They painted themselves like clowns of anarchy and took to the web to spew threats and violent fantasies about gunning down police officers, says the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Jerad Miller was the one with the rap sheet, but his wife, Amanda, fired the final shots. For all the evidence they left behind, the killers' precise motives remain unclear, though police said they appear to have acted alone. Jerad, 31, and Amanda, 22, were loaded for a long fight when they left their apartment early Sunday morning. Police said they told neighbors they planned to murder cops.
“He knew he wasn't going to survive that day,” an official with knowledge of the investigation said of Jerad Miller. “Cops were going to die, and he was going to die.” The two Las Vegas police officers they chose, seemingly at random, had stopped for lunch. The couple may have been planning a larger assault on an unidentified court building. Though the only known assailants are dead, local police have reacted with caution, doubling up with two officers in each patrol car. The police department is putting plain-clothes officers in uniform as a show of force and solidarity. For the time being, there were will be 300 to 350 officers on patrol, rather than the usual 150. An official described Sunday's incident as “an isolated attack,” but police still are investigating possible ties to militia and hate groups.