Idaho Sniper Identified: Wess Roley

The sniper who shot dead two firefighters in an ambush in Idaho was identified by officials Monday as 20-year-old Wess Roley — and an eerie photo shows him aiming a sinister glare into the camera.

Roley’s body was found near his weapon at the scene of a fire he started Sunday afternoon to lure the unsuspecting smoke-eaters to the scene, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press.

He ended up killing two responding firefighters and critically wounding a third, authorities said.
It is unclear whether Roley was eventually killed by a cop’s bullet or took his own life, Kootenai County Sheriff Robert Norris told reporters at a press conference.

The chaos began around 2 p.m. on Canfield Mountain, just north of Coeur d’Alene, when smoke started pouring from the woods and first responders rushed to the scene — only to be met by a hail of gunfire coming from the trees.

Firefighters quickly realized they’d been lured into a psychotic trap and desperately called for backup, according to terrifying 911 calls they made from the scene.

“I’m pinned down,” a firefighter said in the frantic call. “It’s clear to me that this fire was set intentionally to draw us in.

“We need law enforcement up here immediately,” he said. “We have another Coeur d’Alene firefighter down. … We’ve got two unresponsive battalion chiefs down, multiple gunshot wounds, two Coeur d’Alene are down.”

The fire was left to burn as reinforcements battled to root out the unseen gunman, before the gunfire eventually stopped and Roley’s body was tracked down in the trees using cellphone information.

Neither of the two firefighters killed have been identified yet, while a third firefighter was left “fighting for his life” after he was struck by a bullet. He is now in stable condition.

A motivation behind the twisted attack remains unclear, but internet sleuths have identified a chilling possible connection to a decades-old incident involving the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department and neo-Nazis.

Sunday’s incident happened 24 years to the day after a 2001 burning of an Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake — just 7 miles north of Coeur d’Alene — during a fire training operation.

The cabin and its compound had been sold to the department after the Aryan Nations’ national leader, Richard Butler, filed for bankruptcy over a settlement involving the shooting of a Native American woman and her son — and the site was torched by the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department during a training exercise.

“I do not think it is a coincidence that on this date in 2001, firefighters in Coeur d’Alene burned down the Aryan Nation founder’s compound in a training exercise after he lost the property in a federal bankruptcy sale. The tragic current events are unfolding nearby,” one suspicious sleuth wrote in a post on X on Sunday.

So far no connection has been made between Roley and white supremacy movements.