It turns out Victoria Sharp was in the truck with LaVoy Finicum, witnessed the shooting, and repudiates claims that there was a shootout with the FBI.
Listen, at The Truth About Guns, "BREAKING: Eyewitness Account of Oregon Occupier Testimony from Victoria Sharp (AUDIO)."
And at the Kansas City Star, "Kansas woman found herself inside Oregon gun battle":
At a small-town community meeting in Oregon, the Sharp Family Singers from Kansas were scheduled to perform for an audience that would include occupiers from a standoff at a national wildlife refuge.More.
Two vehicles on the way to the meeting never made it. Inside were several protesters — and a Sharp family daughter.
Authorities stopped the vehicles Tuesday in what they said was an attempt to end the occupation peacefully, yet one of the drivers was killed.
Victoria Sharp, 18, was taken into custody and released. But at least one family member, a brother in Chicago, remained frantic Wednesday night about the safety of Victoria and the entire family....
An FBI official said authorities took the action Tuesday after nearly a month of working with other agencies to end the illegal takeover.
“Yesterday, the FBI with our partners took the first steps to bring this occupation to a conclusion,” said Greg Bretzing, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Oregon, at a news conference. “We worked to ensure that we could do so peacefully and safely, out of harm’s way of the citizens here in the county.”
Authorities will continue to try to empty the refuge of occupiers in the safest way possible, he said.
Victoria Sharp said in an audio interview posted Tuesday night on YouTube that the two vehicles were on the way to the meeting in the town of John Day.
“All of us Sharps were going to sing,” she said. “We were just going to try to talk, maybe do some negotiations, and we were going to sing. That was all.”
Sharp, who had arrived in Oregon from Montana after the weekend performances, gave an account of the shooting that differed from that of the driver of the other vehicle.
She said that when authorities stopped the pickup she was in, Finicum — who was driving — told them he wanted to go talk to the sheriff. Authorities told him to turn the ignition off and put his hands out the window, she said.
“Finally, he decided to just drive,” she said. “So we all got down on the floorboard and he took off. And they started firing at us. They had a roadblock set up. And so he ran into a snowbank and they were riddling the car with bullets.
“When we crashed, he got out of the car. He had his hands in the air and he’s like, ‘Just shoot me then. Just shoot me.’ And they did. They shot him dead. And then after he was down on the ground they shot him three more times. And then they bombarded our vehicle with bullets. … We were praying so hard. We were saying stop, please stop.”
She said the shooting lasted five to 10 minutes. “They shot at least 120 shots altogether,” she said.
Nobody in the vehicles fired a shot, she said: “We showed no aggression at all.”
Photo Credit: Facebook.
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