[Park Ranger] Ken Phillips got a photograph of Travis Twiggs. “I’ve made a lot of wanted posters,” he said. “But this was the first time I had to crop out the President.” The bulletins that went out over the wires gave both Travis and Will a “violent criminal history,” although before the carjacking neither had any such thing. A local lawman told me that he’d been informed they were extremely heavily armed, although all they had was the .38—“and in Arizona that’s not even close.” The Twiggs brothers might be bent on committing “suicide by cop,” according to one alert. That possibility seems closer to the mark. The two men were certainly leaving the world as they had known it. The lingering, punishing question is why. Travis, who had two young daughters whom he doted on, might have believed that he was back in Iraq. Will’s thinking was more opaque. They drove into the night, and there is no record that they ever spoke again to anyone but each other. Two days later, they were dead.
The above from a fascinating, scary, sad and important story published in the September 29th New Yorker.
Strongly recommended.