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Occupier said he was ready to die • With his shaved head and soft voice, Robert “LaVoy” Finicum resembled a monk— albeit a monk wearing a Stetson and packing a Colt .45 pistol on his hip.

And like a monk, the 68- year- old waxed poetic when asked this month whether he was prepared to die rather than go to jail for occupying a federal wildlife refuge in rural Oregon.

“Absolutely,” he told NBC’s Tony Dokoupil on Jan. 5. “I have been raised in the country all my life. I love dearly to feel the wind on my face, to see the sun rise, to see the moon in the night. I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box.”

That interview proved prescient Tuesday when Finicum died during a confrontation with federal and state authorities. While police had yet to confirm that he was the one killed, his daughter and followers made the announcement, according to The Oregonian, treating his death as a martyrdom.

“America was fired upon by our government and one of liberty’s finest patriots is fallen,” the Bundy Ranch announced on Facebook shortly after the shooting. “He will not go silent into eternity. Our appeal is to heaven.”