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nothingman · 7 years

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Anne Helen Petersen/BuzzFeed News

The old schoolhouse in Paradise, Oregon where Cliven Bundy spoke to an audience of hundreds on Saturday evening.

As the sun went down in the tiny town of Paradise, Montana, the road winding up to the old schoolhouse was lined full with trucks, SUVs, and trailers. The overflow parking overflowed. Bumper stickers announced support for Trump, for Infowars, for minding your own business. “Politicians prefer unarmed peasants. Protect the 2nd Amendment,” read one. “THE CONSTITUTION: FRUSTRATING LIBERALS SINCE 1789,” declared another. An SUV with Nevada plates, driven by a man with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, stopped to talk to a man wearing an orange security vest, then pulled forward. “The package has arrived,” the security man said into his radio. “I repeat, the package has arrived.”

“The package” is Cliven Bundy — the Nevada rancher who, earlier this month, was released from prison after a federal judge dismissed all charges against him for participating in an armed standoff at his family’s ranch near Bunkerville over unpaid grazing fees. Over the last decade, Bundy has become the figurehead for a growing movement of “constitutionalists” who believe the federal government has infringed upon states’ rights. In most cases, including Bundy’s, the issue comes down to the use of federally managed land — which makes up over half of all land in the West. Bundy has refused to pay grazing fees to the federal government since 1993, and engaged in a standoff with federal agents over that refusal in 2014. But he was not arrested until 2016, while en route to the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon, led by his son, Ammon.

Before Bundy’s release, he was already a folk hero — his last name had come to signify a bold refusal, a protest of the way the federal government has blasphemed the founding intents of its fathers. But after the judge’s dismissal of all charges — and the revelation that prosecutors had failed to turn over important evidence to defense attorneys and violated Bundy’s due process — he has been positioned as something of an oracle, primed to focus the loose, long-simmering anger into action. The hundreds who showed up in Paradise weren’t just there to hear him speak. They were waiting to be told what to do next.

Anne Helen Petersen/BuzzFeed News

Cliven Bundy poses with a supporter in Paradise, Montana.

Inside the Paradise schoolhouse, the mood was more like a tent revival than a city council meeting. Pocket Constitutions were handed out at the entrance like Bibles. Bundy sat on the stage, joined by his son, Ryan, and five other speakers, including Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. The event was hosted by local resident Roxanne Ryan, whose son, Jake, was arrested at the Malheur standoff, and interspersed with musical breaks (one family sang “The Ballad of the Alamo”) and food offerings (a massive spread of sausage pizza, cookies, bananas, and hot chocolate).

The meeting began with a prayer from Ryan Bundy, who gave thanks to God for the Founding Fathers and for inspiring them: “Father in heaven, we ask thee for thy Holy Spirit to be here,” he prayed. “We ask thee that those who speak will speak with thy tongue.” Small children fidgeted in their seats; babies were taken to a “cry room” in the back.

God was invoked in every speech: for the Bundys and their followers, the Constitution is a divinely ordained document, and heeding what they view as its central tenets, including resisting federal forces, is akin to following the word of God. Malheur protester Shawna Cox told the crowd that the Lord had spoken to her and said that she wasn’t going to jail, and that she should defend herself in court. When Fielder finished her speech, she proclaimed “God bless you, God bless America, God bless the Bundys, God bless the Ryans.”

Ryan Bundy’s 40-minute opening was less speech than sermon, building a logical progression from God giving man dominion over the land to the drafting of the Constitution, from the Constitution to the sovereignty of states. “Is Montana a state?” he asked the crowd. “Are you sure? I’m not so sure. Does it own 100% of its resources? How does that make you feel?”

“Like a colony!” someone in the audience shouted.

(The Bundys and their followers are but the latest iteration of the radical movement known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, which has struggled to gain mainstream traction in part because of practical questions as to feasibility: Opponents argue that there is no way for individual states to effectively or safely manage the millions of acres of federal land that would be returned to them; the massive forest fires, like the ones that scorched Montana this summer, would exhaust the budgets of sparsely populated states within weeks. Public lands advocates, like the dozen or so Backcountry Hunters and Anglers who stood at the back of Saturday’s meetings, believe the Bundys are effectively stealing land that belongs to the public.)

Ryan Bundy periodically quoted passages from the Constitution — some well-known, others esoteric — from memory; he quizzed the audience on other portions and asked them to remember the specific sections from memory. The Constitution is scripture, as holy and righteous as any other biblical text. Bundy’s interpretation of it is solidified by his sacrifice to the cause: as Roxanne Ryan told the audience after Bundy left the microphone, “This man spent two years in prison, and half of that time was in solitary. So think about that.”

Anne Helen Petersen/BuzzFeed News

An elderly beagle wears a LaVoy Finicum button

But religion benefits from martyrs — especially if it wants to convert others to the faith. For Bundy followers, that martyr is LaVoy Finicum, who was shot and killed by federal agents at a roadblock outside the Malheur Federal Wildlife Refuge. LaVoy’s name is emblazoned on shirts, hats, and bumper stickers; an elderly beagle had a LaVoy button pinned to its dog jacket. “It matters how you stand” — a phrase attributed to LaVoy — has become a rallying cry; his image has become one of the most popular memes in “liberty-minded” corners of the internet. Cox’s speech was a play-by-play testimony of what happened the morning of his death: “LaVoy gave his life to defend us,” she said, amid cheers from the crowd. “He made that conscious decision that he needed to stand and protect the Constitution.”

If Saturday night’s gathering was a church service, it was a distinctly modern one. There was no Wi-Fi or cell service, but men dressed in muck boots and camo took photos and video of the speeches on their smartphones. At least five different camera setups filmed the gathering for viewers at home; a Redoubt News recording, posted on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page (which has over 205,000 followers) has been viewed 17,000 times and counting. One of the featured speakers was Andrea Parker, whose husband was arrested for involvement in the 2014 Bundy standoff, and has since become well-known for taping, streaming, and otherwise documenting the trial for the outside world. When describing the lead-up to Finicum’s death, Cox said that when she saw federal agents, she “got out my very best weapon: my camera.” She taped the entire confrontation, which has since become a primary document in arguments concerning what supporters view as unwarranted overreach on the part of the FBI.

In their cowboy hats and wool vests, the Bundys can present as men of a bygone era. But the internet has been the Bundys’ greatest rallying tool: through Facebook groups, far-right news sites, blogs, bulletin boards, YouTube videos, and online radio broadcasts, they’ve rallied support around them, consolidated a narrative of persecution, and transformed LaVoy Finicum into a martyr. Even though their supporters are diffuse, their purpose, and anger, is consolidated: Many at Saturday’s meeting were from Northwest Montana, but many had also come from Northern Idaho and Oregon. One woman, wearing a shirt signed, in Sharpie, by Cliven, had driven all the way from the outskirts of Portland. She’d made earrings modeled after the Bundy Ranch cattle brand.

About 20% of the audience raised their hands when asked who identified as “cattlemen.” Many others identified as lifelong Montanans. But others had moved to Northwest Montana and Northern Idaho to be part of what’s become known as the American Redoubt: a loosely affiliated group, largely Christian but not entirely, who’ve moved to the rural expanses of the area so as to fully exercise their constitutional rights (see especially: the Second Amendment). Some, but certainly not all, are affiliated with militias; others are full-blown doomsday preppers; one couple told me that they’d quit their jobs and walked away from their Nevada home at the urging of their pastor to move near Kalispell, Montana, and prepare for end times. Many are fleeing areas like Southern California, which some Redoubters refer to as “the occupied zone,” whose politics have shifted to the left or where white people have become the minority.

Redoubters might not have the same life skills or experiences as the native Montanans, but they share something else. They were furious, for example, that two women were standing outside the schoolhouse with signs that read “Bundy = White Privilege,” intending to call attention to the way the Bundy’s armed action would have been treated if they were not white. “What do they know about white privilege?” the woman from outside Portland, asked me. “I live in a trailer — does that mean I have white privilege?”

At one point during the night, the audience was asked to shout out who they blamed for what had happened to their God- (and constitutionally) given rights. The answers were about what you’d expect: Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Fish and Wildlife, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton. There’s just so much anger — at the way the world has changed, at the slow demise of their way of life, at a country that, to them, is no longer great. Now that Obama and Hillary Clinton are gone, there are few places to direct that abundant anger. What the Bundy’s have done, more than anything else, is give it shape, logic, purpose, and potency.

Anne Helen Petersen/BuzzFeed News

A man records a portion of Ryan Bundy's speech in Paradise, Montana

When Cliven Bundy rose to speak, his message felt like a culmination of the six speakers who had come before. But he told the crowd that their anger toward the federal government, and their desire for him to go confront the bureaucrats in Washington, DC, was misguided. “Good heavens, we have a Constitution,” he said. “This battle’s already been fought for us.” The next step, then, is to act like it: “Go read your Constitution and start acting like a sovereign state,” he said, not unlike a father scolding a frustrated child.

In other words: If you’re frustrated with the way that the federal government has been encroaching on your way of life, stop recognizing the government’s authority. At one point, he spoke directly to Montana ranchers: “You guys are still signing the contracts!” he said, referring to the agreements that allow ranchers to graze on Bureau of Land Management land. Then, when the rancher has a problem — with the BLM, or the Forest Service, or the Park Service, or Fish and Wildlife — and they go to the local sheriff for help, the sheriff’s hands are tied, because the rancher signed an agreement with the federal government, thereby acknowledging and acquiescing to its power.

“You guys gotta think about this,” Bundy said. “Remember what I said my 15-second defense was? I grazed my cattle on county land, and I have no contract with the federal government. I haven’t had a contract with the federal government for 25 years.” Which is why, when he goes to court, he doesn’t plead guilty — or innocent. “I don’t plea no thing,” he continued. “I don’t recognize this court has any jurisdiction over my land that I graze cattle on, over my rights over my home.”

“So what I ask you to do today here is to act like Montanans,” Bundy said. “Act like you have a county government. Act like you understand the Constitution.”

There was no explicit direction to stop signing the leases — just to think about the power scheme ranchers were ratifying when they did. There was no call to arms. No specific plans were laid. Cliven Bundy didn’t tell anyone what to do. Along with the other speakers, he restated and reaffirmed the cause. He was the lead pastor giving a version of the sermon he’s given several times before. But that’s the great utility of a church service: It’s very seldom about specific, direct action. Instead, it’s about creating a sense of community, and cementing the foundation of the belief system, so that when the time does come to act — in whatever way necessary — the faithful will follow. ●

Anne Helen Petersen/BuzzFeed News

A Montana van parked outside the Cliven Bundy gathering in Paradise, Montana

Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News. Petersen has a Ph.D. from the University Of Texas and wrote her dissertation on the gossip industry.

Contact Anne Helen Petersen at [email protected].

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h-bailey · 7 years

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Las Vegas sheriff, in emotional press conference, admits he’s still searching for answers

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Joe Lombardo was having a late dinner with friends from out of town when his cell phone suddenly blew up with messages. Shots had been fired on the south end of the Las Vegas strip, about 10 minutes from where he was. With a few rushed apologies, he stood and ran out, hoping it would only be a minor diversion.

It took only seconds for Lombardo, the Clark County sheriff, to realize this would be no ordinary Sunday night call. As he rushed past unsuspecting crowds illuminated by the flashing lights of the casinos along the north end of the strip, radio traffic revealed chaos mere blocks away outside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino where officers and thousands of attendees at a country music concert were being sprayed with gunfire by an assailant whose location was not yet known.

Nearly two weeks later, Lombardo still doesn’t have the answers he has been seeking ever since, to the ‘how’ and, more important, the ‘why’ of the horrific attack. But at a press briefing Friday afternoon that clarified some of the events of that night, while raising new questions, the stoic lawman gave vent to some of the emotions that have been roiling him ever since.

As he approached the scene, Lombardo saw hundreds of people running for their lives up Las Vegas Boulevard and along the side streets and parking lots, some covered in blood. By then, the shooting had stopped, and his officers were closing in on the suspected gunman, later identified as Stephen Paddock, who was holed up on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay. But the horror was far from over. Lombardo’s radio crackled with word of casualties, including reports of dozens of lifeless bodies in and around the Route 91 Harvest Festival concert grounds and word that some of his responding officers were down, wounded by gunfire when Paddock apparently took aim at law enforcement responding to the scene. There were also reports, later dispelled, of shots being fired at other nearby casinos along the strip.

People scramble for shelter at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival after apparent gun fire was heard on Oct. 1, 2017 in Las Vegas. (Photo: David Becker/Getty Images)

Slideshow: Scenes from Las Vegas mass shooting >>>

For Lombardo, a 29-year veteran of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, it was the nightmare he had always feared, the one that he had tried to prepare his department for. He had methodically studied mass shootings, including the December 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., and the Pulse nightclub shooting last year in Orlando, to heed lessons for his own officers. He had even traveled to Mumbai, India, to study firsthand the 2008 terrorist attacks where 164 people were killed in a series of coordinated strikes against hotels and other public spaces— aware that terrorist groups had long mentioned Las Vegas as a possible target.

But one of his biggest concerns as sheriff, he told the Las Vegas Sun in 2015, was a “lone wolf” attacker. “The person here locally that is disgruntled with government, separatist, anarchist, those types of individuals,” Lombardo said. Someone, he said, willing to act “on their own.”

As Lombardo later told reporters, even though his officers were doing everything they had been trained to do that Sunday night in reaction to a mass shooting event, nothing had fully prepared him or anyone to be confronted with this type of horror on their own doorstep.

“It just kept getting worse and worse,” Lombardo told KLAS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo listens to a question during a media briefing at Metro Police headquarters in Las Vegas Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2017. Investigators trying to figure out the Las Vegas gunman, Stephen Paddock’s state of mind have so far been stymied by the secret life he appeared to lead before the attack on a country music concert on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday. (Photo: Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)

In the nearly two weeks since Paddock broke the windows of his 32nd floor suite at Mandalay Bay and rained gunfire on roughly 22,000 concertgoers below, killing 58 and injuring more than 540, Lombardo has become the face of the ongoing investigation. Plain-spoken with a matter-of-fact delivery, the sheriff has been the primary conduit of information for his community and the television audience at large from around the world as people grapple for answers to why Paddock created such carnage.

Lombardo has won praise for his down-to-earth, even-keeled demeanor, and seems more forthcoming than other law enforcement officials, including the FBI, who have publicly spoken about the case. He has insisted on “telling the public what I know when I know it,” as he explains it, to “provide calmness in the community.”

While Lombardo has warned the media and others against speculation, he has been open about his own theories. He has repeatedly questioned how Paddock, a 64-year-old real estate investor and avid gambler, could have planned the attack with no one noticing or helping.

“Do you think all of this was accomplished on his own?” Lombardo said at a briefing last week. “Face value, you’ve got to make the assumption that he had to have help at some point.” He said “it would be hard for me to believe” that Paddock did all the preparations totally on his own.

The sheriff has also said he believes Paddock— who had 50 pounds of explosive material and another 1,600 rounds of ammunition in his car, parked in the casino’s garage — intended to escape. But he acknowledged that not everyone involved in the investigation agrees with him.

Drapes billow out of broken windows at the Mandalay Bay resort and casino on the Las Vegas Strip, following a deadly shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas. Police who have yet to find Stephen Paddock’s motive for the massacre said Friday, that they will enlist the public’s help. (Photo: John Locher/AP)

Lombardo has not tried to conceal his own frustration with the pace of the investigation. After nearly two weeks police still have no clear motive for one of the worst mass shootings in American history. And as the mystery has deepened about Paddock, a 64-year-old real-estate investor and gambler with no record of mental illness, political or religious extremism, Lombardo has openly questioned whether a motive will ever be established.

“There’s a chance we may never know,” Lombardo told reporters this week. “There are questions that may never get answered.”

The investigation has cast a spotlight on Lombardo, who, according to those who know him, does not enjoy the limelight. Lombardo, 54, was born in Japan. His father, a sergeant in the Air Force, was transferred to Nellis Air Force Base in Vegas in 1976 when Lombardo was 14.

After high school, Lombardo joined the Army before enrolling at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where he got a civil engineering degree. But soon, he followed his father, who had retired from the Air Force and joined the Las Vegas police department, into law enforcement. Lombardo joined the Las Vegas police in 1988—and while working his way up the ranks, he graduated with a master’s degree in crisis management from UNLV and from the FBI National Academy, both in 2006.

In 2014, Lombardo, who is a Republican, ran for and was elected Clark County sheriff—a job that, unlike in other big cities, involves running both the sheriff’s department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. More than 3,500 officers report to him, and his jurisdiction spans roughly 8,000 square miles—including the city of Las Vegas and the rest of Clark County, which extends nearly 100 miles east toward the Utah border and 100 miles south towards Arizona.

While much of the land is unsettled desert or farmland, it has not been without drama. In 2014, Lombardo, as assistant sheriff, was the lead tactical commander in responding to a standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters and officials with the Bureau of Land Management who had confiscated cattle Bundy had been grazing on federal land. Lombardo helped negotiate the release of cattle allowing the standoff to end peacefully.

Protesters gather at the Bureau of Land Management’s base camp, where cattle that were seized from rancher Cliven Bundy are being held, near Bunkerville, Nevada April 12, 2014. T (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

As sheriff, Lombardo has grappled with restructuring a police department that has come under Justice Department scrutiny for its frequent police shootings and its relationship with the black community. In a high profile event over the summer, Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett accused Las Vegas police of targeting him in a traffic stop because he was black and of using excessive force. Lombardo has said his officers acted properly, but has allowed that more work needs to be done establishing trust between his department and the community.

But now Lombardo faces one of the biggest challenges of his career—heading up an investigation where a man appears to have taken deadly aim at people while leaving no obvious clues or explanation for why he did so. In the days since the Oct. 1 shooting, Lombardo has grown more and more outwardly frustrated in the search for Paddock’s motive.

“We still don’t know why,” Lombardo told reporters earlier this week. “And it’s not for a lack of trying.”

With that mystery comes increased scrutiny on other parts of the investigation—including on the police response to the shooting.

On Monday, Lombardo released a significantly revised timeline of the shooting, indicating that Paddock shot a hotel security guard six minutes before he started firing on concertgoers. The timeline, which was disputed by MGM Resorts, the owner of Mandalay Bay, raised questions about why it took police so long to locate the gunman, and a possible failure in communication between officers and Mandalay Bay, which presumably would have reported that one of their guards had been shot.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo discusses the Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department headquarters in Las Vegas. On Monday, Lombardo said Paddock shot and wounded the security guard outside his door and opened fire through his door around 9:59 p.m. – six minutes before shooting into the crowd. That was a different account from the one police gave last week: that Paddock shot the guard, Jesus Campos, after unleashing his barrage of fire on the crowd. (Photo: Erik Verduzco/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)

On Friday, Lombardo corrected the timeline once again—bristling at what he described as people in “cyberspace” questioning the integrity of not only his investigation, but his own personal integrity. “I provided you the information has I knew it, and everybody in here knew it was going to change,” he said, visibly irritated. “The dynamics of this investigation are far reaching. It’s wide. It’s huge, and you can’t expect exact answers in the early throws.”

In their initial account, police said the security guard, Jesus Campos, was shot around 10:15 p.m. — about 10 minutes into the attack — when Paddock discharged a volley of gunfire through the door of his room after seeing Campos approach on a baby monitor the shooter had placed on a room service cart. Police had originally portrayed Campos as a hero, telling reporters he had interrupted and stopped the killing, and alerted law enforcement about the location of Paddock’s room.

But on Monday, police said Campos, who was unarmed, was shot and wounded at 9:59 p.m. as he investigated an apparently unrelated alarm for an open door on the floor — six minutes before Paddock began firing out his window at 10:05. Police now say they have no idea why Paddock, who had a large quantity of ammunition and other loaded weapons in his room, stopped his rampage 10 minutes later.

Lombardo said Campos had alerted Mandalay Bay security that he had been shot, but police hunting for the gunman only learned this when they found him lying wounded in the hallway. By that time, Paddock had, for no known reason, stopped shooting.

According to the updated timeline released Monday, police officers reached the 31st floor of the resort and casino at 10:12 p.m. — where, they reported to colleagues, they could hear shots being fired above them. Officers reached the 32nd floor, where Paddock was staying in Room 135, at 10:17, two minutes after he stopped shooting. They found Campos a minute later, at 10:18 p.m., and the security guard pointed them to Paddock’s room. Police did not breach Paddock’s room until 11:20pm—over an hour later—where they found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

But that timeline was disputed by MGM Resorts, which released a statement Thursday saying the 9:59pm report was “not accurate.” “We know that shots were being fired at the festival lot at the same time as, or within 40 seconds after, the time Jesus Campos first reported that shots were fired over the radio,” the statement read. “Metro officers were together with armed Mandalay Bay security officers in the building when Campos first reported that shots were fired over the radio. These Metro officers and armed Mandalay Bay security officers immediately responded to the 32nd floor.”

Police run to cover at the scene of a shooting near the Mandalay Bay resort and casino on the Las Vegas Strip, Oct. 1, 2017, in Las Vegas. Multiple victims were being transported to hospitals after a shooting late Sunday at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. (Photo: John Locher/AP)

On Friday, Lombardo defended the revised timeline, specifically regarding the 9:59pm timeprint, but said “circumstances associated” with it had changed and the police timeline was was “not in conflict” with the MGM Resorts statement. The sheriff explained that a “human entry” in a hotel security log provided to police had listed 9:59pm as the moment Campos had first encountered Paddock. But he said it now appears that the entry marked the time when Campos, attempting to reach the 32d floor, discovered that a stairwell door near Paddock’s room had been barricaded.

Unable to access the floor from that stairwell, Campos, according to Lombardo, took another route, and was actually shot at 10:05pm, about the same time when Paddock began taking aim at concertgoers outside his window.

But the sheriff did not clarify remaining questions, including what time Mandalay Bay officials alerted police that Campos had been shot or why it still took 12 minutes for cops to make it to the 32nd floor. On Friday, Lombardo repeated that Campos alerted security at Mandalay Bay of the gunfire—both via radio and his cell phone. But, uncharacteristically, he declined to take follow-up questions.

Lombardo, who has declined most national media requests except for an appearance on “60 Minutes” that aired last Sunday, was unapologetic about the changing facts of the case. And he pushed back against criticism that the shifting timeline was evidence of “incompetence” or “conspiracy” by his department.

“I am absolutely offended by that characterization,” he insisted. “There is no conspiracy… Nobody is attempting to hide anything.”

The details, he added, are likely to change again.

In the 12 days since the shooting, Lombardo says he hasn’t slept much. A few hours here, a few hours there—mostly on a ragged old couch in his office at police headquarters. He and others have been coming through more than 1,000 tips from the public, trying to answer the mystery behind why someone who had led an otherwise unremarkable life would suddenly become a mass killer.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, center, responds to a question during a media briefing at the Las Vegas Metro Police headquarters in Las Vegas, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)

“Part of me losing sleep is, did I miss something? Did I fail to do something? Did my people fail to do something?” he told the Las Vegas Review Journal. “You immediately think you’re gonna know the reasons why in the short term. Now, here we are a week after the fact, and we still don’t know.”

On Friday, 12 days after the shooting, the sheriff looked and sounded exhausted. And after days of being matter-of-fact and in control, he became visibly emotional discussing officers who had selflessly run towards the scene to save lives, even as the bullets continued to rain down. Several officers, he said, he been severely wounded when Paddock began shooting at them as they drove up to the scene—a diversion that injured them, but likely saved the lives of others.

One of the officers, Brady Cook, had four gunshot wounds, including in the chest. “The reason I bring him up,” Lombardo said, choking back tears,” is because he asked me if he could come back to work today.”

The sheriff paused, trying to regain his composure. “Excuse me for my emotion,” he said, his voice quivering.

_____