Marvin Heemeyer or What Happens When You Push A Good Man Too Far
This is a story about a man who was pushed past his limits, a town and a bulldozer. Marvin Heemeyer, and Air Force vet and small business owner in Granby Colorado. He owned a small muffler shop in town.
Heemeyer had purchased the land his shop sat on at a tax auction. There were harsh words with the former owners after Heemeyer made the winning bid. Those bad feelings would persist for years.
The family that had previously owned Heemyer’s lot decided they wanted to build a cement plant on the surrounding acreage. Heemayer, understanding the construction would impact his business sued the town and the developers over the project. Heemeyer would eventually lose.
The town board started going after Heemeyer about a sewage issue on his property. Marv had had enough. He sold his property and leased back a portion of his shop. That is where he built “killdozer”, an armor plated Komatsu D355A dozer.
Marv fitted the dozer with composite armor consisting of steel plate and concrete. He added video cameras and ballistic polycarbonate windows for visibility. Onboard fans and an air conditioner were used to keep Heemeyer cool while driving. He had made three gun-ports, fitted for a .50-caliber rifle, a .308-caliber semi-automatic rifle, and a .22-caliber rifle, all fitted with a 1⁄2-inch steel plate.
Around 1415 local on 4 June 2004 Heemeyer decided to enact his revenge on the town and those he thought were out to get him. Heemeyer began by driving his armored bulldozer through Mountain Park Concrete, the plant he fought so hard against, and damaged several buildings and other fixed equipment.
From there he went to the Town Hall and leveled it. He then targeted a bank, one of the members of the planning commission worked there, and damaged that building. Heemeyer next targeted several street fixtures, such as trees and traffic lights, before moving on to the offices of the local newspaper and the homes and workplaces of those he considered his tormenters.
Marv next targeted a propane storage yard, firing 15 bullets at the tanks, some of which contained 30,000 U.S. gallons of propane. Police were forced to hurriedly evacuate all residents within a thousand yards of the site, including a senior housing complex. Heemeyer then fired upon nearby power transformers, but struggled to find a good angle. Heemeyer hit the transformers once and missed his other shots.
Heemayer finally attacked the Gambles Store, targeting it due to the owner’s involvement in the hearings about the batch plant. Unaware of a small basement on the property, Heemeyer dropped a tread into it, immobilizing himself. At some point the radiator on Killdozer had been damaged, so even if he had been able to free himself, Marv’s rampage would have ended in short order anyway.
Marvin Heemeyer killed himself with a single shot from a .357 magnum at 1630 local time 4 June 2004 after laying waste to half the town of Granby. It took authorities until 0200 the next day to gain access to the interior of Killdozer.
The attack lasted two hours and seven minutes, damaging 13 buildings. His targets included the town hall, the Sky-Hi newspaper office, Gambles General Store, Maple Street Builders, Mountain Parks Electric Co, Liberty Savings Bank, Kopy Kat Graphics, the wall of his former business, the home of a former mayor (in which the mayor’s 82-year-old widow then resided), and a hardware store owned by another man Heemeyer named in a lawsuit, as well as a few others. The damage was estimated at $7 million, 2 million of which was to the concrete plant, which was underinsured, resulting in a payout of $700,000.
