Nashville Scene
Why were a couple of gay Republican potheads blown away by the FBI?
June 15, 2006
On Monday, Sept. 3, 2001, at 5:25 p.m., FBI special agent Richard Salomon, from a distance of less than 10 yards and using a bureau-issued .308 sniper rifle, shot Tom Crosslin between the eyes, blowing the 46-year-old’s brains out the back of his head. The next day, at a little after 6:35 a.m., sergeant Daniel Lubelan, of the Michigan State Police, fired two shots from his .308 Remington sniper rifle. The first hit Crosslin’s lover, Rollie Rohm, near his heart. The second blew off his balls. By the time lieutenant Jerry Ellsworth jumped on Rohm’s back to handcuff him, the 28-year-old was dead, thus ending a five-day standoff between the owners of Rainbow Farm and the combined forces of local, state and federal law.
According to the FBI report, Crosslin, at the moment he was shot, had spotted the well-camouflaged Salomon and was raising his mini 14 Ruger in the agent’s direction, presumably to fire at him. The Michigan State Police report indicates that Rohm, just before he was fired on, had shouldered his Ruger and aimed it at the armored assault vehicle approaching him. The accounts in both reports are, five years later, still a matter of some dispute, particularly the one concerning Rohm, whom even law enforcement knew to be a peaceful, even hapless, stoner. A larger dispute, however, especially to residents of rural Cass County, in Michigan’s southwest corner, is what compelled the full, heavily armed force of the law to isolate Rainbow Farm, infiltrate the grounds with snipers, and then move in on Rohm with an assault vehicle.
That dispute aside, how did this dramatic, deadly standoff escape the attention of the national media when seemingly similar standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco received round the clock attention, and have since become part of America’s consciousness? It didn’t, at least at first. CNN, FOX, The Associated Press, Rolling Stone and a gaggle of local media were all over the story, but just as they were beginning to understand the conflict as more complicated than a couple of drugged-out gun nuts gone berserk, airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. By the time the national media got back to covering anything else, Rainbow Farm, except to the people in Cass County, was a distant memory.
Enter Dean Kuipers, Los Angeles City Beat’s deputy editor, who grew up just a few miles from the location of the 35-acre farm. In his fascinating Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke, he writes, “The shootings in Vandalia smelled funny the moment I read about them on the cover of the Kalamazoo Gazette. The Sept. 9, 2001 Sunday subscription edition arrived at my house in California, and there was.