In the weeks leading up to the rave, while Fullmer carried out plans for the event, Sheriff Tracy set his sights on disrupting it. Tracy is suspicious of raves; he says they are a breeding ground for drug and alcohol use, for sexual assaults on women, and for violence of other kinds. This is not, he insists, just an idle belief on his part -- Tracy says previous raves within his jurisdiction have caused just this sort of trouble, so when he became aware of Versus II, he knew the crowd would be up to no good.

Versus II opened its gates at around 9 p.m. on Saturday evening. In the three hours before the cops burst in, between 800 and 1,000 people streamed into the place. According to several members in the crowd, there were no sexual assaults or violent incidents of any sort. Mark Byers, one of the half-dozen emergency medical service officers present, attests that there were no health problems. Security personnel at the gates did search ravers as they came in, and according to Fullmer, various types of contraband were confiscated. The rave then uncoiled as planned -- lights pulsed, music blared across the canyon, and people danced.

Tracy, though, had no eye for the entertainment. He had inserted undercover personnel in the crowd, and in the three hours after the gates opened, he says, the agents made five purchases of illegal substances. Drugs were all over the rave, he says, and so he decided to act. He called in the helicopters and ground troops.

For ravers in the crowd, the first sign that anything was amiss came with the lights of a chopper cresting over a nearby ridge. "It gets to be about 11:30 and we all see this light coming from over the mountains and it gets closer and closer," Ashley Hawker, Fullmer's girlfriend, described in an e-mail. "Then it starts shining its light on the entire crowd. That's when I look to my right and ... I see a guy dressed in all green camo and carrying a gun and wearing a helmet. I thought my eyes had deceived me but following right behind him are more big green men carrying fully automatic guns. My whole body starts shaking uncontrollably." Many ravers emphasized the speed with which the police descended; one minute, everything appeared normal, and the next minute, the crowd was surrounded by uniformed men with guns. "It was a military siege," says Jessica Riley, a 25-year-old raver and student at Humboldt State University who attended the party that night. "The light is sweeping all over the ground, and there are all these kids standing there trying to figure out what is going on. The quickness shook a lot of people."

Bewildered as they were, many ravers immediately began to document the raid. "Every single kid with a camera and a phone pulled it out and started taking pictures," Riley says. The move seems to have infuriated the cops. On Coombs' video, you can hear the officers yelling at him to turn off his camera, and on a discussion page documenting personal accounts from the raid, several people say they witnessed kids getting attacked by the cops for refusing to give up their cameras.

Once they were among the crowd, officers directed people toward the exits -- sometimes refusing to allow them to pack up their camping gear -- and began to deal harshly with anyone who resisted. Alaisha Matagi, a 24-year-old woman in the crowd, later posted online that when an officer "in full army attire" told her to leave, she asked, "What's going on?" "At which point I was brutally attacked," she wrote. "Thrown to the ground and in the scuffle punched in the face by SWAT. That was not it either. I suppose I posed some threat as another SWAT member rushed over to subdue me to the ground putting his knee in my back and arresting me. At that point I am screaming to a patron 'what's going on?' He is just as confused as I am. At that point another SWAT member came over and kicked me in the leg. Let me tell you that I also only weigh 130 pounds. I had three grown men attack and beat me and throw me to ground for absolutely no reason at all. Not to mention being dragged to a van and violently being tossed in and taken to jail. Fined for resisting arrest and another outrageous charge [failure to obey police]." Matagi's account is supported by Coombs' video -- she's the woman in the red-hooded sweatshirt being held to the ground by many officers -- as well as by several witnesses who spoke to Salon.

In interviews and on message boards, other ravers described additional instances of harsh tactics by the police. Some people say tear gas was used; others say Taser weapons were drawn and fired. Several in the crowd point out that in infrared footage of the scene shot from the police helicopter that night, an officer in the air can be heard directing officers on the ground to fire a Taser at some people. And virtually everyone who spoke to Salon said they saw officers drawing and pointing automatic weapons at ravers, and that this tactic really freaked people out. Heath McBee, who owns an audio firm called Euphoric Beats and was handling the sound that evening, says he was resting on a cot in his truck when officers slammed open his doors and began yelling at him to shut the music down. "I woke up to an M-16 pointed at me," McBee says, like nothing he'd ever seen in nine and a half years of working raves.

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