Three members of Rise of the Moors, the heavily-armed antigovernment group that held an hours-long standoff with police on Interstate 95 July 4 weekend, will appear in court Tuesday.
On July 3, at roughly 1:30 a.m., a Massachusetts State Police trooper spotted a group of men refueling multiple vehicles in the breakdown lane of I-95 in Wakefield. The group, dressed in military-style body armor, was carrying a combination of pistols and rifles, police said.
The men were unable to produce licenses for the weapons when requested by the trooper, who called for backup.
“You can imagine 11 armed individuals standing with long guns slung on an interstate highway at two in the morning certainly raises concerns and is not consistent with the firearms laws we have in Massachusetts,” state police Col. Christopher Mason later said.
A nine-hour standoff between the men and state and local police ensued, shutting down parts of I-95, and ending with 11 arrests after police used a sonic blast to disable members of the group who would not surrender.
On Tuesday, three of the men — Steven Perez, 31, and Aaron Jimenez, 27, both of the Bronx, N.Y., as well as Aaron Lamont Johnson, 29, of Detroit, Mich. — will be arraigned in Woburn Superior Court, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said.
The trio, along with five other men, were indicted on Sept. 1 by a Middlesex County grand jury on a litany of charges, most of which were weapons and ammunition violations, Ryan’s office said.
Two other men — Omar Malik Antonio, 36 of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Quinn Cumberlander, 40, of Pawtucket, R.I — will be arraigned later this week.
Rise of the Moors is not a hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center says. Rather, the group, which identifies as Moorish Americans, believes themselves to be the first inhabitants of Rhode Island.
“They consider that their territory as opposed to the territory of the United States of America,” Rachel Goldwasser, an SPLC research analyst, said in July.
Some members of the group have rejected the court’s authority in previous courtroom appearances. Cumberlander told a District Court judge in July that he was a “foreign national” and wanted to appear in a federal court, while two other men refused to provide the court with their names.
In late July, several Rise of the Moors members filed a federal lawsuit seeking a change in court venue and $70 million in damages. The men claimed they were subject to “defamation, discrimination of national origin and deprivation of their rights under the color of law,” and asked that the case be brought to an “international court, consular court, or federal court.”
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