How To Catch A War Criminal (In Beaverton)

Nigel Duara: Thirty-three minutes before sunrise one April morning, a man in black tactical gear slammed a battering ram through a cheap plywood door at a run-down Beaverton apartment complex, 50 feet from the Tualatin Valley Highway. He and a half-dozen armed officers poured into the second-floor apartment, screaming for anyone inside to come out, palms open, hands up. A woman named Sammy Yetisen emerged, as did her father and her son, a grade-schooler.

Down the street, in an unmarked car, sat the man who'd spent months studying Yetisen. Ted Weimann, a Portland-based investigator for the Department of Homeland Security, had woven the details of this woman's life, behavior, and movements into his own routine—his morning gym workout, the books on tape he consumed while watching her house.

Agents led Yetisen to the car. Weimann had planned it this way: after the noisy chaos of the extraction, he would stage his own first encounter with Yetisen in a quiet, even consoling environment. They drove in silence, 25 minutes through the predawn streets, to a squat, off-white brick building in Southwest Portland. They walked in silence through double glass doors, past a metal detector, to a dimly lit room with a table and two chairs.

Weimann told Yetisen to sit. She was 39 years old, with a nest of tangled black hair framing heavy-lidded, drowsy eyes and a soft chin. He pulled his chair in close. From a manila folder, he produced a grainy black-and-white photograph of a young woman holding an automatic rifle.

This is you, he said. And this is your gun. You named it Rose.

(thanks, Dugan)