Mitchell Taebel has said some unusual things since being arrested and accused Wednesday of leading DPS troopers on an extended chase that ended in a high-speed head-on crash in Tempe.
Taebel has not been shy about his anti-government views.
He said during his initial appearance Thursday morning and a jail interview Thursday afternoon that officers had no probable cause to arrest him, so he resisted an unlawful arrest.
We've seen this before.
Self-proclaimed sovereign citizen Michael Crane is accused of killing Lawrence and Glenna Shapiro in Paradise Valley, and Bruce Gaudet in Phoenix in 2012.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, sovereign citizens believe the U.S. government stopped existing in the 1800s and the current government does not apply any longer. They file loads of paperwork to try to prove their point, and they can be violent if stopped by police.
We asked the SPLC to check out some of Taebel's writings.
"What we see in the filings is not just anger, you know. We see a system of questioning the very nature of the rule of law in the United States," said Ryan Lenz of the SPLC. "In many ways, you start to see that sort of rhetoric as someone goes down the rabbit hole of sovereign citizenry."
Lenz didn't classify Taebel as strictly a sovereign citizen -- he said he's an anti-government extremist.
Taebel invoked a law that he says means he can kill police officers for unlawful arrests, but it doesn't mean what he thinks.
On his website, Taebel says that under 18 USC Section 242, executions of officers are a necessity. He also posted video of himself off-roading in the same red Jeep he drove Wednesday as it rammed into another SUV in Tempe.
Taebel posted almost everything about himself online, including school transcripts, videos of his arrests and lawsuits he's filed that ask for the officers in his arrests to be executed.
He's being held on $400,000 bond.