POLICING THE POLICE
or even at his job at Walmart,
there would have been two fewer
funerals in Ogden.
B
EFORE THE RAID, Erna
Stewart, 31, had considered
becoming a cop. “I had done
some ride alongs. I had bought my
own gun, and I knew how to clean
it. I was trying to figure out what
I wanted to do with my life, and I
thought I’d either be a police officer or a personal trainer.”
She’s now a personal trainer.
“It wasn’t even the raid itself that
turned me off to cops,” she says.
“It was the way they treated my
family after it happened. We got
hate mail from cops and their
families. I mean, the way we were
treated in the community ... it just
made me jaded. And angry.”
It also motivated her. Soon after
the raid, Erna quickly became the
family’s liaison to the press, and
she’s since become a leading advocate of reform.
In the days and weeks after the
raid, the task force, the district
attorney and other Weber County
officials began to malign Matthew
David Stewart in the media. A
“source close to the investigation”
first told the Ogden StandardExaminer that police had found a
HUFFINGTON
11.17.13
“I don’t think they thought
anyone was living there. They
called it a ‘low-level’ raid.”
picture of Stewart “dressed as a
terrorist,” and “posing in a suicide
bomber’s vest” in the house. The
police reported that they had found
a bomb in Stewart’s closet and
child pornography on his computer.
He was portrayed as a violent,
anti-government extremist. Wilson,
his ex-girlfriend, told investigators that Stewart had once told her
that if the police ever came for his
marijuana plants, he’d “go out in a
blaze,” and he’d “go out shooting.”
She claimed that he didn’t believe
the federal government had the
authority to collect taxes, and that
he had told her of plans to shoot up
the IRS after he lost his job there
working as a security guard.
Family members say that Stewart was a government skeptic who
could sometimes indulge in conspiracy theories, but that Wilson
and the police’s portrayal of Matthew was an exaggeration.
“I know the drug war really bothered him,” his father Michael says.
“He was passionate about the
way the government was going. He
didn’t like it,” Erna adds. “I remem ber he was really upset about