Will Gun-Toting Vigilante Get the Justice He Deserves?

Cochise County, Ariz. -- Crouching low, Ronald Morales and his 11-year-old daughter moved quietly and quickly, hoping to escape detection. Stealth was vital as they crept around the boulders and scrub brush that clutter the Sonora desert just north of the Mexican border.

It was Oct. 30, 2004. Morales, a 37-year-old Department of Defense employee, was deer hunting with his father, Arturo, and three little girls: his daughter, Vanese, who was then 11, her little sister Angelique, 9, and Emma English, a friend who was also 11. All were Mexican-Americans -- U.S. citizens since birth.

The way Ron Morales tells the story, around 4 p.m. he and his eldest daughter left the rest of the party at his truck to stalk a buck they had spotted.

Vanese had the deer in her crosshairs when the sound of a distant ruckus in the direction of the truck alarmed her father. Morales took the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, and they hurried back.

They arrived to find another truck parked near their own. Next to it, Morales says, an angry white man with a pistol strapped to his side paced back and forth, shouting obscenities. "You're fucking trespassing! You guys need to get the fuck out of here!"

"I have a hunter's permit, I have a map," Morales protested as he walked to his vehicle, set down his rifle, grabbed a Bureau of Land Management map, and tried to reason with the man.

Morales, a Navy veteran, says he addressed him as "sir" and asked his name. The man reached in the cab of his truck, yanked out an AR-15 assault rifle, and gave Morales his answer.

"My fucking name is Roger Barnett! If you don't get off my property, I'm gonna shoot you and shoot you and shoot you!"

Then, Morales says, Barnett chambered a round and pointed his weapon at Morales' chest.

The clash

Two years later, Ron Morales and Roger Barnett met again, two men sitting stoically at opposite ends of Judge James Conlogue's stark courtroom in Cochise County, which ends at the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona. Outside, November winds whipped the streets with impunity.

It was to be a momentous confrontation, probably the most dramatic yet seen between anti-immigration hard-liners and those who oppose them. Closely watched by reporters and other observers from near and far, the clash would unfold at ground zero of the increasingly virulent battle over illegal immigration.

More people trudge across this ruggedly beautiful part of Sonoran Desert, which stretches from Mexico north into Arizona, than any other section of the 2,000-mile-long border. It is here that Roger Barnett brought national attention to the immigration situation with his loud and public complaints about illegal migrants who trespass on his sprawling ranch. It is also here that Barnett, a man who boasts of having personally apprehended 12,000 border-crossers, effectively sired the entire citizen's border patrol movement -- a movement once characterized as "vigilante" by President Bush, a Texan intimately familiar with the borderlands.

A rancher since 1996, Barnett's a swaggering, silver-haired, ruddy-faced product of the desert sun whose militant reputation -- like the vigilante movement he inspired -- stretches far beyond Cochise County.

"Humans, the greatest prey on earth," Roger Barnett told a reporter from London's Independent in May of 2000, six months after he was photographed for Time magazine brandishing an M-16 -- and a full 16 months before Chris Simcox would leave his California kindergarten classroom to form the Arizona militia that would eventually become the Minutemen, now the best-known citizen group to carry weapons to the border in an effort to halt illegal immigration.

"A vigilante goes out, rounds up people, holds a trial and executes them. I haven't done that yet," Barnett told USA Today that same year. "But bloodshed could happen."