Social media accounts paint chilling portrait of Las Vegas cop killers

Posts before rampage warned of 'coming sacrifices' and 'bloodshed'

Jerad and Amanda Miller during Christmas 2013. (Facebook)
Jerad and Amanda Miller during Christmas 2013. (Facebook)

A day before going on a shooting rampage that left two Las Vegas police officers and a bystander dead, Jerad Miller, one of the gunmen, posted this on Facebook:

“The dawn of a new day. May all of our coming sacrifices be worth it.”

Witnesses reportedly said Miller, 31, and his wife, Amanda, shouted, “This is a revolution” and “We're freedom fighters” when they ambushed the officers who were on their lunch break at a pizza restaurant.

If their social media accounts are any indication, rants about attacks and disgust with authority were a common thread in their lives.

“To the people in the world...your lucky i can't kill you now but remember one day one day i will get you because one day all hell will break lose and i'll be standing in the middle of it with a shot gun in one hand and a pistol in the other,” Amanda Miller posted on Facebook on May 23, 2011.

Amanda Miller created and posted this Bitstrip comic to her Facebook six months ago. (Facebook)
Amanda Miller created and posted this Bitstrip comic to her Facebook six months ago. (Facebook)

After killing Police Officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, and taking their weapons, police said, the Millers fled across the street to a Walmart store, where they shot and killed customer Joseph Wilcox, 31, before apparently taking their own lives in a suicide pact.

The couple, who married in September 2012, moved from Lafayette, Indiana, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in January of this year.

Photos on 22-year-old Amanda Miller’s Facebook page shows the couple celebrating Christmas with family two weeks before departing for Nevada. In one photo, she poses with copies of the “Shooter’s Bible” and “Extreme Survival.”

“My new books that my Grandma Paula got me!” she wrote on Facebook.

Amanda Miller shows off books she received last Christmas. (Facebook)
Amanda Miller shows off books she received last Christmas. (Facebook)

According to the Lafayette Journal & Courier, Jerad Miller had a long history of arrests and convictions for drug offenses while in Indiana.

In a July 8, 2013, video he posted to YouTube, he vents about the government making a profit from an ankle monitor he has to pay for and wear while under house arrest. He also rants about the local courthouse and questions why citizens need permits.

“You have to go down to that big stone structure, monument to tyranny, and submit, crawling, groveling on your hands and knees,” he says on the video. “Sounds a little like Nazi Germany to me or maybe communist Russia.”

Amanda and Jerad Miller in April in Las Vegas. (Facebook)
Amanda and Jerad Miller in April in Las Vegas. (Facebook)

On Monday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that a neighbor said the Millers might have been planning a larger attack on an unidentified court building. According to the story, the couple’s next-door neighbor and friend was holding documents for the couple that included detailed plans to take over a courthouse and execute public officials.

Jerad Miller used the handle “USATruePatriot” on another YouTube account where video titles included “second amendment logic,” “Would George Washington use an AK?,” and “Police confiscate guns and threatened to kill me.” In two videos, he stands in front of an American flag dressed as the Joker and rambles about what it would be like to be president of the United States.

“A new world order under the Joker,” he shouts while belting out an evil laugh.

Jerad Miller’s profile picture on Facebook is of two knives behind a mask and the word “PATRIOT” in stars and stripes. Much of his social activity was centered on Second Amendment gun laws, government spying and drug laws. Six days before Sunday’s rampage, he posted on Facebook that, “to stop this oppression, I fear, can only be accomplished with bloodshed.”

“We can hope for peace. We must, however, prepare for war. We face an enemy that is not only well funded, but who believe they fight for freedom and justice. ... We, cannot with good conscience leave this fight to our children, because the longer we wait, our enemies become better equipped and recruit more mercenaries of death, willing to do a tyrants bidding without question. I know you are fearful, as am I. We certainly stand before a great and powerful enemy. I, however would rather die fighting for freedom, than live on my knees as a slave.”

Investigators with the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center said the Millers' web writings were typical of right-wing, militia-type thinking.

But Heidi Beirich said the SPLC’s intelligence files don’t show the couple to be members of an organized group.

“It’s just the two of them doing this crazy thing that the two of them decided to do,” Beirich, director of the SPLC’s intelligence project, told Yahoo News.

The ADL says in the past five years, there have been 43 separate incidences of violence between domestic extremists and U.S. law enforcement. All but four of the attacks were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, according to the ADL.

“The two police officers who lost their lives are only the latest in a series of casualties in a de facto war being waged against police by right-wing extremists, including both anti-government extremists and white supremacists,” Mark Pitcavage, ADL director of investigative research, said in a written statement. “Some extremists have deliberately targeted police, while others have responded violently when meeting police in unplanned encounters. The killings are not the effort of a concerted campaign, but rather a series of independent attacks and clashes stemming from right-wing ideologies.”

Follow Jason Sickles on Twitter (@jasonsickles).