From U.S. v. Olson, decided yesterday by Eleventh Circuit Judge Ed Carnes, joined by Judges Andre Brasher and Charles Wilson:
During a two-week period …, Olson conspired with seven others to set fires in four different Walmart stores. They set the fires during business hours while customers, children, and employees were still inside the stores. The fires caused confusion, chaos, and fear….
In early 2021, Alexander Olson moved to Lillian, Alabama, with his brother, Quinton Olson, and his friend, Michael Bottorff, who became two of his co-conspirators, to live in a house already occupied by his other soon-to-be co-conspirators, Jeffrey Sikes, Erica Sikes, Sean Bottorff, Jenna Bottorff, and Mikayla Scheele. After moving in, Olson became involved in meetings (that sometimes lasted all day) in which the eight co-conspirators planned the Walmart fires.
Jeffrey Sikes was unquestionably the leader of the pack. On the night before the first fire, he instructed co-conspirators Olson, Sean Bottorff, and Mikayla Scheele to pack bags with tactical gear and clothes in preparation for the next day's operation. When that day arrived, Olson, Scheele, and Sikes entered the first Walmart during normal business hours, while Bottorff stayed in the getaway car. Sikes told Olson and Scheele that once the three of them were inside the store, they should disperse, douse store merchandise with lighter fluid, and then set the merchandise on fire. Each one of them, including Olson, lit a fire inside the store. As those three fires broke out and spread, there was "mass chaos" as customers, including young children, and employees scrambled to get out of the store.
The next day, Olson and Scheele set fire to another Walmart in Mobile, Alabama. They followed a similar pattern to the one they had used the day before: they entered the store separately, found each other once inside, and then split up as Scheele set fires. As the two of them left the store, there were "a lot of people outside" as everyone tried to escape the burning store. The alarms were loud, the smoke was thick, people were scared and screaming.
On the way back home from that second fire, the group stopped at a different Walmart so that Olson could buy a cell phone. They planned to use that phone to anonymously send a document entitled "Declaration of War and Demands for the People" to various media outlets.
The "Declaration of War" characterized Walmart's policies and business practices as "a crime against humanity" that "validate[d]" the conspirators' "action of war against them." The document included seven demands that Walmart would have to meet for the fires at its stores to stop:
- Pay its employees $18/hour, regardless of full-time status (Demand 1)
- Pay 100% of each employee's health insurance premium (Demand 2)
- Give new moms six months maternity leave and new dads two months paternity leave (Demand 3)
- Pay its CEO no more than five times as much as its lowest-earning employee (Demand 4)
- Implement a climate plan (Demand 5)
- Supply 900 ready-to-eat meals (900 from each store) to people in need each day (Demand 6)
- Produce half of its goods in the United States within five years (Demand 7)
