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She bought her dream home; a ‘sovereign citizen’ changed the locks
Excerpted...
The official-looking letters started arriving soon after Shanetta Little bought the cute Tudor house on Ivy Street in Newark, New Jersey. Bearing a golden seal, in aureate legalistic language, the documents claimed that an obscure 18th-century treaty gave the sender rights to claim her new house as his own.
She dismissed the letters as a hoax.
And so it was with surprise that Little found herself in her yard on Ivy Street on a June afternoon as a police SWAT team negotiated with a man who had broken in, changed her locks and hung a red-and-green flag in its window. He claimed he was a sovereign citizen of a country that does not exist and for whom the laws of the United States do not apply.
Little was a victim of a ploy known as paper terrorism, a favorite tactic of an extremist group that is one of the fastest growing, according to government experts and watchdog organizations. Known as the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, and loosely based around a theory that Black people are foreign citizens bound only by arcane legal systems, it encourages followers to violate existent laws in the name of empowerment. Experts say it lures marginalized people to its ranks with the false promise that they are above the law.
The man who entered her house, Hubert John of Los Angeles, was arrested June 17 and charged with criminal mischief, burglary, criminal trespass and making terroristic threats. Prosecutors in New Jersey are preparing to take the case before a grand jury, according to Katherine Carter, a spokeswoman for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. He was released on his own recognizance.
But the strange letters declaring that Little’s home is not her own still come. They arrive on faux-consular letterhead using the name Lenapehoking of the Al Moroccan Empire at New Jersey State Republic. Lenapehoking was the land between New York City and Philadelphia that includes New Jersey and was home to the Indigenous Lenape tribe before it was colonized by European settlers. John and his group refer to themselves as Moors.
