Fifteen years ago, the Colorado mountain town of Granby came under the national spotlight after a disgruntled muffler shop owner drove an armored bulldozer he had secretly spent months building on a destructive course through town, smashing and bashing his way into and through 13 buildings.
Marvin Heemeyer, 52, killed himself with a gunshot to the head when his bulldozer got stuck and police moved in. No one else in the Grand County town was injured during the dramatic June 4, 2004, incident.
What set Heemeyer off was a zoning dispute he had been having with town officials over a plan to permit the construction of a concrete batch plant near his muffler shop.
When the decision in the case didn’t go his way, Heemeyer began the painstaking task of outfitting a Komatsu D355A bulldozer with end-to-end steel and concrete plating, attaching external cameras to act as his eyes to the outside world, and cutting out portholes through which he was able to fire rounds from inside the dozer’s cab.
For more than two hours, Heemeyer drove his modified tank down Main Street in a slow-motion rampage, crashing into a bank, the police station, town hall, a newspaper office and a hardware store, among other targets. Attempts by law enforcement to stymie him were futile, as the sheer heft of his machine and the fortifications he had appended to it made it unstoppable and impenetrable.
Damage to the town was estimated to be around $7 million, according to Sky-Hi News, the local newspaper that turned out to be one of the targets of Heemeyer’s wrath.
