Ammon Bundy Has Disappeared
Photographs by Cole Barash
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Two weeks before chaos hit St. Luke’s hospital in Boise, Idaho—before Ammon Bundy showed up with an armed mob and the hospital doors had to be sealed and death threats crashed the phone lines—a 10-month-old baby named Cyrus Anderson arrived in the emergency room.
The boy’s parents, Marissa and Levi, knew something wasn’t right: For months, Cyrus had been having episodes of vomiting that wouldn’t stop. When he arrived in the ER, he weighed just 14 pounds, which put him in the .05th percentile for his age. Natasha Erickson, the doctor who examined him, had seen malnutrition cases like this in textbooks but never in real life. Cyrus’s ribs were clearly visible through his chest. When he threw up, his vomit was bright green.
Erickson hooked the baby up to an IV and a feeding tube, and he slowly started to gain weight. But Levi and Marissa were anxious to leave. They were members of an anti-government activist network that Bundy, the scion of America’s foremost far-right family, had founded, and they shared his distrust of medical and public-health authorities. To Marissa—whose father, Diego Rodriguez, is himself an extremist leader and Bundy’s close friend—the hospital was a “lion’s den.”
By the next evening, Levi and Marissa were demanding to take their baby home, but hospital staff said it wasn’t yet safe. They left a few days later, with instructions to bring Cyrus in for follow-up appointments. When they failed to show up for a scheduled weigh-in at a local clinic the following week—Marissa was feeling sick herself and decided to postpone it—a nurse there referred the case to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. Cyrus missed another appointment that afternoon at St. Luke’s, and another nurse contacted the detective on the case. Someone had to see the infant right away, she said.
That night, officers pulled the family over at a gas station in nearby Garden City. Marissa begged for Bundy’s help by phone. “They’re trying to take my baby. They’re trying to take my baby,” she kept telling him, until she was out of breath. Police lights were flashing all around her as a crowd began to gather. She couldn’t understand how things had escalated so fast.
Bundy put out a call for help from his group, the People’s Rights Network, which claimed to have more than 50,000 members, and told Marissa to livestream what was happening on Facebook. When a police officer demanded that she hand Cyrus over, she pleaded with him. “Do you understand what happens when the state takes custody of babies?” she said. “I’ve seen this so many times. I can’t be that next person—I can’t.” While Bundy was driving to the gas station, he learned that both Levi and Marissa had been arrested, and Cyrus was on the way to another St. Luke’s branch, an ER about 10 miles away in Meridian. Bundy and his supporters headed there.
Within an hour, a small crowd was blocking the ambulance bay, forcing the hospital to divert patients elsewhere. Protesters shouted that the hospital staff were kidnappers and child molesters. Some followed nurses to their cars as they left the building. Bundy himself was arrested for trespassing on hospital property, and Rachel Thomas, the lead doctor in the ER that night, feared that the crowd would break down the doors and try to take the baby.
In the early hours of the next morning, after getting out of jail, Bundy posted a video urging more of his followers to join the protest. “It’s just sickening, sickening, sickening,” he said. “These people believe they have the authority to take our.”
