Wendy Lineweaver sensed something was up when she arrived at a Ann Arbor warehouse last month for a hastily arranged memorial service for a fellow Hutaree member.
The warehouse’s parking lot off Varsity Drive was empty, with the exception of a white moving truck.
Hutaree members had arrived in two cars about 6:10 p.m. after meeting at the Lineweaver's home in Manchester an hour earlier.
Five of them wouldn't be going home that night.
A large sticker of Hutaree’s distinctive green patch was plastered on the warehouse door, which Lineweaver thought was tacky because the Christian militia unit didn’t own the property.
The Hutaree patch.
When Lineweaver, her husband Ken, their 18-year-old son, and five other Hutaree members walked inside, she was struck by the apparent lack of effort put into organizing the service. A few sandwiches, some bags of chips and bottles of pop had been plopped on a table.
While members were there to mourn “Dan,” also known by his Hutaree name, “Keebelik,” his family was nowhere to be found. On a cinderblock wall, "weird nicknames" were written in black marker, she said.
On their way inside, Hutaree leader David Stone had told them they would each have to select a name from the wall, she said. Lineweaver had no idea what purpose the names served or who wrote them.
“What it told me is that he had been in that warehouse before,” she said.
Keebelik’s "battle dress uniform" was draped over a chair sitting on a table, with a white candle lit beside it, Ken Lineweaver said. Roughly 20 folding chairs were arranged around a brand new television hooked up to a DVD player. At one point, Wendy Lineweaver saw a loft with boxes on it, but steps leading up to it were missing. The first step was more than five feet above the floor.
“All the stairs were freshly sawed off except the top two,” she said.
Hutaree member "Scott," who organized the service and told Stone that Keebelik had died, was there when everyone arrived. Lineweaver said he was "extremely nervous."
She wondered how he got there because she didn't see his nice truck with New Jersey license plates parked outside.
“His voice was shaking when I spoke to him,” she said.
“I asked this Scott guy, ‘How come you didn’t call us and tell us to bring some food?” she said.
According to Lineweaver, he replied, "Oh, I told Dave he doesn’t need to worry about it."
Despite the eerie feeling, everyone stayed at the service to honor Dan, the Lineweavers said.
Joshua Clough, Michael Meeks, David Stone's wife Tina Stone and his son David Stone Jr. were the other Hutaree members there, Wendy Lineweaver said. That made nine people total. One hasn't been seen or heard from since, Lineweaver said.
“Every instinct was telling me to get out, but I liked Dan…or thought I did,” she said...
