Updated::The Charleston Gazette | Police: SUV that crashed had IEDs, guns, pot, chickens

A Pennsylvania man was arrested Friday morning after the SUV he was driving — with live chickens and “altered fireworks” inside — wrecked on Interstate 79, shutting down the highway for several hours.

Seth Grim, 21, was driving a Ford Explorer south on I-79 at about 3:30 a.m. when he flipped the vehicle between the Wallback and Amma exits, according to the West Virginia State Police.

State Police Spokesman Lt. Michael Baylous said the driver was on the run from authorities in Pennsylvania.

Baylous said the Explorer was carrying improvised explosive devices, a large amount of ammunition and two AK-47-style rifles, and that troopers found marijuana in the vehicle.

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After his arrest, Baylous said, Grim told police he is a “sovereign citizen.” Members of the sovereign citizen movement generally try to reject taxation and local, state and federal laws. According to a report this year from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, “sovereign citizen” groups were the largest perceived terrorist threat among American law enforcement agencies.

Updated to add::

Richard Rowe writing at Americans Against The Tea Party makes a very pertinent point concerning this story.  It is an attitude I have witnessed myself and it is bothersome.

Of course, some will laugh at the story of Seth Grim — and it is funny. It's always funny to see bad people undone by their own stupidity, especially when it involves dozens of chickens. Especially when you frame that against the cognitive dissonance it takes to call yourself something as glaringly (and grammatically) self-contradictory as a "Sovereign Citizen." You might even think that these people are obviously too stupid to do much real harm...a comedy of errors in the making.

But Grim's story is funny like clown shoes on a serial killer. There's a far darker and more frightening pattern emerging here, and it involves people who won't hesitate to kill anyone they see as "violating" their "God-given right." They are far-right, violent, heavily armed, paranoid, militant, unstable, self-entitled religious fundamentalists with a persecution complex and nothing to lose — the Sovereign Citizens may be America's ISIS.

Here's to hoping the the sovereigns stay individualist!!

The Charleston Gazette | Police: SUV that crashed had IEDs, guns, pot, chickens