COUNCIL, Idaho — The Yantis family was at dinner when the telephone rang. A bull owned by Jack Yantis, 62, had been struck by a vehicle on Route 95, which cuts through Yantis land. He needed to come down.
Collisions like that are not uncommon here in the rural West, where "open range" signs warn drivers that fences might not count for much. And there is usually a hard Western conclusion: The owner of the animal, if it is still alive but deemed beyond recovery, puts a bullet through the animal's head and hauls it away.
This time it all went wrong.
About 45 minutes after the crash, Jack Yantis lay dying on the highway, shot by two deputies from the Adams County Sheriff's Office, who had responded to the collision. Yantis' wife, Donna, 63, who had been ordered to the ground with other bystanders and family members, was having a heart attack.
Much about what happened that night, on a dark stretch of highway just outside Payette National Forest two hours north of Boise, remains uncertain. State and county officials said Jack Yantis' bolt-action rifle discharged, but they have not described the circumstances. Family members say flatly that Yantis was murdered. Inquiries by the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Idaho State Police are just beginning. Donna Yantis is recovering in a hospital in Boise, and one of the people in the vehicle that struck the bull is still hospitalized.
But the convulsion of recrimination, anger and anxiety that has gripped this community of 800 people since the shooting on the night of Nov. 1, much of it directed at the sheriff's office, is not going away, residents said. And though the circumstances from other recent police-involved shootings around the nation are different — including that all the parties involved here are white — the alienation from authority echoes in a way that feels much the same.
"This is a very conservative community in a very conservative state, and people are just distrustful of the government," said Dale Fisk, the editor of The Adams County Record, a weekly newspaper that has been covering the story. Now the uncertainty over what happened has become what Fisk, who played football with Yantis in high school, called "a suffocating blanket."
Sheriff Ryan Zollman said in an interview that he had received numerous death threats, though many of them, he added, judging by the area codes of the phone numbers, had come from far away.
"We'll see how you like it when we gun down your family in cold blood," one recent message said, according to Zollman.
The tensions were also evident Saturday, when about 75 people marched through Council carrying signs reading "Justice for Jack," and "How many bullets constitute excessive force?" A group called 3% of Idaho, which stands for "freedom, liberty and the Constitution," according to its website, brought in about 10 members from around the state to march alongside local residents.
"We heard there might be attempts to disrupt," said Eric Parker, the group's vice president. The march was ultimately peaceful.
There is little doubt, residents and family members said, that Yantis was a tough man who had lived a tough outdoor life. He lost part of a toe in a logging accident, and just a few years ago, when he was in his 50s — and still training horses — he broke his pelvis coming down on a saddle horn when the horse bucked.
Several people over two days of interviews in Council said Yantis, who ran for sheriff himself seven or eight years ago but lost, was also a man who was not about to hold his tongue when he felt wronged.
"He was a good man, he was an honest man, a hard worker, but he did have a bit of a temper," said Bob Grossen, whose family has been in the Council area since the 1880s. "But if you know Jack, if you grew up around Jack, you know Jack would not be the person who would pull a gun on someone — I have no problem saying that."
Yantis' two daughters described him as a soft-spoken man who rarely raised his voice and who loved his animals. He trained his daughters in gun safety from the age of 5. His idea of Sunday worship was to head into Idaho's back country.
"Let's go see what God created," he would say, his daughter Sarah Yantis, 42, recalled.
That Adams County is a tough place to be in law enforcement, though, or to hire or retain officers, is also clear. The pay is low — $14.50 to $15 an hour in a dangerous job — and the territory to patrol is vast. With the two officers involved in the shooting now on paid administrative leave, only four deputies are left to patrol an area bigger than the state of Rhode Island.
Economic stress is also part of the fabric. Adams County has the highest unemployment rate in Idaho, 6.8 percent, compared with 4.2 percent statewide, according to the most recent federal figures. Timbering jobs and tax revenues have declined over the years, and some residents believe that the sheriff's office writes more speeding tickets than necessary just to make up the revenue. The county has about 3,900 residents.
"They have to do their job and I agree with that — you can't speed, and you can't drive drunk," said Sylvia Hulin, who said she has nieces and nephews married into the Yantis family. "But oh my gosh, it's just known all over the country, 'Be careful when you go through Council because they'll stop you.'"
Yantis' 5-year-old bull, struck and wounded on the highway that night, is what connects all the pieces.
Family members said they heard gunshots before arriving at the scene, which was visible from Yantis' home just off the highway, and found that the bull had already been shot, apparently by the deputies, but not killed.
"Every animal deserves to be put down humanely, and they weren't even doing that part right," Sarah Yantis said. "It went wrong from the get-go."
Donna Yantis' nephew, Rowdy Paradis, 42, who was having dinner with the family and went to the highway that night, was more blunt in his assessment.
"It was a needless murder," he said in an interview standing on the muddy ranch driveway. Asked exactly what happened, Paradis said: "Nobody knows. He was leaned over the bull, then one cop grabbed him and it happened."
Part of the frustration in Council is that Zollman has not said definitively whether any cameras on the deputies or their vehicles were turned on that night. Deputies, he said in an interview, have discretion in camera use because of the limits of battery time and memory; for traffic incidents, they do not always hit record.
He said in the interview that he had turned over the cameras to investigators for the state police without checking because he did not want anyone to say that evidence might have been doctored.
"We are in a lose-lose situation, not just for the sheriff's office, but the community," Zollman said. No matter what happens with the state and federal investigations, he said, "there are always going to be people who say we should have acted differently."