JT Ready, Arizona Border Vigilante Blamed for Mass Murder, Had State Republican Party Ties
Posted: 05/ 3/2012 6:34 pm
A border vigilante and avowed white supremacist who police believe killed four people and himself in a suburban Phoenix home on Wednesday was once allied with the Republican Senate majority leader who pushed through Arizona's harsh anti-illegal immigration bill in 2010.
Police in Gilbert, Ariz. said evidence at the scene indicated that Jason Todd Ready, 39, shot and killed his girlfriend, the woman's daughter and her boyfriend, and her 15-month-old granddaughter before turning the gun on himself. Hazardous chemicals and "military grade munitions" were found at the home, police said.
Ready, a former Marine known as "J.T.," founded and led the U.S Border Guard, a vigilante group that conducted heavily armed patrols of the Arizona-Mexico border with the aim of disrupting the flow of illegal immigration and drug smuggling.
Ready served for several years as a Republican precinct committeeman in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb, and Russell Pearce, a Mesa Republican and former Arizona Senate majority leader, endorsed Ready's run for Mesa City Council in 2006, which he lost. The two were linked over their shared opposition to illegal immigration.
"One of the things that I appreciate about J.T. is the fact that I think he's committed, as a true patriot, to the real purpose and the limited purpose of government, kind of like the Republican platform that we have," Pearce said in an interview in 2006.
Pearce then appeared with Ready at an anti-illegal immigration rally in Phoenix in 2007. But he disavowed the relationship in 2008 after his political opponents exposed Ready's extremist views, and he worked to have Ready removed from his position as Republican committeeman.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/jt-ready-gilbert-arizona-killing_n_1475985.html
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