20 years after a bulldozer rampage in a small Colorado town, the legacy of the “killdozer” lives on

GRANBY, Colo. — Few physical reminders remain in this unassuming mountain town 20 years after a rampage by an aggrieved muffler shop owner attracted worldwide attention.

Marvin Heemeyer — convinced he’d been wronged by town leaders — plotted for more than a year, crafting and installing a 40,000-pound steel-and-concrete enclosure atop a bulldozer. He then smashed his makeshift tank into 13 buildings in a one-man act of revenge and retribution.

Tread marks are still engraved in the pavement in front of the Sky-Hi News building, which Heemeyer collapsed with his 85-ton armored Komatsu bulldozer on June 4, 2004, during a 2 1/4-hour slog from one end of town to the other. He and his dozer damaged or toppled Granby’s town hall, an electric utility building and a concrete plant as police fired high-caliber rounds repeatedly — but to no effect — at the slow-rolling behemoth.

At Thompson & Sons Excavating, what is likely the only remaining intact piece of Heemeyer’s fearsome machine — a trunnion that secured the blade to the dozer — now serves as a peculiarly heavy bookend on a shelf in the Thompson brothers’ shop. Back on that day, the chunk of iron fell off the bulldozer as it rammed through the front wall of their home.

Heemeyer, 52, fatally shot himself in the head after part of his bulldozer fell through the floor of a hardware store he was demolishing. His body wasn’t retrieved until the next day, when SWAT teams used explosives and a cutting torch to breach the nearly impregnable compartment he had built. He was the only person to die in the rampage.

The Grand County town of 2,100 has largely moved past the destruction wrought by Heemeyer 20 years ago this Tuesday. But the man who caused the damage lives on through music, on merchandise and inside the minds of those who see him as someone pushed to the edge by a heartless government — and forced to take matters into his own hands.

What struck a chord with some, especially those on America’s political fringes, is that the South Dakota native and Air Force veteran was acting out against government leaders who he felt had targeted him with unfair land use and zoning decisions. In some cases, he targeted their family members.

But two decades later, the sheer spectacle that put Granby on the map still befuddles many locals. Granby has made little attempt to commemorate the incident.

“The town made a big mistake scrapping that tractor,” Larry Thompson, the older of the two Thompson brothers, whose father was a former Granby mayor, told The Denver Post recently. “They could have made a killing off that tractor.”

But Casey Farrell, who owned the Gambles hardware store where Heemeyer’s attack on Granby ended, vehemently disagrees with those who think the menacing machine should have been preserved.

“If we had kept that thing around, it was going to be a shrine-type scenario,” he said. “That thing radiated evil.”

Online, a “killdozer” cottage industry thrives, commemorating a man whose well-publicized phrase from notes he left behind — “I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable” — has become a meme encapsulating an anti-government ethos.

Ten dollars at Amazon will get you a sticker of Heemeyer’s dozer with the phrase: “I’d rather be secretly modifying a bulldozer for a year and a half in Granby, CO.” Thirty-five bucks will fetch you a Heemeyer action figure from Straight to Hell Toy Co., which states that its offering is “not an endorsement or celebration of violence of any kind.”

You can even luxuriate with a balsam-and-cedar-scented bar of soap carved into the shape of the bulldozer, armor and all, that’s called “Unreasonable Things.” The product description from the MW Soap Co. states that the scent is “almost like a calm afternoon in a small Colorado town.”

Incident’s appeal lies in its “outlandishness”

But commemorations of Heemeyer’s deed have migrated to darker places on the internet.

On the social media platform Telegram, several chapters of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group, have held him up as a hero. The center’s deputy director for data analytics, Megan Squire, has been tracking extremist organizations’ embrace of Heemeyer and his dozer for years.

She shared a 2023 Telegram post with The Denver Post from last June 4 in which the president of the Indiana Proud Boys declared, “HAPPY KILLDOZER DAY.”

“Today, we celebrate Killdozer Day and Marvin Heemeyer, the last great American folk hero,” the post reads. “A man driven to the brink who chose to fight back against an indifferent system.”

A big part of the Killdozer story’s appeal, Squire said, lies in its pure “outlandishness” and its ability to “provoke folks to stand up to a tyrannical government.”

Four years ago, a man ambushed and killed law enforcement officers in California. He was reported to have been sympathetic to the anti-government Boogaloo movement. Before his arrest, according to the Mercury News in San Jose, he scrawled “I became unreasonable” in blood on the hood of a car before his arrest.

“In 2024, in the internet subculture, a lot of the community is about people plucking out portions of that event to make an anti-government and conspiratorial story,” Squire said.

Patrick Brower, the publisher of the Sky-Hi News newspaper at the time of the attack, says what lights up many people online is an often-romanticized David vs. Goliath rendition of what unfolded in Granby in the years leading up to June 4, 2004.

“I think people see Marv as an anti-hero and cultural hero because he struck out against the government that he thought had wronged him,” he said, adding: “It’s mostly people who don’t know the story.”

Brower, who documented the attack in his 2017 book “Killdozer: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage,” said Heemeyer became increasingly disgruntled by what he perceived as heavy-handedness by officials in town government and the water and sanitation district regarding a lot he bought in Granby in the early 1990s.

Heemeyer, Brower said, wasn’t happy about the cost of having to hook up his muffler shop to the town’s sewer system. A few years later, when a local businessman wanted to build a concrete batch plant next to his muffler shop, Heemeyer went into overdrive in his attempt to stop it.

He hired a lawyer, Brower said, and sued the town over the proposed plant. But he lost in court.

“Tread,” a documentary that first appeared on Netflix in 2019 and is now available on YouTube, incorporated many of Heemeyer’s ruminations and reasonings in his own voice on tapes he recorded before putting his plot into motion. On one audio recording, Heemeyer sounded defeated — but determined to seek vengeance.

“You took advantage of my good nature,” he said. “There is no way to make this right. You picked on the wrong man.”

But Brower, a consulting producer on “Tread,” said the town had simply followed its land-use rules in approving the concrete plant. Heemeyer, he said, was convinced he had been wronged, and there was no going back.

On the tapes, Heemeyer spoke of a peace coming over him when he realized that “God wanted me to do it.” His father died in March 2004, three months before he launched his attack.

The Post contacted Heemeyer’s brother, Ken, for comment on the 20th anniversary but did not hear back.

“He created his own conspiracy”

Heemeyer moved to Grand Lake, which is down the road from Granby, in the fall of 1991. Brower said Heemeyer bought his property for a good price in Granby and the area provided many places for him to pursue his love of snowmobiling. He regularly went out in the company of fellow snowmobiling enthusiasts.

Heemeyer never married or had children, a fact he attributed on his recorded tapes to God’s will.

He spent 18 months collecting the steel for his dozer. He then poured concrete and cut and welded the metal sheets in secret, night after night, in a shed next to his muffler shop.

Heemeyer expressed disbelief that no one ever caught him building the armored bulldozer, including an inspector who came in one day to look over his shop. With his project hidden beneath a tarp just feet away, Heemeyer concluded in one recording: “I wasn’t supposed to get caught.”

“He looked at himself as a vigilante who was ordained by God to avenge the imagined wrongs he had experienced,” said Brower, 68. “He created his own conspiracy and he lived it out.”

George Davis, the owner of Maple Street Builders in Granby, was initially perplexed about how he ended up on Heemeyer’s hit list.

“Prior to all of this, he came across as a good guy,” said Davis, who had hired the welder to fix a couple of mufflers. “He was talented.”

He theorizes that Heemeyer was set off after Davis, who had signed Heemeyer’s first petition against the concrete plant, declined to sign a second one.

“We argued,” Davis said. “He got angry, we had a few words and then he stormed out.”

On June 4, Heemeyer used his Komatsu to push Davis’ one-ton flatbed truck through the front of his business.

“Who in the hell would do that?” Davis said. “To have that much hatred and do something like that … ”

Farrell, the former owner of Gambles hardware, was one of the town council members who approved the concrete plant that Heemeyer so vociferously opposed. He also liked the man well enough.

“He was the greatest welder I’ve ever seen,” Farrell said. “He was a little quirky — but hell, I’m a little quirky.”

But Heemeyer also could have a mean streak, he said. In Farrell’s estimation, Heemeyer got ensnared in what became a self-created grudge match with the town — a place he was convinced was rigged by a good old boys’ network that never accepted him as a true member of the community.

Town leaders, Farrell said, made concessions to Heemeyer to reduce the concrete plant’s impacts on his muffler shop, but they weren’t enough.

“He could not live with the fact that with all the fight he put up, the batch plant got approved,” Farrell said. “He just went nuts.”

However Heemeyer might have justified his actions to himself as worthy, the damage he wrought was real and painful for those he targeted, including Farrell and his wife, Rhonda.

Farrell had to liquidate thousands of dollars’ worth of appliances and tools damaged by Heemeyer at a fire sale a few weeks after the rampage. A quarter of a million dollars of value evaporated from his business. He had to let five employees go.

“I didn’t sleep for two months. I was trying to figure out how to support my family,” Farrell said. “What about my employees? Should we rebuild?”

He doesn’t buy into the admiration for Heemeyer that some people express. On the attack’s fifth anniversary, Farrell said, someone erected a cross and a sign reading “Rest in Peace, Marv” at the site of his former business. As he drove by, he couldn’t contain his anger.

“I got out and kicked it down,” Farrell said.

Rhonda Farrell said the destruction wasn’t limited to what Heemeyer and his dozer did to the Gambles building.

“We were a family, and the loss of that family was devastating,” she said.

“I understand the frustration”

Despite being victims of Heemeyer’s rage, Larry and Gary Thompson said they can appreciate the difficulty of dealing with government rules and directives. Their family has run an excavating business in Granby since 1949.

“I can understand where he was coming from. We deal with it, too,” said Gary Thompson, 64. “We have too much government. He just snapped.”

He quickly added: “I understand the frustration, but that’s not the right way to do it.”

The Thompsons believe they made Heemeyer’s target list because their father, Dick Thompson, was a well-connected Granby mayor for years. And their brother Ron Thompson served on the water and sanitation board that Heemeyer despised. Both men died before Heemeyer carried out his dozer rampage, which destroyed three buildings owned by the Thompsons.

One of those buildings was leased to Xcel Energy, and the incident produced an iconic image of a utility truck folded in half by the ferocity of Heemeyer’s Komatsu. The picture went viral before viral was a thing.

“It looked like Beirut — with helicopters and everything,” Larry Thompson said of the scene that day.

Across the country, the Granby bulldozer attack caught the imagination of a 5-year-old Cody Detwiler. Twenty years later, he is re-creating Heemeyer’s armored dozer, down to the cameras and internal monitors he used to guide himself on his path of destruction through town.

Detwiler is better known as the face of the WhistlinDiesel YouTube channel, where he creatively destroys all manner of vehicles, including vintage and luxury models. The channel has posted videos of the YouTube star buying an abandoned Komatsu D355A bulldozer, the same model as Heemeyer’s, in Montana earlier this year, and transporting it to Tennessee — via Granby.

“It’s so intriguing to us,” Detwiler told The Post in an interview from Nashville. “We can definitely appreciate the work ethic that went into this.”

WhistlinDiesel has more than 7.3 million YouTube subscribers. Detwiler’s Killdozer videos have garnered nearly 20 million views. Despite Heemeyer’s attack now being two decades gone, Detwiler said, it still stirs up fascination — and even sympathy — from his audience.

“This has been a large talking point in the last several years,” said Detwiler, now 25. “With men and blue-collar workers in the Midwest, it seems to resonate a lot. Marv had a voice and a way to stand up to people, whether it was justified or not. (People) can understand why someone could be pushed to that point.”

Music’s extreme metal community has also found common ground with Heemeyer, according to Pat Jarrett, a 41-year-old bass player for the Virginia sludge metal band named — wait for it — Heemeyer.

While Jarrett says he and his bandmates lean to the left on the political spectrum, they understand the alienation and frustration that fueled Heemeyer’s actions 20 years ago.

“Marv Heemeyer is a kind of folk hero in the extreme metal community,” Jarrett said. “Certainly, his rampage was unreasonable, but he was pushed to the point of pushing back. And there’s catharsis in that.

“I understand that feeling of wanting to hole up in a garage and build something I could bulldoze with.”

A Swiss thrash metal band named Xonor has a song called “Killdozer,” as does Canadian doom metal band Dopethrone. North Carolina metal band Lords and Liars released its own “Killdozer” track.

“Focused. Deliberate,” the lyrics go in Lords and Liars’ version. “Nothing will stop him but his equipment. Rage born. Revenge machine. He’s going down a way that’s been never seen.”

“Marv is part of the lore of heavy metal,” Heemeyer’s Jarrett said.

Brower, the journalist and book author, has doubts that Granby will ever fully escape the legacy of Marvin Heemeyer, even if he himself barely did 20 years ago — running out of his newsroom as the ceilings and walls came crashing down.

The internet, in particular, will remain a repository for those who think a 52-year-old welder and muffler repairman did what he had to do.

“He represents a cynicism about government,” Brower said. “And because Marv did what he did in such a fantastic and gargantuan way, it has taken on this hyper-mythological status.”