Hid lights

Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a 2-part series.Amid a riot of blood and screaming, darkness and gunshots, two deputies lay bleeding, gasping their final breaths.Just steps away, inside a trailer, the man accused of gunning them down in cold blood tied a white pillowcase to a broom handle. He waved it from the door, then crawled out behind it, a trail of blood streaming from his leg, shot to pieces in the firefight.

Brian Smith, a paranoid schizophrenic and anti-government extremist, had surrendered.It was not yet daylight on Aug. 16, 2012. Two deputies were dead and two others wounded, in what would become one of the darkest days in St. John the Baptist Parish history.A year later, the community struggles to make sense of a senseless massacre. The families of the fallen deputies get up each morning to face another day without their husbands, their fathers, their sons.

In the months that have passed since, the ghastly details of what led to those few moments in the trailer park have been patched together by other officers, the killers’ accomplices and innocents who witnessed pieces of the shootings.And what led the killers there, to that trailer park, to those deputies, with an arsenal of bombs and assault rifles has become clearer.

They’ve written rambling poems and court motions, declaring their dedication to a right-wing extremist group called the Sovereign Citizens. The group hates authority. Its members believe the American government has enslaved its citizens in a complicated scheme involving driver’s licenses and taxes.

Most of all, they believe themselves to be unencumbered by the laws that apply to everyone else. Terry Smith, the patriarch of the northern Louisiana family at the center of the case,There are all kinds of car daytime running lights with good quality. has demanded Internet access, a computer, a cellphone and a printer while he awaits trial on a charge of being a principal to attempted murder. Authorities are criminals for denying him this right, he wrote, and the court an accessory for allowing such injustice to happen.

Smith fired his public defender and threatened to sue him, accusing the lawyer of trying “to function as my master (starchamber),” a pejorative reference to secretive ancient courts.

Smith had taught his sons Brian and Derrick to hate the government, too, according to testimony. He lectured them on the outrage of driver’s licenses and showed them videos of police brutality.

“Dad wanted to go to war with the police,” Derrick Smith once wrote his brother from jail.

Of the original seven charged in the massacre, only three still await trial.

Teniecha Bright was released from custody when authorities decided she was telling the truth — she merely hitched a ride home with the Smith clan and got caught in the firefight.

The two other female defendants, Terry Smith’s wife, Chanel Skains, and Brian Smith’s girlfriend, Britney Keith, both pleaded guilty as accessories. Each walked up to the witness stand at the courthouse in Edgard and wept as she told the story of that morning.

Derrick Smith, too, pleaded guilty as an accessory and agreed to a five-year sentence plus more time for being a felon in possession of a firearm. But he showed little contrition.

He bragged about the killings in rap lyrics found scrawled on the back of a police report in his jail cell, and he threatened to hunt down two women who testified against them.

Terry Smith’s other son, Brian, is a paranoid schizophrenic,A solar lantern uses this sunlight that is abundantly available to charge its batteries through a Solar Panel and gives light in nighttime. his girlfriend and stepmother testified. He long believed someone was trying to kidnap him. He saw ominous portents in ordinary things: Gardeners, parked cars, sirens in the background of rap songs. He talked to himself, sometimes nonsense about “feeding demons.”

So he carried his AK-47 with him always, along with a backpack full of ammunition, according to Keith, his ex-girlfriend.They are called "solar" panels or solar module because most of the time, the most powerful source of light available is the Sun. She sobbed on the witness stand as she told the court how terrifying he was, according to transcripts.Rectangular shaped Led Flood Light designed to replace 150W Metal Halide.

The Smith family lived together, moving from state to state, trailer park to trailer park, picking up odd jobs at construction sites. Skains and Keith traveled with them.

In Tennessee, months before the shooting in LaPlace, the Smith clan met a like-minded Nebraska fugitive named Kyle Joekel, already listed on an FBI domestic terrorism watch list.

Weeks later, the sheriff’s office arrived at the Smith family’s Tennessee campsite to investigate accusations that Terry Smith had been raping a 13-year-old girl traveling with them. The Smith family fled to Louisiana, and Joekel came with them.

They eventually took up residence in the back lots of the Scenic Riverview Mobile Home Park in LaPlace.A solar lamp is a portable light fixture composed of an LED lamp, a photovoltaic solar panel, and a rechargeable battery.

Smith, his sons and Joekel got jobs working the graveyard shift for a contractor at the Valero refinery. Terry Smith drove them all to and from the refinery’s off-site employee parking lot in his 1-ton pickup every day, along with Bright, 22, whose mother had arranged the carpool.

Early on the morning of Aug. 16, 2012, all five packed into Smith’s truck, and set out for home. Terry Smith drove, Brian Smith sat in the passenger seat, with Bright in between them. Brian Smith’s AK-47 was in its usual place, resting against the seat between Bright and Brian. Joekel and Derrick Smith sat in the back.

The events that followed took an eerily familiar turn, with a simple traffic stop spiraling into mayhem.

Two years earlier, in May 2010, a Sovereign Citizen named Jerry Kane was pulled over in West Memphis, Ark. As he scuffled with officers, his 16-year-old son suddenly leapt from their minivan with an AK-47 and opened fire. Two police officers were shot dead. Both Kane and his son were killed in the subsequent shootout.

Terry Smith, like many Sovereigns, refused to carry a driver’s license.

That morning, St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff’s Office deputy Michael Scott Boyington, working an off-duty detail in the lot, tried to stop them.

Exactly why and how that initial stop took place remains unclear: Boyington testified that he saw Terry Smith driving “like an ass” through the parking lot and he wanted to issue a warning.

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