Mother and son who sued buy Aryan compound
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COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - The mother and son whose lawsuit helped bankrupt the Aryan Nations are the new owners of the hate group's former compound.
Victoria and Jason Keenan were the only bidders in yesterday's U.S. Bankruptcy Court sale of the 20-acre property that served as headquarters for some of the nation's most violent neo-Nazis.
The Keenans said they plan to sell the property, possibly to a human-rights group.
"We hope to get the evilness out of there and turn it around to something positive," Jason Keenan said.
Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler witnessed the transfer of the property he had owned for some 30 years. He blamed a Jewish conspiracy for the outcome.
"You take from those who work and have and give to those who have never worked and did not have," Butler said.
Butler filed for bankruptcy protection in October, a month after the Keenans were awarded $6.3 million for being shot at and assaulted by Aryan Nations security guards.
The Keenans were the only ones to make a deposit. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala., civil-rights group that represented the Keenans in their lawsuit, lent them the $95,000 needed to complete the purchase.
The auction proceeds will go to the Bankruptcy Court, to be paid to creditors of Aryan Nations and Butler, including the Keenans.
The compound is a wooded site north of Hayden Lake that contains numerous buildings, including Butler's home, a bunkhouse, a guard tower, the chapel of Butler's Church of Jesus Christ Christian and other facilities.
The Keenans will get all the contents of the compound as well as intellectual property, such as the names "Aryan Nations" and "Church of Jesus Christ Christian."
The Keenans were driving past the compound July 1, 1998, when their car backfired. Three Aryan Nations security guards, thinking someone had fired a shot, jumped into a pickup and chased them.
They shot out a tire, forcing the Keenans' car into a ditch, and held the occupants at gunpoint.
"I did what I had to do to help save Coeur d'Alene," Victoria Keenan said after she won her lawsuit. "Even if I can save one child from being like them, that's something."
Butler had bought the land in the 1970s, when he moved from Southern California to Idaho.