When a cop in the Salt Lake City suburb of Farmington, Utah, pulled over a late-model BMW 3-series with an odd-looking license plate on the afternoon of March 1, he was confronted with an even odder-acting motorist.
Chase Linde Allan, a 25-year-old graduate of Utah State University initially declined to roll down his window more than a few inches. He declined to identify himself and and declared: “I am not giving you jurisdiction … do not detain me … you are not allowed to stop me … I don’t need registration … I don’t answer questions … traveling is a federally protected activity.”
After refusing several times to give his name, the driver finally relented and handed over a passport, but with a curious warning: “If you want my identification, it will be under duress and you accept security and trusteeship over it, and you will be responsible for any debts that you are trying to incur here.”
“I’m not trying to incur any debts,” the officer replied. “I’m trying to investigate why your vehicle doesn’t have any registration.”
The American born-and-bred Allan — a blonde jock who played soccer in high school and college and was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — said he was independent of any and all US laws.
As a follower of the Sovereign Citizen movement — said to be 300,000-strong and growing — Allan, like other adherents, believed the US government has no authority over them.
According to the FBI, sovereign citizens are “anti-government extremists” who claim that though they “physically reside in this country,” they are “separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States” — and don’t have to answer to tax entities, courts, motor vehicle departments or law enforcement traffic stops.
Instead of the usual Utah license plate with the words “In God We Trust,” and “United We Stand,” Allan’s featured three small and four large vertical red stripes and what resembled a golden winged flag.
Clearly frustrated, the officer called for backup. Two more cops, a supervisor, and a trainee arrived on the scene, at the downtown Farmington post office parking lot.
Still, Allan refused to cooperate.
The back-and-forth continued before one of the cops demanded, “Step out of the car for me.”
“No,” Allan responded.
“Step out of the car, or we’re going to break the window and pull you out,” the cop repeated more forcefully.
Once again Allan, whose family later said he had been studying constitutional law, refused.
As the officer opened the driver’s side door to grab and oust Allan, another cop shouted the words law enforcement officers fear:
Instantly, the cops fired off an estimated dozen shots.
Allan was treated at the scene and pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. A holster was found strapped to his right hip, a handgun was on the car floor, the driver’s side window was riddled with bullet holes, and all of it was recorded on police body cameras.
Farmington Police Chief H. Eric Johnsen, a 22-year veteran of the Farmington force, told The Post that the “officer-involved critical incident is now under investigation by the Davis County Critical Incident Protocol Team” and that the five officers involved have been placed on administrative leave pending outcome of the investigation.
Meanwhile, Allan’s family has accused the police of committing a “brutal murder.”
Allan’s fatally tragic confrontation with police is only the latest high-profile anti-government action involving a so-called sovereign citizen.
While the FBI points out that not all of the actions of sovereign citizens are violent, and that they should not be confused with extremists such as the militia movement, they do sometimes “use or buy illegal weapons.”
Confrontations, violence and other forms of severe law-breaking have been a way of life for some adherents going back to the radical 1970s.
Among sovereign citizenry’s violent and infamous are father and son Jerry and Joe Kane who, during a routine 2010 traffic stop in West Memphis, Arkansas, leaped out of their minivan and opened fire, killing two officers with an AK-47 assault rifle.
The Kanes were soon spotted at a nearby Wal-Mart parking lot and killed in a gunfight with law enforcement.
Terry Lynn Nichols was convicted as an accomplice to Timothy McVeigh in the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City — one of the deadliest acts of domestic terrorism, in which 168 people were killed.
Three years earlier, as a self-styled sovereign citizen, Nichols attempted to renounce his US citizenship by writing to the local county clerk in Michigan, stating that the political system was corrupt and declaring himself a “non resident alien.”
On February 8, 2010, computer engineer Andrew Joseph Stack III, a self-styled follower of sovereign citizenry, flew his single-engine Piper plane into a seven-story Austin, Texas, office building that housed Internal Revenue Service offices, killing himself and an IRS employee.
The sovereign movement has significantly expanded since the late 2000s, with law enforcement experts and the Southern Poverty Law Center estimating there are some
several hundred thousand hard-core believers in the US.
The pandemic and the related lockdowns and vaccine mandates reportedly played a role in the rise of the movement.
According to the UK’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focused on extremism, “anti-government sentiments in relation to imposed Covid-19 measures” has triggered a “surge in popularity of Sovereign Citizens-related ideas.”
A 35-page report by the Anti-Defamation League entitled “The Lawless Ones: The Resurgence of the Sovereign Citizen Movement,” published a decade ago, called the sovereigns “one of the most problematic domestic extremist movements in the United States.”
The ADL noted that, “spontaneous sovereign citizen violence, especially during traffic stops … poses a significant risk to law enforcement officers.”
According to Fox News, “adherents of the movement believe the US government creates a secret identity for each citizen at birth that controls a clandestine US Treasury account totaling up to $20 million, which is used as collateral for foreign debt. And by filing enough bogus legal documents, including fake liens and false foreclosure notices, sovereign citizens believe they can game the system, ultimately eliminating personal debt or defrauding corporations.”
While the movement is “largely white,” there reportedly is a “growing African-American offshoot” called the “Moorish Sovereign Citizen” movement, according to the ADL.
Moorish members reportedly contend that African-Americans are “foreigners” who are urged to violate US laws, and commit crimes such as “criminal trespass” — underscored in 2021 when a Newark, NJ, home newly purchased by a black woman was taken over by a Moorish sovereign who placed a Moorish flag in the front window.
He served the woman documents, on fake consular paper, from the fictional “Lenapehoking of the Al Moroccan Empire at New Jersey State Republic” and claimed that an obscure treaty from the 1700s gave him the right to take her house as his.
When a SWAT team showed up, Hubert A. John, 39, was identified as a sovereign citizen and arrested on charges of criminal mischief, burglary, criminal trespass and making terrorist threats. It’s unclear what the current status of any legal proceedings is.
Similar cases have been reported in Seattle and Maryland
When cops stopped Chase Linde Allan earlier this month, his alliance with the controversial Sovereign Citizen Movement may have already been known within the Farmington police department.
His death happened one year after his mother, Diane Killian Allan, a local real estate saleswoman, took the Farmington police to court after being stopped in April 2022 for driving with an expired auto registration, like her son.
In September 2022, she sued the department — asserting that, as a sovereign citizen, she was stopped unjustly. After handing over her passport and a copy of the US Constitution, she was given two tickets for $100.
In her lawsuit, Killian Allan argued that that neither the United States, nor any other jurisdiction, had any rule over her, and that she had the right to travel in Farmington without police interference.
Her son was named in the lawsuit because he had accompanied her to the police department when she returned the tickets, according to reports.
In the wake of the death of Chase, who lived at home with his parents, Killian Allan called him “a patriot doing what he could to defend the people’s freedom and liberty in his community.”
