Those who've been with us for a few years will recall the dramatic shootout with police that happened in the summer of 2010, around midnight on a July Saturday, in the middle of I-580 in Oakland, resulting in the entire freeway being shut down for the better part of the next day. Thanks to YouTube, we have audio of the complete, Wild West-style gun exchange in which unemployed Tuolumne County carpenter Byron Williams, possibly quite drunk at the time, seems to have emptied a magazine of ammunition at CHP officers who were trying to pull him over. Jurors began hearing evidence against him Monday for the attempted murders of four CHP officers.
As the Oakland Tribune reports, the entire standoff lasted 20 minutes, with 10 officers emptying about 200 rounds in Williams' direction, until he was finally wounded enough to surrender. He had loaded his car with several guns and outfitted himself with a bulletproof vest before hopping in the car to head to San Francisco for what he later characterized as a "confrontation" with the liberal Tides Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union both frequent targets of vitriol from Glenn Beck and Fox News, with Beck claiming that Tides was the source of a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy capitalism. The suggestion that Williams was likely out to kill people that night of July 17 seems like it should be relevant to this case, but Williams' defense attorney is saying that the CHP and Oakland police have mischaracterized the sequence of events on I-580, saying that Williams had a right to defend his own life from what he saw as a possible "execution."
The case will come down to whether they can prove that Williams had intent to kill. It's said that he only emptied 10 rounds in the direction of the officers, who far outnumbered him. But yeah. Bulletproof vest.
As we learned in the days following the confrontation, Williams lived next door to his mother near the gates of Yosemite, and the two were stockpiling weapons in preparation for the coming "revolution." The guns were said to belong to the mother, because Williams was a parolee with two previous convictions for bank robbery.
Below, the original YouTube video posted by an Oakland resident living just yards away from the freeway overpass where the shootout took place.
Previously: Byron Williams, the Crazed I-580 Shooter, Pleads Not Guilty
