When Gina Gonzalez scrambled, limping, from the living room couch where her bleeding daughter lay dying to grab her husband's pistol from the kitchen, she was only intent on trying to stay alive. When she fired off a succession of rounds from the gun, huddled in a corner, her sole purpose was to drive out the gang of intruders posing as Border Patrol officers who, only minutes before, had entered their home and gunned down her husband, blasted her in the leg and chest, and then coldly shot her 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia, in the face as she pleaded for her life.

In that mad scramble, Gonzalez indeed succeeded in driving out the intruders. What she could not have known at the time was that, in doing so, that night's horror also became the tragic end of the road for the crumbling vigilante border-watch movement known as the Minutemen.

The intruders were almost entirely strangers to Gonzalez. Certainly she had never met the squat, loud blonde woman who led them into her home in rural Arivaca, Arizona, close to midnight on May 30, 2009, dressed in camo and pretending to be from the Border Patrol. Nor did she recognize the tall, dark-haired man in black face paint with her who gunned them all down. But because she fought back after first pretending to be dead, they fled the house in a panic, leaving behind a wealth of clues: an AK-47 sitting atop her kitchen stove, a silver revolver dropped in the roadway, and most of all, fresh blood from the minor wound she inflicted on the gunman's leg. All with lots of DNA samples for forensic detectives.

Those, combined with more clues that Gonzalez was able to give detectives two days later from her hospital bed, were enough to set detectives on the track of the key suspects within a matter of days. Within two weeks they made three arrests – a 41-year-old woman from Everett, Washington, named Shawna Forde, and two men who participated in her renegade border-watch organization, Minuteman American Defense, or MAD: Jason Bush, a sometime white supremacist then living in eastern Washington who was identified as the gunman, and Albert Gaxiola, an Arivaca resident who had fingered the home of Raul "Junior" Flores as a target.

The Minutemen's scheme had been to target drug dealers, rob them of their cash and drugs, and use the proceeds to finance a "super militia" that would both patrol the border and fight the nefarious New World Order. At one planning meeting, Forde told other Minutemen that the "drug house" they were targeting in Arivaca contained up to $3 million in cash and drugs and that the family was just a front for the drug cartels.

Instead, the home of Junior Flores and Gina Gonzalez contained nothing more than their 9-year-old daughter; the invaders found neither drugs nor money (in fact, they missed some $3,000 in cash Gina Gonzalez had tucked inside a pocket of her purse to pay bills). Junior Flores was indeed involved in the pot-smuggling business, but he was a small-time operator known to keep those dealings well away from his home. The depth of these killer Minutemen's ineptitude was hard to overstate: they had killed a little girl for absolutely nothing.

National leaders of the Minuteman movement – particularly its cofounders, Chris Simcox of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, or MCDC, and Jim Gilchrist, leader of the Minuteman Project – hastily distanced themselves from Shawna Forde and her offshoot organization. Simcox claimed that his organization had kicked Forde out back in 2007, when she had become embroiled in allegations of lying and pretending to be a senior leader in the Washington state chapter of the Defense Corps: "We knew that Shawna Forde was not just an unsavory character but pretty unbalanced, as well," he said. Not only that, he claimed that her earlier dismissal proved his organization did a good job of weeding out extremists from within its ranks.

Similarly, Jim Gilchrist took down material from his Minuteman Web site supporting MAD, Forde's group, and announced his "condolences to the victims," declaring that Forde and her associates were "rogues," and insisting that his relationship with her was never "extensive." "They happened to use the Minuteman movement as a guise, as a mask," he said.

Simcox's MCDC spokesperson, Carmen Mercer, decried the media coverage of the Forde case in a press statement. "The media continues to flame the fires of ethnic friction and faux racism through their ridiculous reporting that this is a Minuteman crime — the media is irrational and reckless in perpetrating this despicable propaganda," she wrote. "The Arivaca home invasion had nothing to do with the Minutemen, nothing to do with race or illegal immigration, it had to do with psychopathic criminals preying on other criminals."

However, an investigation of these claims and characterizations by AlterNet and the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute makes clear that they are patently false. Not only did both Simcox and Gilchrist have extensive dealings with Forde over the years, both repeatedly courted her work and her organization. Simcox didn't chase Forde out of the MCDC: he begged Forde not to leave his fold. In the case of Gilchrist, one witness to the conversation says that, in 2008, he and Forde discussed her plan to finance the movement by ripping off drug dealers — and that he was enthusiastic about it. Forde not only was fully empowered by Minuteman movement leadership, she was enacting a violent scheme with what she believed was their tacit approval.

As it happens, Shawna Forde's rise within the Minutemen coincides with the rise of internal feuding that marked the beginnings of the border-watch movement's gradual decay. And it may not be a coincidence.

The first rift in the united front of the Minuteman movement arose in late 2005, only months after the movement had attracted massive media coverage for its springtime border-watch campaign, the Minuteman Project. Cofounders Simcox and Gilchrist apparently decided in December of that year — during a Conservative Political Action Committee gathering — to part ways, largely over how to handle the large sums of money the movement was attracting. So Gilchrist kept the Minuteman Project as his own, and Simcox fired up his own organization, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. By midsummer of 2006 the split had become public, and Gilchrist began openly distancing himself from Simcox.

By December 2007, the split was an open feud, especially after Gilchrist announced his endorsement of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee; Simcox, who backed Ron Paul's candidacy, retorted: "No, the Minutemen don't support Huckabee. Jim Gilchrist supports Huckabee. This endorsement threatens to destroy Gilchrist's credibility and the credibility of his organization forever." Gilchrist replied by characterizing Simcox as part of a cadre of "professional extremists and charlatans."

Forde first began showing up at Minuteman events in Washington state in the spring of 2006, roughly at the same time Simcox appeared before the Bellingham human-rights commission, denying that the movement condoned racists or extremists within their ranks.

Forde started out as a simple participant, counter-demonstrating at an immigrant-rights rally in Seattle, and participating in border watches in the Bellingham area that the Minutemen had been organizing. But she moved up quickly in the ranks, largely because of a leadership vacuum in the organization, soon claiming a variety of leadership positions in the Washington Minuteman Detachment (as they called themselves), including "media director" and "events director." In November of that year, she appeared on a public TV "town hall" discussion of immigration broadcast from Yakima, and was described as representing both the Minutemen and a conservative immigration think tank, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, though the latter denies she was ever affiliated with them.

A few weeks later, in early December 2006, Forde wrote to Simcox, portraying herself as media director for the Washington state MCDC chapter and urging him to look hard at the lack of leadership in the state. Simcox wrote back: "Thanks for the heads up on your concerns Shawna. Thank you for everything you are doing. … You call us any time you need something. I'm investigating beginning tomorrow. Send me what you have and we'll make a trip up there to hold some meetings to get things back on track."

Tags: chris simcox, jim gilchrist, minutemen, minutement civil defense corps, shawna forde, the minutemen project