25 feet away.

These arrows were both embedded in the ground, one at the rivers edge in just a couple inches of water (yes, in my backyard - the river is high at present), and the other a bit further into the river. Both arrows are equipped with target tips that definitively rule out hunting use, but are both perfectly capable of lethality on a human. Neither arrow has the required markings of ownership for hunting use, either. To be clear, there is no good reason to find target arrows in this location. There are no nearby kids or teens that this might be attributed to, and, as you’ll see in a minute, this strongly appears to have intent to harass or injure behind it.

A thin scum layer where the arrows were partially submerged means they were there for a little while - weeks to months - and their notable absence during some fall construction work we did narrows the timeline for when they were fired to a couple weeks plus or minus of the prior shooting incident. Personally, I suspect the incidents are linked, and I suspect the arrows preceded the shooting, and were quite likely fired when my family and I were in the immediate area - passing by us silently and lying unnoticed until now. I suspect the combination of inefficacy (having missed us) and the lack of noticing the arrows emboldened the enemy to the use of a firearm afterward, likely opportunistically, while I was working on my vehicle.

The good news is, since this incident does involve physical evidence, we can conduct some analysis beyond best-guesswork. Firstly, the arrows were embedded in the ground at a fairly steep angle, perhaps 45 degrees or more, indicating a lobbed shot fired at a high angle. Second, the manner in which they embedded was roughly north-to-south, with the fletching pointing back towards the direction of their origin toward the south. Taken together, these shots were clearly lobbed at a high angle from the south over a patch of marshland (yellow line below). There is no acceptable reason to launch a potentially lethal arrow, let alone two, over the short trees toward my backyard, and over my neighbors backyard.

The potential trajectory, if extrapolated to all reasonable distances from which the arrow might have originated (considering minimums given the embed angles and maximums of powerful bows), travels about 200 yards downriver before entering into the Maine wilderness - a very difficult area to access and one that is not frequented much. This would suggest that it’s unlikely, though perhaps not impossible, that the origin of the arrows was so far away as to place it in the Maine wilderness. However, there seems to be another, closer, potential point of origin that, for very many reasons, seems far more probable.

Calls are currently in with both State Police and Fish and Game over these new circumstances. I do hope that some level of investigation will be conducted, and the culprit(s) found and held accountable - after all, these are major felony crimes. My duties, in Concord and otherwise, are difficult for me to attend to while I have a knowledge that people are taking pot shots, and that my family may be at risk. Anything traversing my property on a ballistic arch is extremely unwelcome, and return-fire should never be ruled out as a distinct possibility.