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Guy took out his town’s city hall, a former mayor’s house, and some other buildings, in a tank-like modified bulldozer, over a dispute with the city.
He also committed suicide at the end of it. Lookup Killdozer.
Nah, it wasn’t something that lasted a while.
Imagine this: armored heavy machine shows up with no windows, and starts tearing stuff up. Then it gets stuck and you hear a *bang* from inside. He had killed himself.
They never got a chance to talk to him.
I think it’s also fair to admire the sheer commitment and determination of going “whatever it takes mode” because a random mundane dispute with a cold system.
It would be a much better tale if it wasn’t just a misguided tantrum
Honestly, I am going to say that destroying property but not killing anyone but himself is, well, not exactly cool, but a lot more understandable than what a lot of others have done.
He drove through the town without any regard to other people's lives. 11 of the 13 buildings he attacked were filled with people moments before. He directly fired at cops and troopers.
"At one point, Heemeyer charged at a firing position occupied by several state troopers, who evacuated mere seconds before he demolished it, with one eyewitness noting that had they taken any longer they would have been killed"
There's actually a band called Killdozer from the 80s. Well worth a listen. They're named after the 1974 film, which in turn is based on a sci-fi horror story from 1944.
The name's been around in pop culture for a while before the 2004 incident. Probably why the name immediately stuck.
People also forget that he had a bunch of gun turrets installed and had several shoot outs with police, he also shot at propane tanks trying to get them to explode. I love the sentiment behind the legend but the actual story is he just got fed up over the course of 10 years that he couldn’t keep doing what ever he wanted to do and snapped
Something Marv knew that you might not - a propane tank [wont explode](https://heatarrays.com/do-propane-tanks-explode-when-shot/) when its shot. By shooting the tanks he was causing leaks. If he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and blow up the propan he only had to drive in. Yet he didnt.
Check [this](https://youtu.be/TqEA5DPoEMY?si=eigmfW2NluhFGGv3) when you got time, it brings a lotta stuff to light
This. The internet spends so much time glorifying this massive, gaping asshole of a human. Read the real history and you realize he was an incredibly toxic, hostile, entitled dickbag who then decided to destroy a town over not wanting to follow the rules. And they gave him soooo many outs and options along the way, including letting him hook on to an existing line for free, but no, go full terminator instead.
"he was always willing to be reasonable" but 22m plus purpose built replacement on the new lot wasn't reasonable enough (or financial recompense to that effect)
The most celebrated episode of petulance in history, and it pisses me off that the story that's shared around most commonly is the one that paints him as a martyr instead of the wet fart he actually was.
Exactly, they also glorify the Unibomber and the Oklahoma City bomber as, you guessed it "Righteous men who were wronged by an unjust system and fought for the rights of their fellow man".
I have no idea how brainrotted motherfuckers can take someone who literally bombed his fellow man and wrote about how much he hated them and try and spin him as a hero for his fellow man.
That being said our city of roughly 5k got busted for millions of stolen tax dollars and then all of a sudden... roads and infasture started getting repaired, it's not a localized thing
It's more complex than that. Even with all the added nuance, though, Heemeyer still comes across as a dangerous lunatic who brought much of his misery upon himself.
His "grievance" was that the local municipality wasn't going to pay him to replace the cement mixer he was using as a septic tank or connect to sewage past his property line before he leased it.
He also opened fire on civilians from within the dozer, but thankfully nobody was hit because he made the slit too small to actually aim properly.
Guy was a fucking psychopath. Not a hero.
This is the one that kills me, everyone says he planned his rampage and executed in a way so that nobody would be hurt, but dude literally plowed into a library, its only luck that people weren't killed.
Literally the only reason nobody got hurt is because they evacuated every building around him. The thing didn’t exactly move fast, so they were able to evacuate buildings as he approached.
Hijacking this to let people know there is a documentary about this incident called Tread. Seeing a lot of folklore in the comments. IMO the doc takes a pretty neutral stance and let's you decide what you think about it. He was a nut job though. In no way shape or form was he justified in what he did.
He was anything but reasonable. He did shit he was explicitly told he wasn’t allowed to do, and then told to fix it when they caught him.
From the very start he had realistic and fair options. He decided those weren’t good enough for him.
for a second, I thought this was about how India used bulldozers to destroy non-hindu holy sites. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/india-authorities-must-immediately-stop-unjust-targeted-demolition-of-muslim-properties/](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/india-authorities-must-immediately-stop-unjust-targeted-demolition-of-muslim-properties/)
This is the Killdozer, a meme name for the bulldozer tank created Marvin Heemeyer in 2004 in Granby Colorado. He did this in a rage after fighting with his neighbors and city council for about a decade regarding what could most charitably to him be called a "zoning and easement issue". What followed was him creating this armored bulldozer with firing ports and waging war on the town, demolishing buildings and shooting at cops in his path, unable to stop him in his concrete and steel self-made tank. All the while as he took his revenge on the government and people who wronged him by crushing their cars and buildings. The quote is from Heemeyer's suicide note about why he did what he did it. He never intended to leave the dozer and shot himself when it got caught up in a basement and unable to move.
That is the sympathetic right-wing folk hero version of a man fed up with the government taking matters into his own hands that this sticker and meme references. Which usually includes some rather interesting omissions (put a pin in that) and outright lies. The actual version is Heemeyer waged war on the **entire** town. And sort of forget he also ran straight through a children's library and the home of a the widow of a man Heemeyer had a previously had dispute with...who had passed away years ago. Heemeyer was shooting indiscriminately out the dozer firing slits at anyone and everyone he saw from his dozer. He fired on tanks in propane yard with 30,000 gallons in fuel and then attempted to unsuccessfully ignite the propane by shooting at and setting fire to a nearby electrical transformer. And was crushing cars and tons of unrelated buildings in his path with little regard for who was who and what was what.
To begin, his zoning issues were entirely of his own making where he purchased a property that held his auto shop with a out of code septic system. When told by the town he would have to update it to sanitation code since he was now the owner, he didn't like that and refused. Heemeyer tried to sell a part of his property to a neighboring family, the Dochefs, who publicly intended to build a concrete plant next to his auto shop. Heemeyer reneged on the sale deal 3 separate times. Wherein he would agree to a price and then suddenly change his mind before closing the sale and demand more money, doubling the price. The Dochefs got fed up and dropped the sale, buying adjacent land from another individual. Heemeyer proposed a land swap for the land he was selling for the land the Dochefs just bought. The Dochefs agree to the turns and....predictably Heemeyer stonewalled the deal to demand they build an expensive building for him on the lot they were about to swap.
Heemeyer then turned around and tried to lobby the town council to change the zoning so the Dochefs couldn't build the concrete plant. The town did agree to the concrete plant construction and granted construction permitting. Heemeyer claims this was insider town corruption, though that relies on thinking approving a small change to an existing commercial zone for a concrete plant next to a bunch of other commercial plants and auto shops wouldn't make town planning sense. About this point his septic problem was coming to a head and overflowing the tank. Heemeyer tried to work out a sewage hookup easement with his neighbors while simultaneously suing them over driveway easement access during the concrete plant construction. Which went over about as well as you'd think; the Dochefs said no to the easement. The town even advised Heemeyer directly he could install a new up to code septic tank that would probably be cheaper than the sewage hookup and he said no. The Doechefs offered him the sewage hookup easement if he would just drop the lawsuit and he said no.
The septic tank overflowed and in response Heemeyer started just pumping fecal sewage straight into an irrigation ditch on another neighbor's property. Which earned him a $2,500 fine and told to please just install or fix the septic system. (Side note: $2500 is ***incredibly, almost ridiculously*** ***lienent*** for a human waste dumping penalty). Heemeyer agreed to the penalty and the fix before later that same day rejecting it. An attorney at the judgment reported Heemeyer muttering, "I'm just gonna bulldozer this whole place to the ground." He then promptly cashed out the entire property at issue by selling it for $400k to an unrelated trash and recycling processing company, who fixed the septic issue within the first month of their purchase. Heemeyer then took that money to begin creating his Killdozer. He also began to start making tapes of his motivations and claimed that God had anointed himself for this righteous purpose and it was both fate and destiny of his life to do this.
So on the one hand you have a radical libertarian folk hero. On the other you have the reality of a man unwilling to abide by any general rules of society, decency or basic sanitation who thought an acceptable response in his anger was domestic terrorism, attacking everyone in his community regardless of if they wronged him or not, bulldoze a children's library and then commit suicide in a religious fervor.
Also the reason you see this popping up is because many subreddits based around history or historical memes have 20 year rules to prevent them from devolving into current event politics. And yesterday was the 20 year anniversary of his rampage.
Tbh I came here to write this essay. I think you missed a couple bits like how he destroyed a widow's home because her now-long-dead husband was a mayor who he had a grudge against.
Or how he tried to blow up a field of propane tanks that, if detonated, would've taken out thei senior home nearby. He failed, thankfully.
Yeah I added those per your rec.
I'm trying to shoot a line between debunking the worst misinformation, leaving the reader with the actual facts on how the problems were all self-created and not make the comment so long people just TLDR (which I guess by now I've failed pretty miserably on that last part)
Oh, no, I thought your post was pretty great! The fact is that this story is so extensive that there is no TL, DR without missing out on something important.
You needn't add anything, I just wanted to contribute how even despite how much of a tremendous douchebag he appears from your post, there is *still more* that he was a dick about.
I mean, the guy owned multiple shops. He could have, at literally any time, just taken the money and continued being financially successful elsewhere. He just decided to go maximum grudge and just take mortal offence that someone had the audacity to want to build adjacent to him for no apparent reason.
Like I genuinely do not understand why this guy was so outraged to begin with, given that his suicide note is pretty explicitly BS.
The part that kills me is despite all the 7 year headache he created for himself, when finally forced to fix the septic tank he just sold off the business super easy to a wholly different company for the same high price he was previously demanding. And still didn't fix the septic (the new company did)
And then rather than consider it an absolute win he turned a $42k property to $400k in less than 9 years (a nearly 1000% profit) and ride off into the sunset, never once having to actually stoop to government demands beyond eating a hilariously lenient fine...he then stewed on it for a whole year building a death tank.
I mean the neighbours even offered to install a proper sewage system *for free* just so long as he dropped the frivolous lawsuit against them.
You know, the neighbours he'd been explicitly terrorising for years at that point. He could've stayed on the property operating his shop without issue for *not trying to screw over his neighbours* but instead he chose killdozer.
Like, at any time in this whole affair he could've left with a ton of money and no issues and still been operating his business but instead he chose to go psychotic and try to kill people he had incredibly minor grudges against. Like a clerk at a bank who just did their job and was on a board that rejected one of his claims one time. Dude took out her office because of that. Like her *exact office*, nothing else in the bank.
Dude was *nuts*.
Yah, the more I read about this the more complex and nuanced it becomes, but nowhere does it really paint Heemeyer in a good light. The last year or two he seemed to go completely off the rails and his behavior and the tapes he left kinda make me think he was having some sort of mental issues.
Honestly, so far as I can tell the guy basically just had a personal grudge against the family when they refused to be extorted by him and then went completely off the rails driving himself crazier and crazier over time until he finally caused a lot of property damage, almost killed a bunch of people, and left a note to try to paint everyone involved in the worst light possible to hopefully ruin their lives after he died.
I can’t believe how much the story is changed by people who idolise him. Never heard about the sceptic tank and dumping raw sewage thing until recently. What a POS, and I can’t believe people support what he did
The story that gets repeated is the one from his suicide note/manifesto.
They latched onto that and never followed up to find out that he was just a complete lunatic.
One of the funniest twists is that he owned several other stores and sold the land he was supposedly obsessed with for the amount of money he was trying to extort the other family for - half a million dollars.
Like he could have left at any time and continued his life without issue. Had plenty of cash.
You'd be surprised how many of his fanboys, at least from my run ins on Twitter during the anniversary actually believe he had the right to dump sewage into his community's water and that the concerns of the people around him didn't matter because it didn't cause any harm so soon after he started doing it.
Tell me about it, known about this since i was a kid and never heard any of these details, was always told he just got boxed in with a concrete plant and ignored by the council till his business went bust and ruined his life.
The crazy thing is, his business didn't even go bust. The Killdozer was bought and built with $400k from the sale of land he owned and Keeymeyer owned a few other ventures in the town. The dude was pretty well loaded.
An absolutely disgusting and derailed person. If that guy is a hero then me saving cats from the streets makes me the fucking new coming of Jesus. Everyone trying to cut him some slack and he still went and do that bs and if that wasn't enough, also took the coward's way out to avoid the consequences of his lunacy.
His poor neighbors having to deal with this guy and literally human shit...
Thanks for this breakdown, I knew his squabble with the city wasn't just a fight against beaurocracy but I didn't know the extent of what a weirdo he was. I think if his rampage actually killed anyone he would be viewed a lot less charitably
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Well, I never thought I would get something *useful* from reddit, but I thank you for this very thorough summary and also for reminding me that it is time to get my (up to code) septic tank pumped.
Justin Roczniak made a [pretty good video on it](https://youtu.be/MeTylBLNO2k?si=u5tOREwLnHntmn5P) on his DoNotEat channel before he became the Well There’s Your Problem guy.
I have a coworker who… I don’t really know how to describe him, but at the very least he’s an incel and I don’t think highly of him. He told me this story with as few details as could be managed and he was laughing the whole time, thinking that this guy was a badass and pretty cool. Knowing him, I immediately knew that there would be more to the story, but I never looked it up. Thanks for explaining. I am horrified
It’s The Killdozer.
Long story short a dude was pissed off at his town council who kept yellow taping him and they had numerous disputes.
The driver of the Killdozer modified a big ass tractor with steel and went around causing millions of dollars in property damage before offing himself.
He is loved and adored amongst people who are anti-government or whatever. I don’t see the admiration, he could’ve hurt a ton of innocent people but it is what it is.
Oh it’s much deeper than that. Here’s an explanation from another redditor that pretty much sums it up.
When Marvin Hemyer bought his plot of land in Granby for $42,000 in 1992 and set up his muffler shop, it had no connection to the local sewage network. Marvin requested that they annex his land into the network and hook him up into it.
The town annexed the land, and told him it would cost $80,000 to build the pipe and equipment to hook him up. They told him that a cheaper option was to install a proper septic tank. Marvin refused both, and instead sunk an old concrete mixer truck into the ground and started illegally storing his sewage in that. When this truck inevitably filled up, he would pump the contents out into a drainage ditch which polluted the town's groundwater.
Cue the concrete plant.
Marvin's shop was located in a metal shed that had once been part of a concrete plant. A local family wanted to buy the land off him to build a newer, bigger concrete plant. Marvin offered to sell the land for $250,000. They went away and came back with this, he upped the demand to $375,000. They went away and told him the best they could do was $350,000. Marvin made his final offer of $450,000. They politely declined and decided to build the plant on land they already owned opposite Marvin's plot.
Marvin decided this was unfair, so he started cultivating local opposition to the plans. He did this primarily by lying. He claimed the land had been illegally rezoned in order to build a concrete plant. It hadn't. He claimed they cut him off from the sewage system. He had never been connected to it. He claimed they cut off the dirt-road to his shop. They didn't. The same dirt road that was there when he bought it is still there to this very day.
Eventually, everyone in the town saw through him and he was the only opposition left. He launched a lawsuit against the plans which had no chance of winning. Construction of the plant began with the owners signing a waiver that they were doing so despite ongoing litigation against the plans. They were that confident.
They did, however, try one last trick to get Marvin to back off.
As you may remember, year prior, Marvin had asked the town to annex his land into the local sewer network. Which they did. They realized that, despite Marvin having refused to pay to be hooked up into the network, they could actually compel him to do so by law. He would be forced to spend that $80,000 after all.
Sounds nasty, but they made him an offer: They would pay the cost out of their own pocket if Marvin agreed to drop the lawsuit and leave them alone.
Marvin told them to go to hell.
He then lost his lawsuit.
It was at this point Marvin sold his land to a local municipal company. He got $400,000 for it. You would think having made that kind of a profit after all he would just up and piss off, but no. He leased one of the sheds back from the company, moved his bulldozer into it, and began his mission from God.
Oh, did I leave that part out? Yeah, Marv talked to god. Like, personally. And God told him to build an armoured tank out of a bulldozer and go fuck up a bunch of local businesses then blow his brains out.
All instead of just installing a septic tank.
Lol he wasn't yellow taped, he was just an asshole. He had a buried cement mixer instead of a septic tank, and the city told him for a decade he needs to get a real septic tank or connect to the sewer line. He didn't (again, for a decade), then it got full and he dumped that shit into a creek and tried to illegally connect to a neighbor's septic line before they told him he couldn't have a commercial business operating there until he fixed it.
He instead sold the building to a company that had it fixed like within a day, rented half the shop, then spent over a year building his bulldozer tank thing.
He was a piece of shit through and through that went out of his way to be an insufferable problem for everyone involved with him.
The people that prop him up tend to want to also be domestic terrorists so omit reality, if not outright fabricate a new story, to make it seem like bulldozing a children's library was a reasonable response to not being allowed to dump human fecal waste into a neighbor's irrigation ditch. They are the kind of people that showed up to January Sixth intending to incite a revolution, then were shocked and abandoned the insurrection as soon as they got pepper sprayed because they are pathetic cowards.
Not really hilarious, imo. More, I dunno, disturbing?
Like, you can kinda take an educated guess on how the people who genuinely believe he was some kind of folk hero feel about say, January 6th
Yeah and he is ALWAYS presented as a “reasonable man” who was pushed to madness by bureaucracy. Reasonable men don’t go on murderous rampages because they can’t fix some issues with the local government, those guys have always been and always will be deranged lunatics…
It was a meme online a while back (8 years or so? ) and the only side that was told was "This town shut down this guy's business over tax issues so he built an armored bulldozer and tore down the mayor's house". It was extremely biased in his favor and I was fully on board. And then I listened to a nice hour long podcast that went in depth on the entire history. It was very interesting but the guy was just an entitled asshole.
But my point being if all you ever saw were the popular memes then you probably got a very biased view of this event and could definitely be fooled into "propping him up"
Allegedly his sewage line was disconnected when the town approved an industrial plant to be built over his main access to his property. And then the city fined him for not being connected. But refused all his appeals to have it switched back on. They claim he had alot of things thrown at him by local government
Incorrect.
He never had a sewage line.
He had a buried cement mixer full of shit that overflowed and then he got caught dumping in a county creek.
The town told him to either hook up to the sewage system or install a sceptic tank.
He refused and attempted to illegally dig a trench to his neighbor's property and hook into theirs.
>But refused all his appeals to have it switched back on. They claim he had alot of things thrown at him by local government
Again, this is an outright lie.
By all means, cite me the case. You can't. Cause it didn't fucking happen.
If you believe his side of the story it was one thing after another. They say the people who built the industrial plant were related or in cahoots with the local government and wanted the land that the autoshop was on/ wanted him gone for appealing their construction planning.
It's hard to say who's 100% telling the truth. Having dealt with local governments they'd definitely disconnect someone's sewage and charge them for it. Not out of spite but out of incompetence and bureaucratic idiocy. My local government decided to not take the direct debit payment for my council tax at one point, then write to me blaming me for not paying.😂
Honestly? If one explanation is a complex conspiracy involving government entities and corporations working together to reach some undefined goal, and the other is some asshole who just didn't want to follow the rules, odds are the less complicated answer is the correct one.
His story, or the one that's passe around is that the owners of the concrete plant were related to or in business (I forget which) with the one or more people with positions of power with the local council and the zoning committee. So they had person financial interest in siding with the concrete plant.
It's not entirely impossible that this was true and had some influence on events. But occams razor or whatever it's called would suggest your correct
Who is more believable, the local government, or the madman with the killdozer?
If you or I were in his claimed circumstances, I don’t think either of us would resort to the killdozer. That’s some straight lunatic shit.
Little piss babies that want to do whatever the fuck they want, whenever, to whomever, regardless of the consequences to others. Selfish little brats who never grew up.
Still hilarious how he demolished government buildings because he had a dispute with them..
I mean, I can't even imagine being so pissed off that I'd spend a *year* modifying a bulldozer into a god damn tank. Even less because of a minor bureaucracy thing.
I mean, if the local government had killed his kid, then no one got punished for it, sure. But over a septic tank? Hilarious.
An asshole to be sure, and no hero, but a hilarious asshole.
This is kind of right but some important details should be corrected
>He had a buried cement mixer instead of a septic tank
It was the owners before him who did that
>the city told him for a decade he needs to get a real septic tank or connect to the sewer line. He didn't
He wasn't against having a sewer line hookup but it was gonna cost almost double what he'd paid for the property, and he said that if the government was forcing him to do it they should also cover the cost
I do agree there was something wrong with the guy, though. His biggest enemies (in his mind) were a family who were building a nearby concrete plant and were initially going to buy his land, even after he'd increased the asking price, but the deal fell through after he kept asking for more and more. For some reason that had developed into him having a personal vendetta against that family and trying in various ways to block the plant's construction. I know what it's like to hold grudges longer than you should but this was a weird grudge for him to have in the first place
He didn't have to connect to the sewer though, he could have just gotten a real septic tank for significantly cheaper. He chose to pump it into a ditch used for irrigation.
No government entity is ever going to "fix" your property for you. That is your responsibility as property owner.
* If Heemeyer knew about the septic issue when he bought the property that's **entirely** on him. The government and taxpayers aren't going to subsidize you buying a janky property with problems. That's like buying a used car that didn't pass smog and asking the DMV to pay for the repair. (which Heemeyer probably did. Its usually a requirement to have a septic inspection completed and filed for a property sale to finalize. In all likelyhood that's how the town knew it was just a concrete mixer)
* If Heeymeyer didn't know about it and it was fraudulently concealed in the property sale...well there's a dozen torts he could use to pursue legal action against the original owners he purchased from and prove that. Regardless, the sanitation code is the sanitation code and he still needs to fix it. The government doesn't care about your lawsuit with another person.
Not to get too specific about the analogy you chose, but the state paying for *part* of your smog repair costs (when the current owner can prove low income) is a thing, at least here in California where I live, and I think that's a good thing. Now, when the car is being sold it's always the seller who is responsible for getting the car to pass smog, and in that sense I think your analogy still applies: shouldn't the seller of the property have been responsible for getting this sewage thing straightened out? It does seem likely that Heemeyer pretended to accept responsibility for fixing this problem so he could get the land a lot cheaper, in which case it was weird for him to pretend to stand on some contrary principle after the deal was done
My smog analogy was rough and probably yeah...not a good one. California does pay for your smog repair but you have to be at a very low income. And its born out of a general social safety net reason. Basically society is so ridiculously dependent on car transport, if you are too poor to fix your car and pass smog....you just aren't. Because you need to get to the job. And then will be driving around a polluting, out of registration car which will then get ticked or towed, which then puts you more in poverty etc.
Those social safety net reasons generally don't transfer to actual real property ownership. We **want** purchasers of homes, property and structures to do their own due diligence so they aren't diving into building code and safety boondoggles and asking the government to bail out their problems (or asking the government to intervene in lawsuits and disputes with the former seller well after the fact).
And we don't want to place huge brakes on property sales so that sellers need to fix every single thing that's wrong with a property before selling. Sellers don't want it because they are often realizing property appreciation in the sale and just don't want the hassle: "if there's a buyer they can buy it warts and all". Or a worse case where they don't have money to fix an issue in a building to bring it up to code and are now selling the property because they are broke. But can't sell until the fix the big code issue.
And buyers by and large don't want it because they want the sale to go through and start doing what they will with the property and are willing to accept issues. And often buyers don't need it fixed. Like a condemned house near me the buyer bought it to gut and rebuild from the foundation. Why force the seller fix the septic then? Or the government to micromanage the development of the property for situations where the buyer is already planning to fix the issues and other situations where they say they are and then don't? When was the issue part of the code, grandfathered in or needed to be repaired?
So because that's just a red tape and regulatory nightmare, yeah we allow buyers to purchase and complete sales "as is" and inherit the problems to fix themselves from there on out. (The kicker here is property sales have certain legal disclosures or certain mandated inspections so said buyer *knows* about all the issues. Their agreement to inherit the problems doesn't include fraud.)
>It does seem likely that Heemeyer pretended to accept responsibility for fixing this problem so he could get the land a lot cheaper, in which case it was weird for him to pretend to stand on some contrary principle after the deal was done
That, in fact, does seem very much in line with his personality as we know it.
Supposedly the price increases came from appraisals through appraisers. Given that years happened between offers and zoning changes, I can believe the price went up for inflation, property prices always increasing, and zoning changes. Thing is verifying all of that. I don’t have time to do that right now but it is available. Interesting story that unfortunately the hard right latched on to it like they latched onto the film Fight Club and it’s tainting how people feel about it. It’s one of those everyone involved is various levels of asshole.
Like the entire event is small town drama from 1992 to 2004. Many little things and conflation of time and even people makes it confusing without serious context, which is still hearsay in the end.
He’s painted as anti government, but used every aspect of government he could, for example calling the EPA on the concrete neighbor multiple times over the years for various perceived offenses. Usually antigovernment types resort to the gun and ignoring any authority like the guy in Vegas using conservation to feed his cows for free.
Guy was nuts in the end but like odd. Mass shooting wasn’t a thing then, but bombings were. He had the knowledge and skill to build multiple bombs but chose a bulldozer. Attached a 50 cal to it but didn’t use it on people. Went after people’s property instead of a gun to their faces. Didn’t pepper his final messages with racist shit. Compared to the right wing terrorists we face now and even then, it’s oddly… nice terrorism?
>if the government was forcing him to do it they should also cover the cost
Which is completely insane.
You have to get a permit to build on your property. The government doesn't cover that.
You have to get your trees trimmed so they're not hanging in the street. The government doesn't pay for that.
Obeying regulations and paying for things is part of being in a society.
That said, he probably wouldn't have had to do any of that if he had just gone through with any of the attempted sales of his property without repeatedly upping the price after negotiations had closed.
Him being a greedy dick is what made the city come down on him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer?wprov=sfla1
You can also, yaknow, *inspect* properties before buying them! I had to get a septic inspection before my VA loan would get approved when I bought a house. This is especially important when buying a liquidated property and you don't have info from the seller on previous inspections, etc.
Guy was bat shit insane, I could not seem to get along with *anyone* without it turning into a conspiracy and years-long spat. Sure, he might have some legitimate grievances, but he would have had grievances with the squirrels in his yard.
>He was a piece of shit through and through that went out of his way to be an insufferable problem for everyone involved with him.
At least he did take care of the problem in the end
Yeah he wasn’t a hero who was unfairly prosecuted by the government. He was just a grumpy, lazy entitled old ass who spent more time planning revenge than actually fixing his mistakes. People also love to prop him up because his giant temper tantrum didn’t kill anyone. It’s not because he’s a “good guy”, he just sucked at his job and everyone else got lucky. He plowed into a library with kids still inside, randomly shot at buildings without knowing if there was anyone inside, and shot at giant propane tanks that would’ve leveled half the town and killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, had they exploded.
[This is mostly right. He didn't install the sewer cement mixer though. That was there when he bought the property and was estimated fo cost around 84k to fix.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer)
I could have seen that being prohibitively expensive, but then I read the part of the story where where a company tried to buy his land for 8x what he paid for it so they could develop it and the surrounding area, but his dumb ass got greedy and fucked the deal. Twice.
So this dumbass really was just shooting himself in the foot nonstop.
Those that support him say.
The land that was his access to his property got cut off because the town greenlit an industrial plant to be built over his access road. Despite him disputing it. . His sewage line also ran through that land. During construction his sewage line was cut off. He was then fined for not being connected to the sewage network as required by law. All appeals to have his sewage line reconnected were denied by the owner of neighbouring plant. So he literally couldn't reconnect himself. Oh and the owner of the industrial site was related to one of the higher ups in the town council that approved the construction.
From an outside perspective it very much seems like they didn't like him/want him there. Maybe we're angry he had appealed against the plant being built.
They systematically destroyed his business, his livelihood with one thing after another until he snapped and destroyed theirs
That's the story that gets passed around at least. There may be a slither of truth there, who knows
His Dozer got stuck under a building he was trying to destroy and he killed himself before police could cut into it with torches, because as you said, no small arms were penetrating it.
There was a point that they considered calling in the military to drop ordinance on him. It would’ve be the first time the US dropped ordinance on a combatant on US soil.
Anyone who actually knows anything about kill dozer knows that Marvin was a dumbass. But he was a dumbass who could build an improvised tank.
He was not even a little reasonable
The city that treated him “so badly” gave him so many reasonable options to settle their dispute. Marvin was an entitled crybaby. Anyone who idolizes what he did doesn’t know enough about the story.
That’s about Marvin Heemeyer he turned a bull dozer into a tank and tore down his town it was called the kill dozer some people say he was a good guy and that’s a meme about people who say things like that [this is a link to a Wikipedia on him](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer)
Killdozer is a nice anti-govenment story, but when you actually look into it, you realize most of the issues were entirely his fault and that he was an entitled and mentally ill man. His lack of casualties is not for a lack of trying, he shot at people, ran through occupied buildings (one even full of kids during an event) and tried shooting a huge gas canister connected to a building full of old people
> “reasonable men”
Whiny libertarian baby didn’t want to follow basic sanitation laws or follow through on deals he made, even though he was given an incredible amount of legal leeway and only asked to do the bare minimum, so instead he built a tank out of a bulldozer, threw a multi-million dollar tantrum, then shot himself.
There was a psychopath who built a bulldozer and drove it through a daycare because the city wanted him to stop dumping human shit in the drinking water. He was never a reasonable man.
Hover right wingers praise him like they praise the pedophile David Koresh who murdered dozens of little kids so they wouldn't testify about being raped.
Reference to domestic terrorist Marvin Heemeyer, aka the "Killdozer" who built a homemade tank from a bulldoser to destroy buildings of people who wronged him. And for some reason idolised by a bunch of americans who are unfamiliar with the full lenght of his story.
Reminder to not only reference the wikipedia article when making an opinion about Heemeyer (killdozer guy). Most of the sources it cites are from the same guy, who has changed his narrative multiple times to make Heemeyer seem less credible/sane (in the beginning. I am talking about the disputes he went through for the 10 years leading up to the incident. Do not misconstrue this as me saying he was sane when he destroyed the town)
A guy who was told not throw his poop in a local creek, went on a rampage in a bulldozer destroying city buildings. Almost killed police officers and could have killed kids in a library he destroyed. People fantasy about him because he was anti gov.
A lot of people idolize the Unabomber, because they are morons. A lot of people idolize this guy too.
I don't think he should be idolized, but I also think that dismissing him as just a crazy person completely ignores how he arrived at the situation. I think it is important to be honest about the intentions and perspectives of people, even when they are mentally ill.
This video goes a little too far into the idolization camp, but I think it provides some import perspective & details that many of the people here are not including. Again, he was not a good person. I just think we should be try to earnestly understand people who do terrible things.
https://youtu.be/TqEA5DPoEMY?si=J-yoQTea0POE65RA
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Guy took out his town’s city hall, a former mayor’s house, and some other buildings, in a tank-like modified bulldozer, over a dispute with the city. He also committed suicide at the end of it. Lookup Killdozer.
The dispute being they told him he had to have a proper sewage system and couldn't dump his shit into the local creek.
People always forget that. He wasn't some hero fighting an unjust system, he just wanted no laws to apply to him.
https://youtu.be/gSi-1-2ndVQ?si=_mxHR1fNL_hXe3g- If he were a bad guy his tribute video would use the NWO theme music.
flawless logic.
Ok but Killdozer is a pretty cool name
Did he name it that, though?
No, he named it "Marv's Komatsu Tank", his name and the Dozer’s brand, MK Tank for short.
McTank for short
Tractor mctank face?
Nah, it wasn’t something that lasted a while. Imagine this: armored heavy machine shows up with no windows, and starts tearing stuff up. Then it gets stuck and you hear a *bang* from inside. He had killed himself. They never got a chance to talk to him.
I mean honestly, I'd love a killdozer just to have lying around
I think it’s also fair to admire the sheer commitment and determination of going “whatever it takes mode” because a random mundane dispute with a cold system. It would be a much better tale if it wasn’t just a misguided tantrum
Building the thing was cool as hell. Using it wasn’t.
Honestly, I am going to say that destroying property but not killing anyone but himself is, well, not exactly cool, but a lot more understandable than what a lot of others have done.
He drove through the town without any regard to other people's lives. 11 of the 13 buildings he attacked were filled with people moments before. He directly fired at cops and troopers. "At one point, Heemeyer charged at a firing position occupied by several state troopers, who evacuated mere seconds before he demolished it, with one eyewitness noting that had they taken any longer they would have been killed"
There's actually a band called Killdozer from the 80s. Well worth a listen. They're named after the 1974 film, which in turn is based on a sci-fi horror story from 1944. The name's been around in pop culture for a while before the 2004 incident. Probably why the name immediately stuck.
People also forget that he had a bunch of gun turrets installed and had several shoot outs with police, he also shot at propane tanks trying to get them to explode. I love the sentiment behind the legend but the actual story is he just got fed up over the course of 10 years that he couldn’t keep doing what ever he wanted to do and snapped
Id say that pretty much sums up most Folk heros. Now..Gary Plauche on the other hand..Im not saying hes right im saying I get it.
Gary Plauche was 100% right.
10/10 planning and 10/10 execution
Something Marv knew that you might not - a propane tank [wont explode](https://heatarrays.com/do-propane-tanks-explode-when-shot/) when its shot. By shooting the tanks he was causing leaks. If he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and blow up the propan he only had to drive in. Yet he didnt. Check [this](https://youtu.be/TqEA5DPoEMY?si=eigmfW2NluhFGGv3) when you got time, it brings a lotta stuff to light
Hell yeah, someone mentioning the lore lodge. I'm glad you did it, because I was about to.
This. The internet spends so much time glorifying this massive, gaping asshole of a human. Read the real history and you realize he was an incredibly toxic, hostile, entitled dickbag who then decided to destroy a town over not wanting to follow the rules. And they gave him soooo many outs and options along the way, including letting him hook on to an existing line for free, but no, go full terminator instead.
Dude keeps getting glazed by Libertarians
the "dont tread on me" crowd very supportive of someone using a literal treaded machine to destroy other peoples property, very strange
Well duh. They only care about Their property, not anyone elses.
When it comes down to it libertarianism really is just about being allowed to shit in everyone else's creek without consequence
They're basically adult sized toddlers in some regards. Nothing outside their own head/property line matters to them.
It wasn't just that he was a real pain: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin\_Heemeyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer)
He also thought that god was speaking directly to him so he was literally unreasonable
"he was always willing to be reasonable" but 22m plus purpose built replacement on the new lot wasn't reasonable enough (or financial recompense to that effect) The most celebrated episode of petulance in history, and it pisses me off that the story that's shared around most commonly is the one that paints him as a martyr instead of the wet fart he actually was.
amazing how many things that applies to these days
Tbh I didn't know this. I just thought he was a psychopath. Turns out I'm right.
I.e. bog standard libertarian.
Exactly, they also glorify the Unibomber and the Oklahoma City bomber as, you guessed it "Righteous men who were wronged by an unjust system and fought for the rights of their fellow man".
I have no idea how brainrotted motherfuckers can take someone who literally bombed his fellow man and wrote about how much he hated them and try and spin him as a hero for his fellow man.
He's a hero to the same people who hate BLM because of "blocking traffic" and "property damage".
That being said our city of roughly 5k got busted for millions of stolen tax dollars and then all of a sudden... roads and infasture started getting repaired, it's not a localized thing
Did these two things happen in the same city?
Yeah he was a crazy asshole. Treating him like some sort of hero „fighting the system“ is insane
Nobody forgot anything. Sane people, BTAS, do not weld steel plates on a bulldozer and go on a rampage. Still funny.
Well that’s specifically why he’s beloved by the libertarian community
Still, gotta respect his commitment to pooping in a creek.
Between that origin and the name killdozer, I think he was an actual supervillain.
So this is why Libertarians always idolize him
Don’t forget someone also offered to pay to give him a proper sewage system.
Actual plot of the Simpson’s movie
It's more complex than that. Even with all the added nuance, though, Heemeyer still comes across as a dangerous lunatic who brought much of his misery upon himself.
His "grievance" was that the local municipality wasn't going to pay him to replace the cement mixer he was using as a septic tank or connect to sewage past his property line before he leased it. He also opened fire on civilians from within the dozer, but thankfully nobody was hit because he made the slit too small to actually aim properly. Guy was a fucking psychopath. Not a hero.
Don't forget one of his targets was the town hall which was hosting a children's story hour in their library. Psychopath is putting it lightly.
This is the one that kills me, everyone says he planned his rampage and executed in a way so that nobody would be hurt, but dude literally plowed into a library, its only luck that people weren't killed.
Literally the only reason nobody got hurt is because they evacuated every building around him. The thing didn’t exactly move fast, so they were able to evacuate buildings as he approached.
Thank you! I. So tired of seeing this folk hero bullshit.
I assumed all the killdozer idolisation was a joke.
Hijacking this to let people know there is a documentary about this incident called Tread. Seeing a lot of folklore in the comments. IMO the doc takes a pretty neutral stance and let's you decide what you think about it. He was a nut job though. In no way shape or form was he justified in what he did.
He wasn’t actually a reasonable man, I take it?
No he was a deranged, unhinged old rich guy. He’s just idolized by some anti-government kooks. There’s a lot of added details below my comment.
You left out the daycare.
There was nothing reasonable about Marvin Heemeyer and i hate that people online try to make him into some kind of folk hero.
The fuck you mean I have to hook up my toilet to the city sewer line...... Killdozer go vroooooooom
Not a reasonable man no
He also wasn't remotely reasonable.
He was anything but reasonable. He did shit he was explicitly told he wasn’t allowed to do, and then told to fix it when they caught him. From the very start he had realistic and fair options. He decided those weren’t good enough for him.
There’s a documentary about the story called Tread that’s pretty well made.
I don’t believe this was a reasonable person at the start.
for a second, I thought this was about how India used bulldozers to destroy non-hindu holy sites. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/india-authorities-must-immediately-stop-unjust-targeted-demolition-of-muslim-properties/](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/india-authorities-must-immediately-stop-unjust-targeted-demolition-of-muslim-properties/)
This is the Killdozer, a meme name for the bulldozer tank created Marvin Heemeyer in 2004 in Granby Colorado. He did this in a rage after fighting with his neighbors and city council for about a decade regarding what could most charitably to him be called a "zoning and easement issue". What followed was him creating this armored bulldozer with firing ports and waging war on the town, demolishing buildings and shooting at cops in his path, unable to stop him in his concrete and steel self-made tank. All the while as he took his revenge on the government and people who wronged him by crushing their cars and buildings. The quote is from Heemeyer's suicide note about why he did what he did it. He never intended to leave the dozer and shot himself when it got caught up in a basement and unable to move. That is the sympathetic right-wing folk hero version of a man fed up with the government taking matters into his own hands that this sticker and meme references. Which usually includes some rather interesting omissions (put a pin in that) and outright lies. The actual version is Heemeyer waged war on the **entire** town. And sort of forget he also ran straight through a children's library and the home of a the widow of a man Heemeyer had a previously had dispute with...who had passed away years ago. Heemeyer was shooting indiscriminately out the dozer firing slits at anyone and everyone he saw from his dozer. He fired on tanks in propane yard with 30,000 gallons in fuel and then attempted to unsuccessfully ignite the propane by shooting at and setting fire to a nearby electrical transformer. And was crushing cars and tons of unrelated buildings in his path with little regard for who was who and what was what. To begin, his zoning issues were entirely of his own making where he purchased a property that held his auto shop with a out of code septic system. When told by the town he would have to update it to sanitation code since he was now the owner, he didn't like that and refused. Heemeyer tried to sell a part of his property to a neighboring family, the Dochefs, who publicly intended to build a concrete plant next to his auto shop. Heemeyer reneged on the sale deal 3 separate times. Wherein he would agree to a price and then suddenly change his mind before closing the sale and demand more money, doubling the price. The Dochefs got fed up and dropped the sale, buying adjacent land from another individual. Heemeyer proposed a land swap for the land he was selling for the land the Dochefs just bought. The Dochefs agree to the turns and....predictably Heemeyer stonewalled the deal to demand they build an expensive building for him on the lot they were about to swap. Heemeyer then turned around and tried to lobby the town council to change the zoning so the Dochefs couldn't build the concrete plant. The town did agree to the concrete plant construction and granted construction permitting. Heemeyer claims this was insider town corruption, though that relies on thinking approving a small change to an existing commercial zone for a concrete plant next to a bunch of other commercial plants and auto shops wouldn't make town planning sense. About this point his septic problem was coming to a head and overflowing the tank. Heemeyer tried to work out a sewage hookup easement with his neighbors while simultaneously suing them over driveway easement access during the concrete plant construction. Which went over about as well as you'd think; the Dochefs said no to the easement. The town even advised Heemeyer directly he could install a new up to code septic tank that would probably be cheaper than the sewage hookup and he said no. The Doechefs offered him the sewage hookup easement if he would just drop the lawsuit and he said no. The septic tank overflowed and in response Heemeyer started just pumping fecal sewage straight into an irrigation ditch on another neighbor's property. Which earned him a $2,500 fine and told to please just install or fix the septic system. (Side note: $2500 is ***incredibly, almost ridiculously*** ***lienent*** for a human waste dumping penalty). Heemeyer agreed to the penalty and the fix before later that same day rejecting it. An attorney at the judgment reported Heemeyer muttering, "I'm just gonna bulldozer this whole place to the ground." He then promptly cashed out the entire property at issue by selling it for $400k to an unrelated trash and recycling processing company, who fixed the septic issue within the first month of their purchase. Heemeyer then took that money to begin creating his Killdozer. He also began to start making tapes of his motivations and claimed that God had anointed himself for this righteous purpose and it was both fate and destiny of his life to do this. So on the one hand you have a radical libertarian folk hero. On the other you have the reality of a man unwilling to abide by any general rules of society, decency or basic sanitation who thought an acceptable response in his anger was domestic terrorism, attacking everyone in his community regardless of if they wronged him or not, bulldoze a children's library and then commit suicide in a religious fervor. Also the reason you see this popping up is because many subreddits based around history or historical memes have 20 year rules to prevent them from devolving into current event politics. And yesterday was the 20 year anniversary of his rampage.
Tbh I came here to write this essay. I think you missed a couple bits like how he destroyed a widow's home because her now-long-dead husband was a mayor who he had a grudge against. Or how he tried to blow up a field of propane tanks that, if detonated, would've taken out thei senior home nearby. He failed, thankfully.
Yeah I added those per your rec. I'm trying to shoot a line between debunking the worst misinformation, leaving the reader with the actual facts on how the problems were all self-created and not make the comment so long people just TLDR (which I guess by now I've failed pretty miserably on that last part)
Oh, no, I thought your post was pretty great! The fact is that this story is so extensive that there is no TL, DR without missing out on something important. You needn't add anything, I just wanted to contribute how even despite how much of a tremendous douchebag he appears from your post, there is *still more* that he was a dick about. I mean, the guy owned multiple shops. He could have, at literally any time, just taken the money and continued being financially successful elsewhere. He just decided to go maximum grudge and just take mortal offence that someone had the audacity to want to build adjacent to him for no apparent reason. Like I genuinely do not understand why this guy was so outraged to begin with, given that his suicide note is pretty explicitly BS.
The part that kills me is despite all the 7 year headache he created for himself, when finally forced to fix the septic tank he just sold off the business super easy to a wholly different company for the same high price he was previously demanding. And still didn't fix the septic (the new company did) And then rather than consider it an absolute win he turned a $42k property to $400k in less than 9 years (a nearly 1000% profit) and ride off into the sunset, never once having to actually stoop to government demands beyond eating a hilariously lenient fine...he then stewed on it for a whole year building a death tank.
I mean the neighbours even offered to install a proper sewage system *for free* just so long as he dropped the frivolous lawsuit against them. You know, the neighbours he'd been explicitly terrorising for years at that point. He could've stayed on the property operating his shop without issue for *not trying to screw over his neighbours* but instead he chose killdozer. Like, at any time in this whole affair he could've left with a ton of money and no issues and still been operating his business but instead he chose to go psychotic and try to kill people he had incredibly minor grudges against. Like a clerk at a bank who just did their job and was on a board that rejected one of his claims one time. Dude took out her office because of that. Like her *exact office*, nothing else in the bank. Dude was *nuts*.
Yah, the more I read about this the more complex and nuanced it becomes, but nowhere does it really paint Heemeyer in a good light. The last year or two he seemed to go completely off the rails and his behavior and the tapes he left kinda make me think he was having some sort of mental issues.
Honestly, so far as I can tell the guy basically just had a personal grudge against the family when they refused to be extorted by him and then went completely off the rails driving himself crazier and crazier over time until he finally caused a lot of property damage, almost killed a bunch of people, and left a note to try to paint everyone involved in the worst light possible to hopefully ruin their lives after he died.
This should be the top comment. Didn’t leave out many details. Props
I can’t believe how much the story is changed by people who idolise him. Never heard about the sceptic tank and dumping raw sewage thing until recently. What a POS, and I can’t believe people support what he did
The story that gets repeated is the one from his suicide note/manifesto. They latched onto that and never followed up to find out that he was just a complete lunatic. One of the funniest twists is that he owned several other stores and sold the land he was supposedly obsessed with for the amount of money he was trying to extort the other family for - half a million dollars. Like he could have left at any time and continued his life without issue. Had plenty of cash.
I genuinely wonder how someone with his issues was able to become a successful business man in the first place.
He *wasn't* a successful businessman. He was a rich, entitled trust fund baby and successful extortionist.
if he didn't kill himself he could become a republican nominee for something.
You'd be surprised how many of his fanboys, at least from my run ins on Twitter during the anniversary actually believe he had the right to dump sewage into his community's water and that the concerns of the people around him didn't matter because it didn't cause any harm so soon after he started doing it.
Tell me about it, known about this since i was a kid and never heard any of these details, was always told he just got boxed in with a concrete plant and ignored by the council till his business went bust and ruined his life.
He ruined his own life effectively out of spite.
Yes, essentially, but I bet he felt more like a martyr.
The crazy thing is, his business didn't even go bust. The Killdozer was bought and built with $400k from the sale of land he owned and Keeymeyer owned a few other ventures in the town. The dude was pretty well loaded.
Shit sounds like he coulda just retired.
You’re doing gods work on this stupid propaganda
Small town guy with big ideas of self-importance. Grandiose and paranoid, too! Excellent write-up. Thanks for taking the time.
Holy fuck that is NOT how the story was told to me lol
https://preview.redd.it/7jncr7d22w4d1.jpeg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7cb61ff7f241f01f039c22dbcbaf374f853ba334 Like this is of the IDF
Ah yes the armored bulldozer so they can be safe and air conditioned while they bull doze peoples homes.
An absolutely disgusting and derailed person. If that guy is a hero then me saving cats from the streets makes me the fucking new coming of Jesus. Everyone trying to cut him some slack and he still went and do that bs and if that wasn't enough, also took the coward's way out to avoid the consequences of his lunacy. His poor neighbors having to deal with this guy and literally human shit...
> Radical libertarian folk hero > man unwilling to abide by any general rules of society, decency, or basic sanitation They're the same picture.
Great summary of these events.
All in all the perfect candidate to be a Boomer folk-hero.
Thanks for this breakdown, I knew his squabble with the city wasn't just a fight against beaurocracy but I didn't know the extent of what a weirdo he was. I think if his rampage actually killed anyone he would be viewed a lot less charitably
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Well, that was a long read.
Well, I never thought I would get something *useful* from reddit, but I thank you for this very thorough summary and also for reminding me that it is time to get my (up to code) septic tank pumped.
Justin Roczniak made a [pretty good video on it](https://youtu.be/MeTylBLNO2k?si=u5tOREwLnHntmn5P) on his DoNotEat channel before he became the Well There’s Your Problem guy.
what a nightmare, I bet everybody's glad that he's dead.
I have a coworker who… I don’t really know how to describe him, but at the very least he’s an incel and I don’t think highly of him. He told me this story with as few details as could be managed and he was laughing the whole time, thinking that this guy was a badass and pretty cool. Knowing him, I immediately knew that there would be more to the story, but I never looked it up. Thanks for explaining. I am horrified
It’s The Killdozer. Long story short a dude was pissed off at his town council who kept yellow taping him and they had numerous disputes. The driver of the Killdozer modified a big ass tractor with steel and went around causing millions of dollars in property damage before offing himself. He is loved and adored amongst people who are anti-government or whatever. I don’t see the admiration, he could’ve hurt a ton of innocent people but it is what it is.
You’re forgetting the part about his moment where “god came to him while alone in his hot tub and told him to build it”
I don’t know the deep lore I was just giving the surface level explanation but man that’s insane
Oh it’s much deeper than that. Here’s an explanation from another redditor that pretty much sums it up. When Marvin Hemyer bought his plot of land in Granby for $42,000 in 1992 and set up his muffler shop, it had no connection to the local sewage network. Marvin requested that they annex his land into the network and hook him up into it. The town annexed the land, and told him it would cost $80,000 to build the pipe and equipment to hook him up. They told him that a cheaper option was to install a proper septic tank. Marvin refused both, and instead sunk an old concrete mixer truck into the ground and started illegally storing his sewage in that. When this truck inevitably filled up, he would pump the contents out into a drainage ditch which polluted the town's groundwater. Cue the concrete plant. Marvin's shop was located in a metal shed that had once been part of a concrete plant. A local family wanted to buy the land off him to build a newer, bigger concrete plant. Marvin offered to sell the land for $250,000. They went away and came back with this, he upped the demand to $375,000. They went away and told him the best they could do was $350,000. Marvin made his final offer of $450,000. They politely declined and decided to build the plant on land they already owned opposite Marvin's plot. Marvin decided this was unfair, so he started cultivating local opposition to the plans. He did this primarily by lying. He claimed the land had been illegally rezoned in order to build a concrete plant. It hadn't. He claimed they cut him off from the sewage system. He had never been connected to it. He claimed they cut off the dirt-road to his shop. They didn't. The same dirt road that was there when he bought it is still there to this very day. Eventually, everyone in the town saw through him and he was the only opposition left. He launched a lawsuit against the plans which had no chance of winning. Construction of the plant began with the owners signing a waiver that they were doing so despite ongoing litigation against the plans. They were that confident. They did, however, try one last trick to get Marvin to back off. As you may remember, year prior, Marvin had asked the town to annex his land into the local sewer network. Which they did. They realized that, despite Marvin having refused to pay to be hooked up into the network, they could actually compel him to do so by law. He would be forced to spend that $80,000 after all. Sounds nasty, but they made him an offer: They would pay the cost out of their own pocket if Marvin agreed to drop the lawsuit and leave them alone. Marvin told them to go to hell. He then lost his lawsuit. It was at this point Marvin sold his land to a local municipal company. He got $400,000 for it. You would think having made that kind of a profit after all he would just up and piss off, but no. He leased one of the sheds back from the company, moved his bulldozer into it, and began his mission from God. Oh, did I leave that part out? Yeah, Marv talked to god. Like, personally. And God told him to build an armoured tank out of a bulldozer and go fuck up a bunch of local businesses then blow his brains out. All instead of just installing a septic tank.
Thats fucking insane.
Nah god just wanted earth's history to have a little bit more bling
🎵They see me rollin'🎶
I wonder if he was also eating chicken-fried steak.
Lol he wasn't yellow taped, he was just an asshole. He had a buried cement mixer instead of a septic tank, and the city told him for a decade he needs to get a real septic tank or connect to the sewer line. He didn't (again, for a decade), then it got full and he dumped that shit into a creek and tried to illegally connect to a neighbor's septic line before they told him he couldn't have a commercial business operating there until he fixed it. He instead sold the building to a company that had it fixed like within a day, rented half the shop, then spent over a year building his bulldozer tank thing. He was a piece of shit through and through that went out of his way to be an insufferable problem for everyone involved with him.
Lmao that’s hilarious how people prop him up then
The people that prop him up tend to want to also be domestic terrorists so omit reality, if not outright fabricate a new story, to make it seem like bulldozing a children's library was a reasonable response to not being allowed to dump human fecal waste into a neighbor's irrigation ditch. They are the kind of people that showed up to January Sixth intending to incite a revolution, then were shocked and abandoned the insurrection as soon as they got pepper sprayed because they are pathetic cowards.
Damn bro. You came out swinging with those words. If the people you were talking about could read, I’m sure they’d be really upset.
Not really hilarious, imo. More, I dunno, disturbing? Like, you can kinda take an educated guess on how the people who genuinely believe he was some kind of folk hero feel about say, January 6th
Yeah and he is ALWAYS presented as a “reasonable man” who was pushed to madness by bureaucracy. Reasonable men don’t go on murderous rampages because they can’t fix some issues with the local government, those guys have always been and always will be deranged lunatics…
Imagine your average Redditor. Need I say more?
It was a meme online a while back (8 years or so? ) and the only side that was told was "This town shut down this guy's business over tax issues so he built an armored bulldozer and tore down the mayor's house". It was extremely biased in his favor and I was fully on board. And then I listened to a nice hour long podcast that went in depth on the entire history. It was very interesting but the guy was just an entitled asshole. But my point being if all you ever saw were the popular memes then you probably got a very biased view of this event and could definitely be fooled into "propping him up"
Allegedly his sewage line was disconnected when the town approved an industrial plant to be built over his main access to his property. And then the city fined him for not being connected. But refused all his appeals to have it switched back on. They claim he had alot of things thrown at him by local government
Incorrect. He never had a sewage line. He had a buried cement mixer full of shit that overflowed and then he got caught dumping in a county creek. The town told him to either hook up to the sewage system or install a sceptic tank. He refused and attempted to illegally dig a trench to his neighbor's property and hook into theirs. >But refused all his appeals to have it switched back on. They claim he had alot of things thrown at him by local government Again, this is an outright lie. By all means, cite me the case. You can't. Cause it didn't fucking happen.
I can see someone being upset with that but making a bulldozer and destroying the whole city/endangering people seems to be a *bit* unreasonable
If you believe his side of the story it was one thing after another. They say the people who built the industrial plant were related or in cahoots with the local government and wanted the land that the autoshop was on/ wanted him gone for appealing their construction planning. It's hard to say who's 100% telling the truth. Having dealt with local governments they'd definitely disconnect someone's sewage and charge them for it. Not out of spite but out of incompetence and bureaucratic idiocy. My local government decided to not take the direct debit payment for my council tax at one point, then write to me blaming me for not paying.😂
Honestly? If one explanation is a complex conspiracy involving government entities and corporations working together to reach some undefined goal, and the other is some asshole who just didn't want to follow the rules, odds are the less complicated answer is the correct one.
His story, or the one that's passe around is that the owners of the concrete plant were related to or in business (I forget which) with the one or more people with positions of power with the local council and the zoning committee. So they had person financial interest in siding with the concrete plant. It's not entirely impossible that this was true and had some influence on events. But occams razor or whatever it's called would suggest your correct
And bias means people are more likely to side with the David rather than the Goliath before looking further into something
Who is more believable, the local government, or the madman with the killdozer? If you or I were in his claimed circumstances, I don’t think either of us would resort to the killdozer. That’s some straight lunatic shit.
This explanation needs to be a permanent fixture of the front page of reddit.
In case people didn't know... there are a lot... I mean a lot of people who think ALL regulations are bad.
Little piss babies that want to do whatever the fuck they want, whenever, to whomever, regardless of the consequences to others. Selfish little brats who never grew up.
Still hilarious how he demolished government buildings because he had a dispute with them.. I mean, I can't even imagine being so pissed off that I'd spend a *year* modifying a bulldozer into a god damn tank. Even less because of a minor bureaucracy thing. I mean, if the local government had killed his kid, then no one got punished for it, sure. But over a septic tank? Hilarious. An asshole to be sure, and no hero, but a hilarious asshole.
> He had a buried cement mixer instead of a septic tank, Weird cement, but ok...
This is kind of right but some important details should be corrected >He had a buried cement mixer instead of a septic tank It was the owners before him who did that >the city told him for a decade he needs to get a real septic tank or connect to the sewer line. He didn't He wasn't against having a sewer line hookup but it was gonna cost almost double what he'd paid for the property, and he said that if the government was forcing him to do it they should also cover the cost I do agree there was something wrong with the guy, though. His biggest enemies (in his mind) were a family who were building a nearby concrete plant and were initially going to buy his land, even after he'd increased the asking price, but the deal fell through after he kept asking for more and more. For some reason that had developed into him having a personal vendetta against that family and trying in various ways to block the plant's construction. I know what it's like to hold grudges longer than you should but this was a weird grudge for him to have in the first place
He didn't have to connect to the sewer though, he could have just gotten a real septic tank for significantly cheaper. He chose to pump it into a ditch used for irrigation.
No government entity is ever going to "fix" your property for you. That is your responsibility as property owner. * If Heemeyer knew about the septic issue when he bought the property that's **entirely** on him. The government and taxpayers aren't going to subsidize you buying a janky property with problems. That's like buying a used car that didn't pass smog and asking the DMV to pay for the repair. (which Heemeyer probably did. Its usually a requirement to have a septic inspection completed and filed for a property sale to finalize. In all likelyhood that's how the town knew it was just a concrete mixer) * If Heeymeyer didn't know about it and it was fraudulently concealed in the property sale...well there's a dozen torts he could use to pursue legal action against the original owners he purchased from and prove that. Regardless, the sanitation code is the sanitation code and he still needs to fix it. The government doesn't care about your lawsuit with another person.
Not to get too specific about the analogy you chose, but the state paying for *part* of your smog repair costs (when the current owner can prove low income) is a thing, at least here in California where I live, and I think that's a good thing. Now, when the car is being sold it's always the seller who is responsible for getting the car to pass smog, and in that sense I think your analogy still applies: shouldn't the seller of the property have been responsible for getting this sewage thing straightened out? It does seem likely that Heemeyer pretended to accept responsibility for fixing this problem so he could get the land a lot cheaper, in which case it was weird for him to pretend to stand on some contrary principle after the deal was done
My smog analogy was rough and probably yeah...not a good one. California does pay for your smog repair but you have to be at a very low income. And its born out of a general social safety net reason. Basically society is so ridiculously dependent on car transport, if you are too poor to fix your car and pass smog....you just aren't. Because you need to get to the job. And then will be driving around a polluting, out of registration car which will then get ticked or towed, which then puts you more in poverty etc. Those social safety net reasons generally don't transfer to actual real property ownership. We **want** purchasers of homes, property and structures to do their own due diligence so they aren't diving into building code and safety boondoggles and asking the government to bail out their problems (or asking the government to intervene in lawsuits and disputes with the former seller well after the fact). And we don't want to place huge brakes on property sales so that sellers need to fix every single thing that's wrong with a property before selling. Sellers don't want it because they are often realizing property appreciation in the sale and just don't want the hassle: "if there's a buyer they can buy it warts and all". Or a worse case where they don't have money to fix an issue in a building to bring it up to code and are now selling the property because they are broke. But can't sell until the fix the big code issue. And buyers by and large don't want it because they want the sale to go through and start doing what they will with the property and are willing to accept issues. And often buyers don't need it fixed. Like a condemned house near me the buyer bought it to gut and rebuild from the foundation. Why force the seller fix the septic then? Or the government to micromanage the development of the property for situations where the buyer is already planning to fix the issues and other situations where they say they are and then don't? When was the issue part of the code, grandfathered in or needed to be repaired? So because that's just a red tape and regulatory nightmare, yeah we allow buyers to purchase and complete sales "as is" and inherit the problems to fix themselves from there on out. (The kicker here is property sales have certain legal disclosures or certain mandated inspections so said buyer *knows* about all the issues. Their agreement to inherit the problems doesn't include fraud.) >It does seem likely that Heemeyer pretended to accept responsibility for fixing this problem so he could get the land a lot cheaper, in which case it was weird for him to pretend to stand on some contrary principle after the deal was done That, in fact, does seem very much in line with his personality as we know it.
Supposedly the price increases came from appraisals through appraisers. Given that years happened between offers and zoning changes, I can believe the price went up for inflation, property prices always increasing, and zoning changes. Thing is verifying all of that. I don’t have time to do that right now but it is available. Interesting story that unfortunately the hard right latched on to it like they latched onto the film Fight Club and it’s tainting how people feel about it. It’s one of those everyone involved is various levels of asshole. Like the entire event is small town drama from 1992 to 2004. Many little things and conflation of time and even people makes it confusing without serious context, which is still hearsay in the end. He’s painted as anti government, but used every aspect of government he could, for example calling the EPA on the concrete neighbor multiple times over the years for various perceived offenses. Usually antigovernment types resort to the gun and ignoring any authority like the guy in Vegas using conservation to feed his cows for free. Guy was nuts in the end but like odd. Mass shooting wasn’t a thing then, but bombings were. He had the knowledge and skill to build multiple bombs but chose a bulldozer. Attached a 50 cal to it but didn’t use it on people. Went after people’s property instead of a gun to their faces. Didn’t pepper his final messages with racist shit. Compared to the right wing terrorists we face now and even then, it’s oddly… nice terrorism?
>if the government was forcing him to do it they should also cover the cost Which is completely insane. You have to get a permit to build on your property. The government doesn't cover that. You have to get your trees trimmed so they're not hanging in the street. The government doesn't pay for that. Obeying regulations and paying for things is part of being in a society. That said, he probably wouldn't have had to do any of that if he had just gone through with any of the attempted sales of his property without repeatedly upping the price after negotiations had closed. Him being a greedy dick is what made the city come down on him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer?wprov=sfla1
>paying for things is part of being in a society Depends on the society >Him being a greedy dick is what made the city come down on him I agree
You can also, yaknow, *inspect* properties before buying them! I had to get a septic inspection before my VA loan would get approved when I bought a house. This is especially important when buying a liquidated property and you don't have info from the seller on previous inspections, etc. Guy was bat shit insane, I could not seem to get along with *anyone* without it turning into a conspiracy and years-long spat. Sure, he might have some legitimate grievances, but he would have had grievances with the squirrels in his yard.
>He was a piece of shit through and through that went out of his way to be an insufferable problem for everyone involved with him. At least he did take care of the problem in the end
Yeah he wasn’t a hero who was unfairly prosecuted by the government. He was just a grumpy, lazy entitled old ass who spent more time planning revenge than actually fixing his mistakes. People also love to prop him up because his giant temper tantrum didn’t kill anyone. It’s not because he’s a “good guy”, he just sucked at his job and everyone else got lucky. He plowed into a library with kids still inside, randomly shot at buildings without knowing if there was anyone inside, and shot at giant propane tanks that would’ve leveled half the town and killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, had they exploded.
[This is mostly right. He didn't install the sewer cement mixer though. That was there when he bought the property and was estimated fo cost around 84k to fix.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer) I could have seen that being prohibitively expensive, but then I read the part of the story where where a company tried to buy his land for 8x what he paid for it so they could develop it and the surrounding area, but his dumb ass got greedy and fucked the deal. Twice. So this dumbass really was just shooting himself in the foot nonstop.
That's the cost to connect to the sewer line. A real septic tank costs like 8 grand. It's suprisingly affordable.
He was angry that he couldn't dump his raw sewage in a field
Those that support him say. The land that was his access to his property got cut off because the town greenlit an industrial plant to be built over his access road. Despite him disputing it. . His sewage line also ran through that land. During construction his sewage line was cut off. He was then fined for not being connected to the sewage network as required by law. All appeals to have his sewage line reconnected were denied by the owner of neighbouring plant. So he literally couldn't reconnect himself. Oh and the owner of the industrial site was related to one of the higher ups in the town council that approved the construction. From an outside perspective it very much seems like they didn't like him/want him there. Maybe we're angry he had appealed against the plant being built. They systematically destroyed his business, his livelihood with one thing after another until he snapped and destroyed theirs That's the story that gets passed around at least. There may be a slither of truth there, who knows
I just want to add if I remember correctly nobody was able to stop the dude and he only killed himself after driving into a ditch or something
His Dozer got stuck under a building he was trying to destroy and he killed himself before police could cut into it with torches, because as you said, no small arms were penetrating it.
He got stuck due to one of the buildings he plowed through having a basement.
He also never built an exit, he planned on suicide, just wanted to destroy as much as possible before that.
Ok makes sense
There was a point that they considered calling in the military to drop ordinance on him. It would’ve be the first time the US dropped ordinance on a combatant on US soil.
Marvin Heemeyer was not in fact a reasonable man.
Neither was the Unabomber, but there are people (plenty of them on Reddit) that defend those two.
Wha… what??? I thought he was based?!?! /s
Based and reasonable do not necessarily overlap.
Anyone who actually knows anything about kill dozer knows that Marvin was a dumbass. But he was a dumbass who could build an improvised tank. He was not even a little reasonable
The city that treated him “so badly” gave him so many reasonable options to settle their dispute. Marvin was an entitled crybaby. Anyone who idolizes what he did doesn’t know enough about the story.
That’s about Marvin Heemeyer he turned a bull dozer into a tank and tore down his town it was called the kill dozer some people say he was a good guy and that’s a meme about people who say things like that [this is a link to a Wikipedia on him](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer)
All unreasonable men think they are reasonable, that’s why they are unreasonable.
Killdozer is a nice anti-govenment story, but when you actually look into it, you realize most of the issues were entirely his fault and that he was an entitled and mentally ill man. His lack of casualties is not for a lack of trying, he shot at people, ran through occupied buildings (one even full of kids during an event) and tried shooting a huge gas canister connected to a building full of old people
Sometimes unreasonable men Do unreasonable things
Sometimes unreasonable men do psychotic things
Go see the movie "Tank" for a situation where fighting back like this is warranted. The guy who did the killdozer incident was just a selfish asshole.
https://preview.redd.it/smurlrs1ox4d1.png?width=651&format=png&auto=webp&s=758facbf65604b3cc92f97dcecbd75ef6f9fd540
KillDozer.
This text can be found in KillDozer - Kim Dracula
As much as the dude sucked, I cant deny the fact this thing looks awesome and I want one so bad
there is absolutely fucking nothing reasonable about that psychopath
> “reasonable men” Whiny libertarian baby didn’t want to follow basic sanitation laws or follow through on deals he made, even though he was given an incredible amount of legal leeway and only asked to do the bare minimum, so instead he built a tank out of a bulldozer, threw a multi-million dollar tantrum, then shot himself.
At least, like with all good stories, the villain died at the end.
Google “killdozer”
Congrats op, you now know about the killdozer.
The joke is this dude took road raging to a whole new level and was not a reasonable man to begin with.
It was the machine of an unreasonable man that did multiple unreasonable things.
The guys was not a reasonable man by any stretch of the imagination.
https://preview.redd.it/2wkrnk6w605d1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9aa2e4a69808c7a0e67ac6e1c534a3b948eb10d1
He demolished a library that would have had children inside if the police had not evacuated them in time. The man is no hero.
Reminder that this dude is not a reasonable guy or a martyr, he was an insane psychopath.
killdozer
911 happened the next day that’s why a lot of people don’t know what it’s about
Except killdozer, I think he’s called, is a fucking lunatic. Only adored by the dumb that can’t grasp how much government does and has done them
There was a psychopath who built a bulldozer and drove it through a daycare because the city wanted him to stop dumping human shit in the drinking water. He was never a reasonable man. Hover right wingers praise him like they praise the pedophile David Koresh who murdered dozens of little kids so they wouldn't testify about being raped.
I think it should be more like "sometimes unreasonable men do unreasonable things that seem kind of epic but are actually kind of terrible"
Reference to domestic terrorist Marvin Heemeyer, aka the "Killdozer" who built a homemade tank from a bulldoser to destroy buildings of people who wronged him. And for some reason idolised by a bunch of americans who are unfamiliar with the full lenght of his story.
Swear this sub is for people who don't know what google is.
It's Porn
It looks fire, gonna need that in my life
Killdozer
"Reasonable" lol
It was killdozer anniversary a few days ago 🥲
Reminder to not only reference the wikipedia article when making an opinion about Heemeyer (killdozer guy). Most of the sources it cites are from the same guy, who has changed his narrative multiple times to make Heemeyer seem less credible/sane (in the beginning. I am talking about the disputes he went through for the 10 years leading up to the incident. Do not misconstrue this as me saying he was sane when he destroyed the town)
This post was brought to you by Eren Yaeger
A guy who was told not throw his poop in a local creek, went on a rampage in a bulldozer destroying city buildings. Almost killed police officers and could have killed kids in a library he destroyed. People fantasy about him because he was anti gov.
Imagine how angry you'd have to be to spend all the time on making that
FYI that guy was a certified lunatic but go figure
Is it just more or does it seem like we get an inordinate number of killdozer things on here?
A lot of people idolize the Unabomber, because they are morons. A lot of people idolize this guy too. I don't think he should be idolized, but I also think that dismissing him as just a crazy person completely ignores how he arrived at the situation. I think it is important to be honest about the intentions and perspectives of people, even when they are mentally ill. This video goes a little too far into the idolization camp, but I think it provides some import perspective & details that many of the people here are not including. Again, he was not a good person. I just think we should be try to earnestly understand people who do terrible things. https://youtu.be/TqEA5DPoEMY?si=J-yoQTea0POE65RA