Oklahoma police are investigating whether a group of human remains found earlier this year in a heavily secured, rural compound is linked to a murderous white supremacist prison gang.
Officials have largely kept quiet about the search, which is probing the potential involvement of the violent Universal Aryan Brotherhood (UAB) group, for fear that members could attack those connected to the investigation.
“We’re just trying to keep some people alive at this point,” an anonymous Oklahoma official told the Washington Post this week.
The gang, which was founded in 1993 in Oklahoma prisons and modeled after California’s Nazi prison gangs, has been linked to meth trafficking, murder, kidnapping, torture and witness intimidation. In August, nine people with suspected ties to the UAB were charged with torturing a rival gang member and dumping him in a ditch.
The group is thought to be connected to a rash of disappearances in rural Oklahoma, where it is a major player in the meth trade. Local residents are reportedly afraid to contact police or put up missing person signs, for fear of reprisals.
In April, county and state police discovered highly degraded human remains thought to belong to between nine and a dozen people. The bodies were discovered at two sites, a walled-off compound in rural Logan County, with numerous caged pitbulls on-site, and another location near an oil well in Luther.
"They were associated with burned wood and other material. … We’ve got our work cut out for us,” the state’s chief medical examiner, Dr Eric Pfeifer, said at the time of the discovery, which has yielded 500 pounds of dirt to analyse for remains.
One of leaders of the white supremacist gang, 57-year-old Mikell “Bulldog” Smith, currently serving a life sentence for a 1985 murder-robbery, owns land at one of the sites where the remains were found.
Last month, officials from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) provided one of the sparse updates on the investigation.
The investigation now involves a search for missing people from three Oklahoma counties: Logan, Potawatomi and Oklahoma County.
Officials have collected DNA samples from family members and are trying to match them to the bone fragments and other pieces of evidence found earlier this year, KOCO reports.
The Independent has contacted OSBI for comment.
The agency has acknowledged its investigation but said little more in public.
“The investigation is very fluid and very active,” OSBI wrote in a August release. “Because of that, the volume of rumors and speculation is high. The OSBI will not comment on rumors as that can jeopardize the ongoing investigation.”
LaVonne Harris told the Post she suspects her son, who has been missing for over two years, is among those discovered in April. She said she and a friend searched through her son Nathan Smith’s social media and saw him associating with people who may have been making Aryan Brotherhood gang signs.
‘They’re Aryan Brotherhood, look! All these people — a lot of them — are doing the signal,’ ” Ms Harris told the paper. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what has my son got into?’ ”
Oklahoma has long been a major node in right-wing extremism, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to the present day; there are at least five major white-supremacist prison gangs in the state, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
ADL researcher Mark Pitcavage wrote in a 2016 report that such gangs are the fastest-growing and most dangerous arm of the white supremacist movement, and that the “combine the criminal intent and know-how of organized crime with the racism and hate of white supremacy, making them twice as dangerous.”
