The furious dad of the young woman who fatally shot two Las Vegas cops and a bystander begged his daughter not to marry the hate-spewing older man she fell for.
“That son of a bitch took my sunshine. He ought to be glad he’s dead or else I’m chasing him down,” Todd Woodruff, 48, told the Chicago Tribune. “She was my sunshine and now she’s gone, and I just don’t think that I’ll be able to get over it.”
Amanda, 22, and her husband executed the two cops at a local pizzeria Sunday before she killed a bystander at a nearby Walmart. She then killed herself after a SWAT team member armed with a rifle shot and killed her husband.
Initial reports said Amanda had killed her hubby, but the Las Vegas Review Journal reported Tuesday that autopsy results showed he was killed by a bullet from an officer’s rifle.
Amanda, her father said, loved animals and once made him drive her to another town to get treatment for an injured bird.
But she changed dramatically after she met Jerad at a flea market in the spring of 2011.
Woodruff was dead set against their September 2012 marriage to the point that he got sick in the restroom before the ceremony, he said.
“I didn’t even want to be there,” he said. “The only reason I was there was because I wanted to walk my daughter down the aisle for the first time. But I puked my head off in the bathroom beforehand because I so didn’t want her to marry him.”
The couple decided to leave Indiana in January for Las Vegas — another move her family staunchly opposed — because Amanda had gotten a transfer from her hometown Hobby Lobby to the Vegas branch.
But Woodruff said the couple had a darker reason for the move: Jerad wanted to be closer to the white supremacist and militia movements that thrive in the Southwest.
“She said there was something out there, some movement she wanted to be a part of,” Woodruff said. “I begged her not to marry him, I begged her not to move to Las Vegas. He was into all this Patriot Nation and conspiracy theory stuff, and the next thing I know, her phone was getting shut off and she was getting isolated from us.”
While her father remembers a sweet girl with a toothy grin, Amanda was showing signs on Facebook as early as 2011 — shortly after hooking up with Jerad — that she had begun to share his violent, anti-government views.
In one post, she warned that “the people of the world” are “lucky I can’t kill you now but remember one day I will get you because one day all hell will break loose and I’ll be standing in the middle of it with a shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other.”
Woodruff told the Tribune that FBI agents told him Amanda had lost her job at Hobby Lobby because she ditched work to join her hubby at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch during the months-long standoff between militia members and the feds over Bundy’s use of federal lands to graze cattle.
“The whole world was against him and he was just, he was just nuts. He got kicked out of his family’s house, they wouldn’t talk to him, it was just that far out,” Woodruff said.
The Bundys apparently agreed, and tossed the Millers from their ranch — for being too radical.
Woodruff said he talked to Amanda for the last time on Friday.
“Even though I’ve seen the pictures and I’ve seen everything else, I still don’t believe it. It wasn’t her. I just don’t know what kind of hold he had on her.”
Meanwhile, Vegas neighbors admitted that they had repeatedly heard Jerad Miller spew anti-government hate and threaten to kill cops — but did not take it seriously until it was too late.
“You can’t have a five-minute conversation without him talking about the government — how much he hates the government and how he wanted to do something about it,” neighbor Larry Burnette told the Las Vegas Sun. “He had talked about [killing cops]. I thought he was blowing off hot steam.”
Another neighbor, Kelly Fielder, took the white supremacist psychos in after they had been booted from their own apartment in the same complex.
“He was just talking out of the side of his neck. That’s what I thought. Just talking trash,” she told the paper. “I know I should’ve [called the police], but I didn’t.”
The pair described Jerad as full of rage, and said Amanda was less strident but completely devoted to her husband.
“They were about as close as you can be for husband and wife,” Burnette said. “I rarely heard any arguments between them.”
Fielder described Amanda Miller as a “fun-loving female” who loved a good laugh.
“Amanda was beautiful,” Fielder told the paper. “Me and her, we just watched TV. We’d watch ‘Law and Order: SVU,’ ‘King of the Hill.’ She made me laugh.”
Miller didn’t share his wife’s sense of humor, and began posting more strident messages on social media after arriving in Vegas.
Authorities said the couple — who often dressed as the Batman comic book characters The Joker and Harley Quinn — targeted the two cops at random.
Officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, were having lunch at CiCi’s Pizza about 11:20 a.m. when the shooters yelled, “This is the start of the revolution” and “We’re freedom fighters!,” cops said.
Jerad shot both before Amanda pulled a handgun and also shot both of the officers as they lay wounded.
The couple draped a “Don’t Tread on Me” Revolutionary War-era flag and a swastika over Beck’s body, and pinned a note to Soldo’s body that declared, “This is the beginning of the revolution.”
They then ran to a nearby Walmart, and were confronted inside by good Samaritan Joseph Wilcox, 31, who was legally carrying a handgun and tried to stop Jared before he was shot dead.
Debra Wilcox said her son was a “mama’s boy” who wanted to protect people.
He and a pal, Jeremy Tanner, had gone to the Walmart to buy a modem when they head Jerad Miller shout, “This is a revolution!”
Tanner said he froze, but that Wilcox wanted to stop Miller.
“He didn’t think twice when he went after the gunman,” Tanner said.
Also Tuesday, the Daily Mail reported that the Millers were big supporters of a fringe candidate for Nevada governor — who once said the Sandy Hook, Conn., school massacre was a hoax set up by President Obama to boost gun control efforts.
And Independent American Party candidate David VanDerBeek predicted there would be more anti-government violence because of the growing power of the federal government.
“My impression is that if this government keeps going down the path it is going down, we will continue to see this kind of violence as people feel desperate and feel like no one’s listening,” he told the paper.
The wacky politician even posted a YouTube video called “If Obama sends police to take your guns, execute them,” the paper said.