BATON ROUGE, Louisiana--The gunman who killed three Baton Rouge police officers identified himself as a member of an African-American offshoot of the anti-government Sovereign Citizen Movement last year, documents showed.
Gavin Long, a former U.S. Marine sergeant who was shot dead by police on Sunday, affiliated himself with the Washitaw Nation, an African-American group whose members view the federal government as illegitimate, in legal papers filed in a Missouri county. In an interview on Monday, a senior member of the Washitaw Nation denied that Long was a member of the group.
In papers he filed in May 2015, Long also said he wanted to change his name from Gavin Eugene Long to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra as part of reclaiming what he described as his indigenous identity, according to Jackson County, Missouri, public records. But court officials said Long never completed the process of legally changing his name.
Filing such papers is a common practice among members of the Sovereign Citizens Movement, according to Ryan Lenz, an expert from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit organization that tracks extremist groups. The center estimates there are 300,000 followers of Sovereign Citizens in the United States.
"He is definitely a Sovereign," said Lenz. "That process is a Sovereign Citizen tactic dating back for years. There is no other ideology that such a process falls under except Sovereign Citizens."
Frederix Joe Washington, the senior member of the Washitaw Nation, said he did not know Long. He also said that people often use the group's name without its permission.
"We know nothing about this man," Washington said. "We don't give cards out, IDs out, licenses or passports. None of this has been given out by us."
A U.S. counter-terrorism official said investigators were examining Long's relationship with the Washitaw group. The official said U.S. agencies can only monitor such groups to a limited extent due to constitutional free speech guarantees and usually only do so when violence is threatened or committed.
The Sovereign Citizen movement is largely made up of right-wing anti-government white Americans, who say the federal government has been corrupted since the 19th century, according to researchers. Since the 1990s, some black separatists have adopted the Sovereign Citizen ideology as well.
Sovereign Citizens say they are allowed to ignore the federal government and often believe they can issue their own identification cards because they refuse to recognize federal law. The movement, which is more of an ideology than an organization, is highly decentralized and has little in the way of formal structure, researchers said.
There were 24 cases of violence or threats committed by Sovereign Citizen followers from 2010 to 2014, and all but five occurred at government offices, during routine traffic stops or at adherents' homes, according to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence assessment leaked to the news media in 2015.
Those episodes included people affiliated with the movement being charged with the 2012 killing of two policemen in Louisiana, convicted of the 2010 shootings of two policemen in Texas and the 2014 shootings of two law enforcement officers in California. A self-professed member of the movement was also convicted of plotting to kill a federal judge and an IRS official in Alaska in 2011.
