Wolfclan Armory, a knife and weapons shop that has been based in Creswell, is planning a move to Main Street in Cottage Grove, the Cottage Grove Sentinel reported March 21.
Wolfclan is owned by the Laskey family. Son, Jacob Laskey, was arrested Jan. 20 on charges of second-degree assault, menacing, unlawful use of a weapon and second-degree criminal trespassing. Jacob Laskey was on federal probation, having served 11 years in prison for his involvement in the 2002 hate crime against a Eugene synagogue.
As Eugene Weekly reported in January, he was photographed with members of the hate group American Front after his release.
Laskey claims to have burned hundreds of copies of EW in response to an article on Antifa. He posted a video of the fire on the Wolfclan Armory YouTube page, as well as a number of other videos including a defense of white nationalist cannabis entrepreneur Bethany Sherman. Laskey later began posting as the “Antiantifa supremacist.” Many of the videos are shared on Wolfclan Armory’s Facebook page. However, Wolfclan owner Jeanette Laskey told the Sentinel that “it wasn’t Wolfclan that posted those things. It was her son, Jacob.”
And as the Sentinel reports, Jeanette Laskey “said she and her husband are not racist. She contended that they had been “threatened” by Antifa and that, while she couldn’t discuss her son’s latest court case, she believed he had stopped taking his medication.”
The proposed opening has engendered protest. Cottage Grove resident Venice Mason told EW she would be protesting and The Optimism page, run by Sarah Rose, posted on March 21 that Backstage Bakery and Cafe in Cottage Grove was providing “free coffee for anyone down there protesting.” She writes, “I got me my coffee and my love rays.” She adds that “there has already been some verbal accosting towards the protest starter Venice Celt Rain ~ who is asking business owners and residents to make it known we don’t accept the hatred here.”
