A standoff in gun country
After the opening of a tactical weapons site in rural Vermont, a zoning dispute has escalated
PAWLET, Vt. — Fear has gradually spread in the town of Pawlet.
In the hills west of town — which is where the trouble started — the houses are remote, separated by wind-scoured stretches of cropland. Those people are the most jittery.
Some of them have installed cameras with infrared lights so they could pick up figures that might be moving in the dark around their houses. A few have invested in bulletproof vests.
None of it makes them feel entirely safe. Michelle Tilander, 63, a retired physical therapist who moved to West Pawlet 10 years ago, said she had written a letter to be opened in case she or her husband should be hurt or killed.
“The police come in, they’ll find that envelope and they’ll know who to question,” she said.
She is talking about Daniel Banyai, a 47-year-old New Yorker who, attracted by Vermont’s relaxed gun laws, bought 30 acres in this rural town of around 1,400 and transformed it into his dream project, a training camp where visitors could practice shooting as if engaged in armed combat.
Whether those fears are warranted is a question that has preoccupied Vermont law enforcement for months. Certainly, the dispute has escalated over three years from a zoning matter into something more combustible, as Banyai resisted the town’s demands to dismantle his weapons training facility, Slate Ridge. Anonymous threats to his opponents have appeared online.
He has argued that his project is protected under the Second Amendment, and, over social media, has called for fellow gun rights advocates to back him up.
“I’m never leaving this land,” he said in an interview. “And I didn’t ask for this war to start, but I’m going to see it through. I want to see through my victory because I bought this land free and clear.”
These collisions do not typically happen in Vermont, whose lenient approach to guns grew out of a centuries-old culture of hunting and farming. But just as school shootings have shaken those shared assumptions, so too have the belligerent public politics of the Trump era.
The State Police have resisted stepping in, saying they do not believe Banyai has violated any Vermont state law. But a January court order set the stage for confrontation, ruling that Banyai must stop using Slate Ridge for training, and the town is now seeking a permanent injunction that could culminate in foreclosure.
“The question is, kind of, how does this end?” said Jessica Van Oort, 44, a Pawlet shop owner who serves as chair of the town’s planning commission.
Banyai, a stocky man from upstate New York with a bushy, untrimmed beard, presented himself to Pawlet’s development board in 2018 as “a veteran who is passionate about guns.” He was mysterious about his past, alluding to overseas service in the Middle East but refusing to offer any details.
His goal was to open a tactical weapons training site featuring as few limits as possible, allowing firearms banned or frowned upon in other places, he said in an interview this month. He chose Vermont specifically because it allowed “constitutional carry,” or carrying a weapon without a permit, he said.
He was aware that similar projects — like a gun range planned for the town of Warner, New Hampshire — had been blocked by community opposition, and sought to avoid that outcome. His predecessor’s mistake, he said, was trying to obtain licenses from the town before starting operation.
“He went to ‘Let me ask for permission,’ ” Banyai said. “Here, I asked for forgiveness.”
In front of the building he uses for instruction, Banyai flies the flag of the Green Mountain Boys, the militia formed in 1770 to keep out land surveyors from New York, then a British province.
On his land, in facilities he said cost $1.6 million, visitors can reenact a range of field exercises — a suburban house, for home invasions; a large open space surrounded by berms, for carjacking and vehicle assaults; and shipboard structures, for high-seas piracy. Months of protests, he said, have made such exercises relevant to many Americans.
“People are more believing the hypotheticals with all the rioting,” he said. “People are getting more conscientious of, you know, how do I defend myself?”
He said that most of his visitors came from states with more restrictive gun laws, like New York and Massachusetts, and that he allowed a militia to train at the site, though he would not identify it. Banyai said he had selected the plot in West Pawlet because it was isolated and would not disturb the neighbors.
That turned out to be wrong. Tilander recalls an afternoon in 2018, when she and her husband, Paul, were sitting in their backyard, and began to hear a kind of shooting they had never heard before.
The Tilanders are gun owners themselves; for years, they belonged to a sportsmen’s club, enjoying afternoons of target shooting followed by convivial steak dinners. What they were hearing from Banyai’s land was something entirely different.
“All of a sudden, we hear ARs — several ARs — going off, all at the same time, over and over and over,” she said, referring to variants of the AR-15 line. “Paul just said, ‘What is going on around here? It sounds like Vietnam.’ ”
The neighbors mobilized against Banyai’s new weapons range in the usual way. They complained about the noise. They circulated a petition. They showed up at meetings.
One adjoining neighbor “explained that as an owner of a horse stable they have a lot to lose, that they do not want to live through a war, and that they were there first,” read notes from a town development board meeting in 2018.
One reason they were irritated is because Vermont’s land use law, known as Act 250, is notoriously burdensome, requiring permits for anything built for a commercial purpose.
“People do get bent out of shape
when you are flouting the rules everyone else is following,” said Merrill Bent, the town’s attorney since the summer of 2019. “They’re like, wait a minute, I had to get a permit for my chicken coop.”
But over the months that followed, the zoning dispute turned into another, less familiar kind of problem.
It turned out Banyai had no desire to win over the town. Instead, he fought back tenaciously in court, arguing that his weapons site did not require land use permits from the state because he did not charge for admission. At a town meeting, he accused town officials, without evidence, of corruption, homophobia and membership in the Ku Klux Klan. He made it clear he would not back down.
“If there’s two types of people in this world — people that are strong and people that are weak,” he explained in an interview, “I’m among the strong percentage.”
Threats against the complaining neighbors began to appear on Slate Ridge’s Facebook page, unsigned and cryptic, alongside right-wing memes and ominous photographs of stockpiles of weapons.
In 2019, the feed featured a picture of the Tilanders’ house with the caption, “Many of you ask how can I get closer to Slate Ridge. Some people living close are leaving. Here is the house the folks are moving out of. The property will be available real soon.”
Other threats targeted Mandy Hulett, who lives next door to Slate Ridge. Posts called for the “eradication” of the Huletts and listed their home address, and asked followers to find an SUV “to shoot up and then blow up,” and speci
fied the make and model of the car the Huletts had given their teenage daughter.
Banyai has said he does not write or supervise the postings. Last month, however, a judge granted Hulett a two-year stalking order against Banyai, noting that although Banyai denied controlling Slate Ridge’s social media, “the court did not find that testimony to be credible.”
An investigative news outlet, VT Digger, picked up the story, and the neighbors looked into Banyai’s past. An Army spokesman confirmed that Banyai had served briefly in the 1990s, showing up in records as a private, the Army’s lowest rank.
More recently, he had legal troubles in New York. In 2018, court records showed, he had been banned from the campus of Pace University, where he was pursuing a master’s degree in homeland security, for threatening an assistant dean. In 2019, he pleaded guilty to a class D felony charge of criminal weapons possession, and is awaiting sentencing in that case. He has filed a motion to vacate his guilty plea, said his lawyer in the case, Anthony Cillis.
His New York pistol permit has been suspended pending the outcome of the case, according to the Dutchess County District Attorney’s Office.
But in Vermont, the efforts to shutter his training site seemed at a standstill. Tilander said she believed the main reason was that Vermont’s law enforcement bodies, from the town level up to the state, were fearful of an armed confrontation.
“Nobody wants to go in there because everybody’s afraid of him,” she said. “We’re 99 and ninetenths percent sure from everything he said, he has a big cache of heavy-duty weaponry and explosive material.”
In fact, in a state that has long relied on voluntary compliance, the problem of Slate Ridge seemed to fall between jurisdictions.
The state’s Natural Resources Board — which requires permits for any commercial development — refused to send its inspectors to Slate Ridge because of concerns that Banyai might be dangerous, and in 2018 and 2019 asked law enforcement to take over the case, said Evan Meenan, associate general counsel for the body.
The State Police refused, explaining that land use has never fallen within their responsibilities. Since then, the State Police
have also investigated at least 10 complaints against Banyai without finding information to warrant any criminal charge, said Michael Schirling, the state’s commissioner of public safety. Fear, he said, was not a factor.
In recent weeks, Banyai has made the conflict into a political cause, declaring his candidacy for town selectman under the motto “Make Pawlet Great Again.”
Whatever the outcome of the dispute, it has already left its mark on Pawlet.
Last February, Slate Ridge’s Facebook page invited followers to attend the town’s Select Board meeting with weapons and trauma kits; the meeting was canceled because of the coronavirus, but some of the town employees were deeply shaken.
Later, the feed published a photograph of Pawlet’s Town Hall, a plain wooden-framed structure that has stood since 1881.
“No Alarm, No Security Camera, Single Pane Windows, No Deadbolts, 30-40 Minutes Police Response Time, Dead Zone For All Cell Service, No Safe Room,” the caption read, and went on to list the names of six town employees who work there.
In March, the town clerk requested funding to install security cameras in the building.
Van Oort, who is running for the Select Board, said it dawned on her gradually how heavily the town relies on a spirit of voluntary cooperation.
“The real difficulty is, when someone just decides not to obey a civil law, what happens?” she said.
Indeed, no one knows what will happen, later this spring, if the court injunction is made permanent and Banyai is asked to dismantle his gun ranges and pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines to the town.
Robin Chesnut-Tangerman, a former Progressive state representative who has urged the state to intervene, drew a parallel with the Jan. 6 events at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, when “what everyone thought would be a cranky protest” deteriorated into violence.
Hulett said she now looks at Pawlet, where her family has farmed since the 18th century, as an excessively trusting place — naive, in the way that small towns are. Or that is what it was, anyway.
“I think we all kind of let our guard down,” she said. “We’re just not equipped to deal with people like him.”
MINNEAPOLIS — Ever since the pandemic began, Amanda Schermerhorn has put her children’s schooling before her own.
Managing her four kids’ ever-changing remote and in-person class schedules is often a full day’s work. So Schermerhorn, a full-time student at Minnesota State Community and Technical College in Detroit Lakes, works around the clock, carving out time to complete her online classwork late at night and early in the morning.
“Juggling four schedules in addition to mine definitely makes it a lot more hectic,” said Schermerhorn, who used to study during the day while her kids were at school. “We’re all feeling a little stressed.”
College students have battled stress and burnout during the pandemic, but perhaps no group of students has been more overwhelmed than those who are raising children while they pursue a degree. These students are scrambling daily to meet class deadlines, earn a paycheck and oversee their children’s lessons. And they are weathering this exhausting academic year without the in-person study groups, tutoring sessions and campus resources they typically rely on.
Now more than ever, advocates say, colleges and universities must prioritize the roughly 1 in 5 undergraduates who are raising children. Student parents, most of whom are women, are far less likely to finish college than others, with just 37% graduating within six years of enrollment, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The obstacles they face, from child care affordability to economic insecurity, have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.
“Parenting students’ college enrollment is one of the first things that will get sacrificed for
employment or to support their children,” said Carrie Welton, director of policy and advocacy at Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice.
Schermerhorn, 35, has sacrificed sleep, personal time and peace of mind this past year. She’s balancing a full slate of online classes and two internships this semester while caring for her 14-year-old twins, Travis and
Ella, 11-year-old son Sylas and 7-year-old son Richard, who has autism.
When her kids log into class from their home, Schermerhorn stays off the internet to avoid overloading it and waits until night to complete her assignments or parks in front of the college to use the Wi-Fi.
“I want my kids to do well in school, so they are going to take precedence over my work,” Schermerhorn said.
Colleges are doing what they can to support student parents during this time, even though most on-campus services have
been scaled back. They are offering emergency grants to those who are struggling financially. And professors are negotiating deadline extensions and letting parents turn off their webcams during class so they can tend to their kids.
Khou Vue, Metropolitan State University’s student parent and resource coordinator, schedules one-on-one video appointments with students who are struggling to balance their studies and parenthood. She also organizes Zoom workshops and virtual activities to foster a sense of belonging. “We understand that building relationships is a big part of retention,” Vue said.
Advisers at the University of Minnesota’s Student Parent Help Center have had less success arranging virtual meetings and support groups because many students are “Zoomed out,” said Susan Warfield, the center’s program director.
The center’s counselors have instead focused on direct outreach, calling every student
parent twice per semester to see how they are doing. “Some started crying immediately and said, ‘I’m just drowning,’ ” Warfield said. “They were too overwhelmed to think about asking for help.”
State leaders are trying to offer support, too. In his budget proposal released last month, Gov. Tim Walz recommended simplifying the state’s postsecondary child care grant program’s application and award process so more student parents can benefit.
For some parents, the pandemic created the ideal conditions for them to go back to school.
Elena Williams, 29, enrolled in online classes at Minneapolis Community and Technical College last fall. She said she was able to do so only because her full-time job at an accounting firm has also gone remote. Now, Williams can work and pursue a degree from home while caring for her 4-year-old son, Parker.
There are still challenges, like when Parker climbs on his mom’s lap or makes shadow puppets in the background of her Zoom classes — “It’s fun when Mom is on webcam,” Williams laughed. She hopes to eventually earn a bachelor’s degree that will help her secure a promotion and higher salary.
“I don’t want to frame the pandemic as being a good thing, but it’s like I’m getting that opportunity because there’s this increased understanding for what’s going on in people’s lives,” Williams said. She hopes colleges will continue to offer a robust slate of online classes.
Even once the pandemic lets up, Schermerhorn does not expect life to get any less hectic.
Schermerhorn will transfer to Minnesota State University, Moorhead, this fall to pursue a bachelor’s degree in political science. If classes are in person, her round-trip commute from home to the campus will total about two hours.
“Just when you think it can’t get any crazier, then it will,” she said, describing life as a student parent.
SOUTH BEND — This time, Notre Dame made enough plays to knock off a ranked team.
It had been a while.
Prentiss Hubb scored 22 points, Dane Goodwin had 15 and Notre Dame beat No. 11 Florida State 83-73 on Saturday.
The Seminoles (15-5, 11-4 squandered a chance for a second straight Atlantic Coast Conference title, losing out on the title when No. 21 Virginia beat Louisville later Saturday to win the regular-season championship.
The Fighting Irish (10-14, 7-11) had five players score in double figures in the program's first win against a ranked team since a 67-66 victory over Wichita State in November 2017. They had dropped 28 such games in a row.
“I thought we had some edge about us to get loose balls and stick our nose in there and take charges, and that helped us,” coach Mike Brey said. “You're not gonna really run anything pretty against an athletic, switching defense, (but) I thought we did a good job the last two days of practice talking about just opening the floor up and cutting more.”
Cormac Ryan, Nikola Djogo and Nate Laszewski had 11 points apiece for Notre Dame, which had dropped four in a row. Juwan Durham had nine points and nine rebounds.
The Fighting Irish went 28 for 34 at the free-throw line, compared to 15 for 20 for the Seminoles.
“I thought Notre Dame did a better job of being extremely aggressive and hitting the open shots and challenging our defensive discipline by making the extra pass,” Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said. “Then at the end, they hit their free throws.”