Dangerous Doomsday Prepper Eludes Feds

Gun tied in knot.
Too bad many more guns aren’t tied in knots.

FOX 13 News-?A federal gun probe of a Florida man whom many say is a ?Doomsday Prepper? wound up turning into a manhunt after he eluded capture by FBI agents Monday morning.? The agents tried to arrest him because he has allegedly built unregistered destructive devices designed to kill government agents as part of an ?end-of times-plot,? according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Agents attempted to arrest Martin ?Marty? Winters, 55, shortly before 9:00 a.m. but Martin sped off in his car and it’s believed that he escaped on foot after that.

Martin and five other people were indicted by a federal grand jury on June 5, on sealed charges pertaining to investigation of a group that’s led by Martin ? the River Otter Preppers, the Times reports.


Neighbors say that Winters is a nice guy,?Gawker?reports. ?However, Winters is a “nice guy” with an arsenal that would make right-wing whackjob?Alex Jones?jealous. During the search, nearby Durant High School was locked down as a safety precaution, according to?Fox News.

In fact, he’s such a nice guy, that, according to a 24-page search warrant affidavit, agents discovered metal tubes that are designed to fire 12-gauge shotgun shells.? These were intended to be booby traps, the Times reports.

Because you know, nice guys keep a big stash of booby traps designed to tear people apart. Sure they do.

Winters is not your average Joe, neighbors told Fox.?Vincent Bernard, who is one of Winters’ tenants, says:

“Marty is a good guy.?He has views that are different from other people.”

No kidding.

Winters and his band of happy campers, like so many before them, follow the Book of Revelations and believe that all hades is going to break loose soon, and that this will require folks to rely on themselves for food and protection from other people, and that for some reason known only to them, this will include blowing them away, especially if they happen to work for the federal government, according to the Times.

You know, because he’s a nice guy that believes in a kind and loving God.?Bernard told Fox:

“He loves God, I know that he reads a lot of Book of Revelations.”

He loves God so much that he’s spent $200,000 on his preparations and has stuffed four barrels full of 60 AR-15 firearms into the ground, Winters told an undercover FBI agent last October, the Times reports.? Touring the neighborhood, Winters pointed out bunkers that he keeps on three other nearby properties.

He talked of shooting government agents in the back by snagging them first with fishhooks that would fire out of air-pressured pipes mounted on the eaves of porches.?Special Agent Ronald Monaco wrote in the affidavit:

?Winters will then shoot the agents while they are entangled in the hooks.”

One unidentified FBI employee spent months talking to Winters and writes that he also talked of shooting tanks of propane gas to kill government agents as he entered his property, because you know, that’s what nice people do.? Make plans to blow people to Pluto and back because these “nice” gun nut preppers ?have taken a one-way ticket to crazyland.

The prepper mindset takes a marked detour from just worrying about disaster preparedness and tweaks it into malignant paranoia, and some are clearly wired differently than the rest of us, such as this woman, who calls herself the “Crazy Prepper Lady”:

“In 2005, we moved to the outskirts of Tampa to be closer to my mom, who is a widow. This area is known for sinkholes, as we all recently learned when a young man sleeping in his bed was suddenly sucked under the earth, never to be found. Meanwhile, the economy took a nosedive, terrorists were going berserk, solar flares were occurring, nuclear disasters were happening, oil spills were increasing, the Mayans prophesied doom, the Egyptians prophesied doom, the Bible prophesies the Tribulation, and all I could think was ?Lions and Tigers and Bears, OH MY!!!!?

Global climate change is wreaking havoc, there are wars all over the world, but this woman is worried about what the Mayans and the Egyptians prophesied? ?She’s clearly stepped out of reality a few too many times, but this isn’t a big deal.


It’s the gun nuts like Winters who are a big deal. The ones who believe that Sandyhook was a hoax, the?stockpilers who believe that President Obama is going to come galloping in on Satan’s warhorse to herald the apocalypse. ?You know, because even though Obama’s been in office for six years, he’s surely coming for their guns, isn’t he?

The other doomsday preppers named in the indictments are Michael Bonta, 49; Jason Swain, 33; Nicholas Hall, 23; James Beebe, 56; and Desiree Beebe, 23.? Bonta has also been charged with crimes related to the aforementioned homemade destructive devices.? The others were charged with being felons in possession of firearms and making false statements, the Times reports.

I’m sure they are “nice” too.

I'm a journalist with more than 25 years of experience in writing for newspapers large and small. I'm currently writing for Decoded Arts, Digital Journal. Currently, I have 13 friendly cats (I'm not superstitious) and a large wolf dog named Bartolomé and I'm teaching him how to eat tea party members. Okay, not really.