Two masked men dressed in fitness clothing worn by Army Rangers made their way onto a military base some 50 miles south of Seattle on Sunday night. The authorities said the men were intent on stealing thousands of dollars in combat equipment from an Army Ranger regiment there.
However, the robbery quickly went awry.
A soldier walked in and began asking questions as the two men were surrounded by piles of equipment. The soldier was bludgeoned with a hammer and one of the attackers brandished a knife.
As the robbers fled, they dropped a bloody rucksack full of stolen combat gear. Handwritten on the rucksack was the name “Fields,” which investigators discovered matched the last name of a man whose identification had been scanned when he drove that day onto the military installation, Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
His name led the authorities to a home elsewhere in Washington State, where they said they discovered a startling scene: rooms and rooms of Nazi and white supremacy paraphernalia and a stockpile of stolen weapons.
That, according to a criminal complaint filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington, tells the story of the investigation that led to the two men, identified by the authorities as Charles Ethan Fields and Levi Austin Frakes, being charged with assault, robbery and theft of government property “by force and by violence and by intimidation.”
The 11-page complaint and a Facebook post by the sheriff of Thurston County, Wash., so far amounts to the only public information about the activities of the two men, who were both identified in the complaint as veterans, leaving more questions than the authorities will currently answer.
The Army confirmed on Friday that Mr. Fields served in the Army and was deployed to Afghanistan twice between 2018 and 2019. He left the Army at the rank of a sergeant. Information about the service record of Mr. Frakes was not included in the complaint.
They were arrested after officials with federal and local law enforcement, including Army special investigators and a Federal Bureau of Investigation SWAT team, on Tuesday raided a house in Lacey, Wash., that was listed for both men on their driver’s licenses.
Neither Mr. Fields nor Mr. Frakes could be reached for comment and as of Friday they did not have lawyers. The charges and arrests were earlier reported by Military.com, an independent news organization.
Mr. Fields and Mr. Frakes are, so far, facing charges in connection with the assault and robbery on Sunday at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which is less than 10 miles from the Lacey house.
But the raid revealed an array weapons and combat equipment, according to the criminal complaint and an account posted on social media by Sheriff Derek Sanders of Thurston County.
The cache included 35 weapons, such as rifles, pistols and a machine gun; grenade launchers; smoke grenades and flash-bangs, many of which the authorities said were identified as military property. The sheriff said that multiple rifles were “staged at windows throughout the residence.”
One of the men admitted in an interview with Army special agents, according to the complaint, that the pair had been stealing from the Army Ranger facility on the Washington base for about two years and selling or trading what they plundered.
In addition to the weapons, investigators recovered more than $20,000 in cash and discovered Nazi flags and a framed photo of Adolf Hitler. Nazi and white supremacy “memorabilia, murals and literature” were found in “every bedroom” of the house, according to the complaint.
State business records show both men have a company registered in Washington called Sovereign Solutions. Military.com reported that the company featured Nazi ideology in its logo, and that its LinkedIn page named military units as clients. The page has since been taken down.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the company linked to the men. The spokesman said that Mr. Fields and Mr. Frakes could face further charges.
The soldier who walked in on the theft in progress was hospitalized for his injuries, according to the complaint. He was able to wrestle the hammer out of the hands of his attacker even after he was struck on the head and torso, according to the complaint.
Photographs included in the filings showed dark blood smeared across the soldier’s face and down the back of his head. He only surrendered the fight when one of the men brandished a knife, the complaint said.
The next day, he inquired with fellow service members about the name Fields, which he had read on a hat that had also been left at the scene.
Someone in his unit connected that name with Mr. Fields, who was previously assigned to the 75th Army Ranger Battalion at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. That person also showed the soldier a photograph that helped him identified Mr. Fields as one of the men who assaulted him, according to the complaint.
It was unclear whether Mr. Fields and Mr. Frakes got onto the base using military identification. Parts of the base are open to the public but visitors are recorded.
The authorities suspect that both men drove onto the base, but that they used bolt cutters to break a lock to enter the Army Ranger compound.
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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