LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Two men have been charged in the slaying last month of a federal courthouse guard in Oakland, California, during an ambush blocks away from anti-racism protests sparked by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police days earlier, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
One of the two men, Steven Carrillo, a U.S. Air Force sergeant described by the FBI as associated with the extremist boogaloo movement, was arrested on June 6 and charged with the ambush killing of a sheriff’s deputy in the Santa Cruz mountains.
The FBI said in an affidavit filed with the criminal complaint in the case that Carrillo appeared to have used his own blood to scrawl the word “BOOG” and the phrase “I became unreasonable” on the hood of a car he sought to hijack before he was arrested.
Carrillo, 32, was charged in federal court on Monday with murder in the May 29 drive-by shooting of Federal Protective Service officer David Patrick Underwood, and the attempted murder of a second security officer, outside a federal courthouse in Oakland.
The suspected accomplice in that ambush, Robert Alvin Justus Jr., has been charged with aiding and abetting in that attack as the driver of the vehicle from which Carrillo is accused of opening fire on the officers’ guard post.
“Indiscriminate targeting of law enforcement officers by those motivated by violent extremism of any stripe is contrary to our nation’s values and undermines the powerful message of peaceful protests,” John Demers, assistant U.S. attorney general for national security, said in a statement.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Cooney)
