In late August 1992, Randy Weaver and his family were refusing to come down from the remote Idaho

mountain top where they lived.

Randy had sold two sought-off shotguns to a federal informant and then missed a court date.

Now the family's ramshackle cabin on Ruby Ridge was surrounded by hundreds of federal

agents and local police officers. Weaver, a fugitive on a federal firearms charge, has been

hold up in a cabin near Naples for more than a year. They say Weaver is a white supremacist

and claim he's heavily armed. The government thought Randy Weaver was a dangerous, possibly violent extremist.

Randy and his wife Vicky thought the government was an agent of Satan on earth.

The result was chaos.

It looked like a scene from Vietnam.

You don't shoot and kill a cop and think you're going to get away with it.

It's kind of like cornering a scared dog.

When it was all over, three people were dead,

and the government had spent millions of dollars to catch one man.

So how did a man who was only charged with selling two sawed-off shotguns come to be the focus of such an enormous investigation in siege?

And I am still waiting 26 years later for somebody to try and explain to me why that was needed.

I'm Ruth Graham, the host of the new podcast miniseries Standoff.

Over four episodes, we'll find out why the siege at Ruby Ridge unfolded the way it did.

And think about some of the questions it raises.

What should we do about white supremacists?

Why has the story of Ruby Ridge become an enduring myth for the far right?

And whose fault was it anyway?

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