Federal prosecutors on Wednesday accused two military veterans of assaulting a soldier and stealing equipment from an Army special operations compound in Washington state, a brazen break-in that ended with a cache of weapons and Nazi paraphernalia discovered in one of their homes.
State and federal police arrested Charles Ethan Fields and Levi Austin Frakes after executing a warrant Monday for alleged assault, robbery and theft of government property, according to the complaint shared with Military.com by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of Washington.
Prosecutors say Fields and Frakes entered Joint Base Lewis-McChord on Sunday evening through the main gate and made their way to a facility used by Charlie Company, 75th Ranger Regiment. Dressed in Ranger fitness training attire and wearing masks, the pair allegedly stole military gear after bludgeoning a soldier with a hammer and fleeing the scene.
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Before being attacked, the soldier, who was not identified in court documents, confronted the veterans, who were in the process of stealing tens of thousands of dollars worth of ballistic helmets, rifle plates and communications equipment.
As the soldier was questioning the pair, ordering them to remove their masks, one of them attacked him, striking him in the head and torso with a hammer. The soldier fought off the attacker, taking the hammer, but "surrendered" as the other assailant was brandishing a knife, according to court records.
The soldier was treated at the base hospital after a "large amount of blood loss," images in the complaint show.
The pair allegedly stole $14,000 worth of gear, but dropped much of it at the scene when fleeing. Law enforcement discovered blood on their rucksacks and boots, according to the complaint.
The Army Criminal Investigation Division requested a search warrant after discovering the rucksacks filled with the equipment that they left behind, as well as the hat that bore Fields' last name. During the search of one of the homes, the CID seized 35 weapons, including rifles, pistols, short-barreled rifles, an MG32 machine gun and suppressors -- some of which appeared to have been produced using a 3D printer -- along with night vision equipment, body armor, flashbang grenades, smoke canisters and blasting caps.
Images from the complaint also show Nazi and white supremacist paraphernalia in one of the residences, including flags with a swastika and "SS" lightning bolts, murals and literature "in every bedroom and near several stockpiles of weapons and military equipment."
Investigators said that one of the veterans admitted in an interview to stealing military property from the Ranger compound for "about two years" to later sell or trade.
Fields and Frakes registered a company in Washington billed as a "defense manufacturing and training" service that featured imagery associated with Nazi ideology in its logo, according to the website and public business records. The company did not return a request for comment.
In social media, they listed several military units as "clients," including the 75th Ranger Regiment, U.S. Army Special Forces, 1st Marine Division and the Coast Guard. Military.com contacted the units on Wednesday. A spokesperson for the Ranger Regiment acknowledged the inquiry, but referred the publication to Army Special Operations Command.
A spokesperson for the Coast Guard said that it "has never contracted with or been a client of" their company. The other units did not respond by deadline.
Fields served a short stint as an infantryman in the active-duty Army from 2017 to 2021, deploying twice to Afghanistan and leaving the service with the rank of sergeant, service records show. The complaint notes both suspects previously served in the military, citing Pentagon records, and that the soldier who tried to confront them learned Fields had been assigned to the Ranger battalion he tried to steal from sometime around 2021.
Military.com contacted the Marine Corps regarding Frakes' service, as a social media page shows that he served in the branch for four years. A spokesperson could not provide his service record, but noted that "there is a Marine veteran with that name."
The two men were booked into Thurston County Jail, and a judge set bail for each at $500,000 on Tuesday during a preliminary appearance, according to the complaint. Military.com contacted the county public defense office that has taken on their cases, according to its director, Patrick O'Connor, but their attorneys had not been assigned as of Wednesday pending charges.
The Thurston County Sheriff's Office did not respond to the publication on Wednesday, but the elected sheriff, Derek Sanders, said on social media that an FBI SWAT team executed the warrant.
"The suspects identified in this case were actively involved in Nazi white nationalist efforts," he said. The county lists both veterans as being charged with unlawful possession of a short-barreled rifle and explosives.
The military has faced persistent challenges in securing its weapons and equipment, including a notable incident in November when 31 M17 pistols went missing from Fort Benning, Georgia; only three have been recovered. A 2021 investigation by The Associated Press revealed that at least 1,900 firearms disappeared from military stockpiles during the 2010s, with some later turning up at crime scenes. The losses have been blamed on a range of security lapses, including gaps in surveillance and poor recordkeeping.
Of the attack on the soldiers, Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow with George Washington University's Program on Extremism, said that "they were not afraid to use violence in order to gain access to the equipment that they were looking for."
"Veterans who end up becoming involved in these extremist movements often look backward toward their military service as a source of inspiration," he said, citing cases such as Timothy McVeigh, an Army veteran who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing and also stole military equipment from a National Guard armory.
"They're just following in their footsteps; they're continuing this pattern that we've seen before," he said.
The complaint said that the pair were scanned into the main gate of JBLM around 8 p.m. Sunday and that they had allegedly used bolt cutters to break a lock into the Ranger compound. Investigators tied Frakes' vehicle to one seen on surveillance cameras on base. It was unclear how they had apparently easy access to the gate and how the unit accounted for its equipment if thefts had been occurring for two years.
"That tells me that there is a lack of proper accountability for sensitive items and military property going on within that unit," Baumgartner, an Army veteran, added.
The Pentagon has entirely abandoned addressing far-right extremism in the military community under the Trump administration. While there is no evidence service members or veterans are more likely to be radicalized, experts have said they are force multipliers to extremist organizations given their inherent credibility and tactical knowledge.
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