Death came swiftly to the Idaho mountains. Bullets pierced the summer air. Heroes fell where they stood. The trigger belonged to 20-year-old Wess Roley, a drifter whose dreams of becoming a firefighter turned into their worst nightmare.
Two firefighters were shot dead and a third wounded when they were ambushed by a man who set the fire to lure them to the area. The victims answered a call that was never meant to save lives. It was designed to end them.
Who Is Wess Roley?
But who was Wess Roley exactly? The 20-year-old suspect came from a family of arborists and had been working in the tree service industry while trying to figure out his career path. He wanted to be a firefighter and was reportedly pursuing that goal. The young man who once dreamed of saving lives became the one who took them away.
Wess Roley was only 20 years old. That means for the last 10 years, his hate-filled, far-right MAGA cultist parents indoctrinated their hate, bigotry, and prejudice into his young, developing mind.
— Daniel Hennessy (@DK_Hennessy) June 30, 2025
They are as much to blame as he is for pulling the trigger. pic.twitter.com/tLZzDXci2u
Roley moved to Idaho in 2024, where he had his own apartment. Since then he was living out of his vehicle and had only a handful of minor contacts with area police. His grandfather described him as optimistic, someone still figuring things out. “He loved firefighters,” his grandfather told NBC News. “It didn’t make sense that he was shooting firefighters. Maybe he got rejected or something.”
Sheriff Bob Norris revealed that Roley set the fire to “ambush” firefighters, with the deadly encounter beginning over his vehicle being parked in the area. Moreover, Roley was found dead with what appeared to be a shotgun and an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Two firefighters were fatally shot and a third was out of surgery and stable as of Sunday night. However, the motive behind this deadly ambush remains unknown. A young man’s broken dreams became a community’s darkest nightmare.
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