{"id":28432,"date":"2025-07-01T00:05:21","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T00:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/28432\/"},"modified":"2025-07-01T00:05:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T00:05:21","slug":"wess-roley-idd-as-alleged-suspect-in-idaho-firefighter-shooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/28432\/","title":{"rendered":"Wess Roley ID’d as alleged suspect in Idaho firefighter shooting\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sniper who shot dead two firefighters<\/a> in an ambush in Idaho was identified Monday as 20-year-old Wess Roley \u2014 and an eerie photo shows him delivering a sinister glare into the camera.<\/p>\n

Roley\u2019s body was found near his weapon at the scene of a fire he started<\/a> Sunday afternoon to lure unsuspecting smoke-eaters to the scene, a law-enforcement official told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n

He ended up killing two responding firefighters and critically wounding a third, authorities said.
It is unclear whether Roley was eventually killed by a cop\u2019s bullet or took his own life, Kootenai County Sheriff Robert Norris told reporters at a press conference.<\/p>\n

Wess Roley was identified as the gunman suspected of starting a fire before fatally shooting two firefighters in Idaho.<\/p>\n

Police respond to a shooting at Canfield Mountain, Idaho. AP<\/p>\n

People pay their respects to those killed in a shooting in Idaho. AP<\/p>\n

The chaos began around 2 p.m. on Canfield Mountain, just north of Coeur d\u2019Alene, when smoke started pouring from the woods and first responders rushed to the scene \u2014 only to be met by a hail of gunfire coming from the trees.<\/a><\/p>\n

Firefighters quickly realized they\u2019d been lured into a psychotic trap and desperately called for backup, according to terrifying 911 calls they made from the scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m pinned down,\u201d a firefighter said in the frantic call. \u201cIt\u2019s clear to me that this fire was set intentionally to draw us in.<\/p>\n

A procession to honor the firefighters killed in Idaho on Sunday, June 29, 2025. AP<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need law enforcement up here immediately,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have another Coeur d\u2019Alene firefighter down. \u2026 We\u2019ve got two unresponsive battalion chiefs down, multiple gunshot wounds, two Coeur d\u2019Alene are down.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fire was left to burn as reinforcements battled to root out the unseen gunman before the gunfire eventually stopped and Roley\u2019s body was tracked down in the trees using cellphone information.<\/p>\n

Smoke from the fire started before firefighters were ambushed. AP<\/p>\n

Roley previously lived in Arizona but was in Idaho working in the tree-service business, his grandfather told CNN.<\/p>\n

He had a tumultuous childhood marked by a messy divorce between his parents \u2014 which culminated with his father allegedly making threats that were eerily similar to the crime Roley carried out on Sunday, according to court papers from the bitter 2015 split.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe threatened to sit outside my house with a sniper rifle or burn my house down,\u201d Roley\u2019s mother wrote in a filing of her son\u2019s father, according to CNN.<\/p>\n

She also said Roley\u2019s father pushed her to the ground and \u201cpunched several holes in the walls.\u201d<\/p>\n

An armored police vehicle leaves an area where multiple firefighters were attacked when responding to a fire on Canfield Mountain. REUTERS<\/p>\n

The mother was granted a protective order barring the father from seeing her or her son \u2014 then 10 years old. But the father claimed, \u201cI am not a danger to my son or anyone else\u201d and said the accusations were a lie.<\/p>\n

In another eerie twist, Roley had aspirations to become a firefighter, his granddad told the outlet.<\/p>\n

Smoke is seen rising after a fire was started outside Coeur d\u2019Alene in Idaho. REUTERS<\/p>\n

Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post\u2019s signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here!<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wanted to be a fireman \u2014 he was doing tree work, and he wanted to be a fireman in the forest,\u201d his grandfather, Dale Roley, said. \u201cAs far as I know, he was actually pursuing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The grandfather expressed bafflement at the situation, saying Roley wasn\u2019t a \u201cloner,\u201d and that he had a supportive family and group of friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had no reason to suspect that he would be involved in something like this,\u201d the grandfather said.<\/p>\n

Neither of the two firefighters killed have been identified yet, while a third firefighter was left \u201cfighting for his life\u201d after he was struck by a bullet. He is now in stable condition.<\/p>\n

A motivation behind the twisted attack remains unclear, but internet sleuths have identified a chilling possible connection to a decades-old incident involving the Coeur d\u2019Alene Fire Department and neo-Nazis.<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s incident happened 24 years to the day after a 2001 burning of an Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake \u2014 just 7 miles north of Coeur d\u2019Alene \u2014 during a fire training operation.<\/p>\n

The cabin and its compound had been sold to the department after the Aryan Nations\u2019 national leader, Richard Butler, filed for bankruptcy over a settlement involving the shooting of a Native American woman and her son \u2014 and the site was torched by the Coeur d\u2019Alene Fire Department during a training exercise.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not think it is a coincidence that on this date in 2001, firefighters in Coeur d\u2019Alene burned down the Aryan Nation founder\u2019s compound in a training exercise after he lost the property in a federal bankruptcy sale. The tragic current events are unfolding nearby,\u201d one suspicious sleuth wrote in a post on X on Sunday.<\/p>\n

So far no connection has been made between Roley and white supremacy movements.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The sniper who shot dead two firefighters in an ambush in Idaho was identified Monday as 20-year-old Wess…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,6526,4216,13670,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,3677,67,586,132,5230,68,1154,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-28432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-firefighters","10":"tag-fires","11":"tag-idaho","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-shootings","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-us-news","25":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114775059598087684","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}