Arrest ends low-key 2 1/2-year standoff

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Posted 7:26AM on Monday, March 25, 2002

MONTPELIER, Vt. - A man who had holed up in his remote home for 2 1/2 years after a bank foreclosed on it, defying authorities who worried about a possible violent confrontation, was arrested early Sunday on one of his rare excursions off the property. Aaron Powell, 45, of Lunenburg, was arrested after his release from a hospital in Lancaster, N.H., where he went for treatment of bites from one of the dogs he allegedly trained to attack law officers, said Essex County State's Attorney Vincent Illuzzi. Powell was being held in lieu of $2,000 bail at Colebrook, N.H., pending an extradition hearing. The arrest ended a standoff that started in the summer of 1999, when the Siwooganock Bank of Lancaster foreclosed on Powell's house and 95 acres of land overlooking the Connecticut River valley. Powell had been making mortgage payments to the bank but refused to pay property taxes, which the bank had been paying instead. Essex County Sheriff Amos Colby said Powell was considered a threat because he had been communicating with right-wing extremist groups such as the Montana Freemen, who engaged in a nearly three-month standoff with the FBI in 1996. Colby said Powell also regarded as a hero Carl Drega of nearby Columbia, N.H., who killed two officers, a judge and a newspaper editor. Drega died in a shootout with police in 1997. Illuzzi said state police had found two guns on the property by midday Sunday. In an Associated Press interview in 2000, Powell had refused to say if he was armed, because "it could be an excuse for foreign agents (government authorities) to come onto my land. They are nothing but gangsters to me." During the standoff, police were not constantly stationed outside Powell's property. But until Sunday, he had left the property only occasionally and furtively. The rest of the time, a loose network of supporters delivered food and helped him meet other needs. He had one felony conviction, for escaping from a state police barracks after a domestic dispute. Colby had refused to carry out the eviction requested by the bank and the bank sued him. The lawsuit was still pending when Powell was arrested Sunday. "You just can't go around shooting people over a civil suit," the sheriff said in 2000. Illuzzi criticized the bank for its aggressive stance, saying it could have added the property taxes to the balance due on the mortgage note, rather than foreclosing and demanding that police storm the property. Charles Hickey, the bank's lawyer, said: "I believe that the bank has acted appropriately. We were placed in this position because of the inaction of the sheriff." State police said they removed three children from Powell's house Sunday, two of them neighbors and the third child Powell's. They also arrested a friend of Powell's, Deborah Beaton, for trespassing.