While SWAT officials indicated the likelihood that they would have to engage Winters in a firefight was high, friends and family suggested otherwise, saying that Winters may have had views different from most people but insisting that he is a “good guy” who wouldn’t hurt others unless it was necessary to do so in self defense.
Police went so far as to suggest that Winters had essentially gone off the reservation and that he didn’t care whether he lived or died, and that he was “plotting” a confrontation with the federal government.
But the claims and allegations may have been blown way out of proportion. After police obtained a warrant to search Winters’ home based on information obtained from a confidential informant they were probably surprised that not only did Winters have no explosive booby troops set up all over his property as had been claimed, he was also far short of having possession of the fifty high-powered rifles that police said he had been stockpiling.
Federal agents this week searched the Florida home of a ‘doomsday prepper’ they alleged had stockpiled over 50 high-powered assault rifles and several explosive devices buried around his property as ‘booby traps’.
However the warrant showed up little more than barrels of food.
…
But in federal court on Wednesday, Winters’ defense attorney, Ellis Faught, said the confidential informant’s estimates were wide of the mark.
The informant had bought four so-called destructive devices from Winters, but they were not buried as booby traps.
Five guns were found locked in a safe, according to 10 News.
…
‘None of this was there,’ Fraught told the court, the station reported.
‘And it’s my understanding that no guns were dug up.
‘It was alleged by the government that there were 50 to 60 guns and I’m only aware of five of them that were found and they were found in his house in a safe.’
Source: Daily Mail
While Martin Winters’ political ideology and interests may differ from those of most Americans, the government had tried him in a public court before any evidence had been presented or found. Some of his neighbors were terrified of this “crazy” individual after they had been told of his alleged crimes, and the mainstream media was happy to oblige the narrative that this right-wing survivalist extremist was a danger to himself and society.
The FBI issued the following photo to its media surrogates during the manhunt in an effort to depict Winters as a survivalist who had gone off the deep end:
His daughters, however, say that Winters is not violent at all and that he is a loving father and grandfather.
“I think they took the whole context of him being prepared and twisted it,” says his daughter Tracy.
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