Terrorism“Boogaloo” Follower Charged with Killing Police Officer during BLM Protest

Steven Carrillo, an Air Force sergeant who is a follower of the extreme-right Boogaloo movement, was on Tuesday charged with the murder of an Oakland policeman during Black Lives Matter protests. The police said the victim was the second police officer Carrillo is accused of killing in recent weeks.

The driver of the van, Robert Alvin Justus Jr., 30, who had met Carrillo on Facebook, was charged with aiding and abetting the murder of Oakland police officer Dave Patrick Underwood, 53, the officer killed in the shooting, the complaint said. Both men were also charged with the attempted murder of a second officer who was gravely wounded.

“They came to Oakland to kill cops,” John F. Bennett, the special agent in charge of the FBI in San Francisco, said at a news conference on Tuesday.

The Justice Department said Carrillo shot Underwood from a white van in a drive-by shooting during the 29 May protests over the police killing of a handcuffed African American man in Minneapolis.

A week later, on 6 June, Carrillo’s van was discovered near Santa Cruz. When police approached Carillo’s residence, he ambushed them and shot another officer, Damon Gutzwiller, who died of his injuries.

The Telegraph reports that officials said that Carrillo, an Air Force security specialist, was a follower of the underground Boogaloo Bois ideology, which promotes an eclectic combination of extreme anti-government stance with the encouragement of civil and race war, aiming to bring about the overthrow of the U.S. government.

The Boogaloo movement is not an organized, coherent group with central headquarters or an agreed-upon, singular ideology. Followers of the movement, however, despite their differences, do share the view that the U.S. government and its institutions have largely failed to address the concerns and preferences of the majority of the American people.

Boogaloo followers often openly carry assault weapons, with the majority preferring to wear their trademark Hawaiian shirts. But some wear military-like garb in public.

“This is a very violent movement even if they are wearing Hawaiian shirts and using funny memes to try to soften what they are doing,” Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago history professor and the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, told the New York Times.