Raging dozer remembered

Town mending after its encounter with a madman

John Aguilar, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 3, 2005 at midnight

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GRANBY - The sound in this small placid town was deafening. A 410-horsepower bulldozer engine - primed, fueled and protected by steel and concrete - roared to life.

In the cab of the Komatsu D355-A sat a vengeful Marvin Heemeyer.

The 60-ton bulldozer, covered by 25 tons of armor, propelled Heemeyer on a 90-minute path of destruction until the engine finally burst a radiator hose, belching a cloud of steam.

Nearly a year later, the engine is piled in the back of a scrap trailer at a salvage yard outside Granby, waiting to be hauled to the furnaces of an Englewood metal recycling shop.

Besides some hydraulics and a few sheets of reinforcement steel, the engine is all that remains of the behemoth that terrorized this town of 1,600 residents, destroying or damaging 12 buildings and causing $5 million damage.

Adrian Bloomfield, owner of the salvage yard, said every last trace of the bulldozer will be gone from Granby by Saturday - a year to the day after Heemeyer mixed diesel fuel with rage and crashed into the heart of this mountain community.

"We kind of lost our innocence," said Mayor Ted Wang. "We're the same place, but we're not the same place."

A day of ruin

Granby looks a lot different from the way it did the afternoon of June 4, 2004 - the day Heemeyer rammed the 20-cubic-yard blade of his "MK Tank" into several town buildings.

New structures now replace piles of broken bricks, twisted metal and shattered foundations.

A $250,000 emergency Granby Fund has helped people rebuild.

Heemeyer's rage was ignited several years ago when the city approved a cement plant near his muffler shop despite his objections. Determined to seek revenge, Heemeyer parked his bulldozer in a rented shed on the west side of town and spent the next 18 months souping it up.

Heemeyer poured 4 inches of concrete between plates of steel, which he welded onto the Komatsu to armor it.

He rigged the bulldozer with video cameras equipped with air compressors to blow dust off the lenses. Images of the world outside appeared on monitors inside the enclosed cab so he could guide it without exposing himself .

He stuck three guns, including a .50-caliber rifle, out of portholes bored into the armor to keep authorities at bay.

Not that they were necessary.

Every round that SWAT teams and police fired at Heemeyer did little more than pockmark the steel-plated covering.

The bulldozer's weight also was the source of its failure. The floor of the Gambles department store collapsed from its weight, and Heemeyer, 52, realizing he could go no further, killed himself inside the bulldozer with a bullet to his head. He was the lone casualty of the day.

Patrick Brower, editor and publisher of Sky-Hi News in Granby, knew Heemeyer for 14 years as merely an argumentative curmudgeon.

"It's unbelievable that he interpreted his loss at the town zoning hearing as deserving of such an extreme act of revenge," Brower said.

"I think Marv imagined a conspiracy that did not exist. If he had been as patient with the town and its officials as he was building his bulldozer . . . "

The recovery

Thelma Thompson, 83, said it still doesn't make sense to her how she ended up on Heemeyer's hit list. After all, she said, his beef over zoning issues was with her late husband, a former Granby mayor, not her.

"I can't understand why he would target me when my husband had been gone for three years," she said.

Her house was destroyed, but she rebuilt on the same site, even though insurance covered only half the cost of construction.

"It was always home. That's why we rebuilt on the same ground and got the same view, and nobody can take that away from us," she said.

Brower also rebuilt on the newspaper's old site. He and a staff of 10 moved into the new building, still without a sign, three weeks ago.

He said insurance largely covered both the cost of the new building and the bulk of his material losses, such as damaged computers and furniture. Sky-Hi also received $20,000 from the Granby Fund, which Brower hopes to put toward the $80,000 loss his business suffered.

"It was a full sprint for a year," Brower said about the challenge of publishing the paper out of Granby's old asbestos-laden middle school for the last year.

"We had people working overtime and people going beyond the call of duty," he said.

The weekly paper never missed an issue.

Scars remain

Some property owners haven't been so lucky. Gambles, the longtime department store in Granby and the last place Heemeyer demolished, is still an empty lot.

"I was underinsured, so I didn't have the money to rebuild," said Casey Farrell, Gambles' owner.

Farrell moved his business, which now sells a streamlined selection of appliances, electronics and vacuum cleaners, into a vacant space in a strip mall on the west side of town.

He got help from the town's emergency fund, but said cash flow at his new store, which is less than half the size of his old store, is only 60 percent of what it used to be.

"The Lord has to keep smiling on me, and I have to keep growing," Farrell said. "If I don't grow, I'm dead."

The town itself still bears the scars of Heemeyer's rampage. The town hall is now a hole in the ground. Officials meet at a suite in a business park on the edge of town.

But Mayor Wang sees a silver lining in the destruction.

"He tried to destroy us, but the effect is that he made things better and stronger," Wang said. "We had a lot on our plate before the bulldozer clanked down the street. The irony is that it might have accelerated some things."

The mayor cites plans for a new municipal center, including a new library, at North Zero Street and Jasper Avenue, where the old town hall sat. Groundbreaking is scheduled for Saturday.

Saturday will also serve as Granby's centennial celebration, an effort to eclipse the anniversary of the rampage with something more lighthearted.

"We're not going to dwell on the bulldozer," Wang said. "We're kind of a sleepy little town, and we've been moving toward a position of getting that back.

"I hope it's quieter from now on."

aguilarj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2550

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