At 2:00 PM on Sunday, June 29, I was sitting at the 4th Street stoplight in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, watching what looked like every police car in the region come screaming past me. I was on my way to Fred Meyer for groceries, thinking there must have been a horrible accident. The sirens were so thick you could feel them in your chest. I turned off 4th to avoid the jam and headed to Government Way, parked at Fred Meyer, and looked up. Canfield Mountain was on fire! If you live here, you know that mountain isn’t just scenery. It’s where people hike, ride bikes, take their kids to explore nature... It’s where you go to breathe.
Twenty minutes later, my phone rang. “Mom,” my son said, “there’s an active shooter in the neighborhood.” Those words didn’t even compute in my brain. Active shooter? In Coeur d’Alene? It sounded like something from a bad dream, like a headline you’d see about someplace else, never here. My son lives across town—he’d read it on the North Idaho News Facebook page—and he told me all the roads to get home were blocked. I remember just standing there in the Fred Meyer parking lot gripping my phone, feeling my heart slam into my ribs so hard it was all I could hear. For a second, I honestly couldn’t process what he was saying. Active shooter—residents ordered to shelter in place—firefighters ambushed on Canfield Mountain. What the hell was happening? I called my husband, who was at home, and got no answer. I called three of my closest neighbors—no answer. That was the moment the air felt like it left my body. I was quite literally in shock, standing there with my groceries, trying to convince myself I wasn’t trapped in some surreal nightmare. A madman was up there on the mountain I’d looked at every day for years, gunning down first responders. It didn’t feel real. It felt like the world had cracked open and poured something unspeakable into our quiet town.
When I finally got home, Cherry Hill Park, not far from the shooter and walking distance from my house—the same place families walk their dogs, where kids laugh on the playground, where we all pretend the world can’t come crashing in—was transformed into a staging battlefield. Tactical units were everywhere. Fire engines lined the road. My heart was still thundering, refusing to settle down. A short bike ride from my front door, two firefighters were already dead. This was Coeur d’Alene—safe, predictable, familiar—and suddenly it felt like the center of something that didn’t have a name yet.
And before any facts were confirmed—before law enforcement even held a proper press conference—the online rumor mill was already grinding out its usual garbage. Within hours, Social Media was lighting up with all the lazy, knee-jerk assumptions--He must be a white supremacist. He must be an anti-government militia nut. Remember the Aryan Nation, Ruby Ridge... North Idaho equals RACISTS! He must be everything they needed him to be to fit whatever pet narrative they were peddling. Not a single one of these claims came attached to an official record, a court filing, a statement from the sheriff, or even a credible source willing to put their name on it. But that didn’t stop blue-check “experts” and out-of-town reporters from spewing it all over social media like they’d cracked the case from their sofas.
Let’s get something straight: the only facts that have been documented are that Wess Roley was identified by law enforcement as the suspect. He allegedly set a fire on Canfield Mountain to lure first responders and then ambushed them with gunfire. He was found dead at the scene. Two firefighters were killed, and one was injured. There is no confirmed mugshot. There is no verified motive. There is no record, at this time, proving any ideological affiliation. Everything else is conjecture piled on top of tragedy. And because this is North Idaho, the media reflex kicked in immediately. Richard Butler’s name was dragged back into headlines as if his moldy legend somehow explains every violent act that occurs in this region. It never fails—when anything happens in Coeur d’Alene, the national peanut gallery dusts off the same script: White supremacist. Militia extremist. The Great White Terror of North Idaho. Let me remind you of some inconvenient history. Richard Butler didn’t even come from Idaho—he slithered up here from California, parked his compound in Kootenai County, and spent years trying to build a movement of angry, gullible men. The people who actually live here despised him. They refused to show up to his ridiculous parades down Sherman Avenue. They ignored him so completely that he died broke and irrelevant. But because Butler’s sorry little circus tent once had an address here, national reporters can’t resist resurrecting him every time a headline carries the words North Idaho. Every! Single! TIME!
The truth is simpler and less satisfying to people who profit off fear. This was a violent ambush that took the lives of two public servants, scarred a community, and left a mountain smoldering. We don’t know why it happened yet. We don’t know who Wess Roley really was. And until documented evidence emerges, every claim about his motives and his past is just static. But static sells. It fuels the same recycled paranoia that keeps the national press convinced we’re all one bad day away from donning militia gear and stockpiling canned food in a basement. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left trying to hold our families together and sort out what’s real. I was there when this unfolded. I saw the smoke rising over Canfield Mountain. I watched law enforcement carve a path through town. I stood in a parking lot with my heart about to explode because nobody answered the phone and nobody could tell me this wasn’t the end of something familiar and safe. And I’m not going to let people who’ve never set foot in Coeur d’Alene hijack this story to feed their narratives. When the records come out—when the court filings, the coroner’s reports, and the official statements hit daylight—we’ll know what happened. Until then, you can keep your recycled white supremacist headlines. The people who actually live here have earned the right to wait for the truth.
