Burning Hate: The Stormer's Stormtroopers

This is the story of Wil Zachary Smith, and the third installment in the Burning Hate series - stories of the men who marched with tiki torches on August 11, 2017. Read the introductory piece here. Read the first and second installments.  

Azzmador is missing.

It sounds like the plot of a young adult novel about a racist wizard, but there's nothing magical about Robert Warren Ray, a 56 year old nazi propagandist with a string of DUI arrests and an outstanding felony warrant in Albemarle County for pepper spraying counter protesters on the night of August 11, 2017.  

When he arrived in Charlottesville in August 2017 flanked by his redheaded bodyguards, Billy and Wil, Azzmador was a celebrity in the niche online subculture of rabid antisemites and race warriors who read The Daily Stormer, a nazi blog edited by Andrew Anglin (who has also since gone into hiding to avoid collection of a growing number of multi-million dollar legal judgments).

Today, despite five years as a fugitive on charges in Albemarle County and a 2020 federal bench warrant for failing to show up for a deposition, Robert Ray is nowhere to be found.

Robert Ray had a busy summer in 2017. On June 10, he led a contingent of racists to Hermann Park in Houston where a militia group called This Is Texas organized a rally in response to a hoax, believing antifa planned to destroy the Sam Houston statue. The militia members taking an armed stand on behalf of a monument to a slaveholder didn't take too kindly to the more explicit racism of Azzmador's crew and ejected the group from the rally. Video from that day shows Ray leading a group that included his body guard Billy Williams, the violently misogynistic William Fears, and a young Thomas Ryan Rousseau. Later that summer, Rousseau would wrest control of the neo-nazi group Vanguard America from its founder Dillon Hopper. After Unite the Right, Rousseau rebranded Vanguard America as Patriot Front in an effort to shed the group's association with Heather Heyer's murderer after photos emerged of James Alex Fields dressed identically to members of Vanguard America and marching in their midst just hours before the murder.

A week after his scuffle with the militia in Houston, Azzmador, with his pair of redheaded bodyguards, showed up in Austin where influential alt-right speakers addressed a small crowd of Vanguard America members led by Rousseau.

After the event, when confronted in a restaurant by a Jewish patron, Ray reportedly told the man, "We'll be throwing you in an oven."

When Azzmador made a public appearance, there were two things you could count on: he's going to say a slur on camera and somewhere lurking behind him, you'll see one or both of these Texans.

William "Billy" Williams and Wil Zachary Smith* are big bearded redheads from the tiny north Texas town of Nocona. With their similar names, red beards, large frames, and hailing from the same small town, the pair can be hard to tell apart. For those of us having trouble, Azzmador gave a straight to camera interview on the morning of August 12, 2017 introducing his security team, calling Billy and Wil "Texan" and "Hammer," respectively. And, in a second stroke of luck, Azzmador confesses to a felony in the same one minute clip.

The 'gassing' Azzmador so proudly recounts the morning after the torch march was captured on film. In a wide shot taken by photojournalist Zach D. Roberts from above the crowd, you can play a sort of cursed game of Where's Waldo, but instead of Waldo's recognizable red and white stripes, you're looking for a bearded bigot in a red hat, the stream of his Sabre Red® pepper spray illuminated by a camera flash.

In June of 2018, an Albemarle County grand jury returned indictments against both Robert Ray and Wil Smith for 'malicious release of gas,' but the arrests never materialized. Ray had gone into hiding. Smith was always right at home in Nocona and there are no clear answers about the failure of local police to properly execute the fugitive warrant when Smith was arrested on unrelated charges in Texas in 2021.

In what may start to feel like a theme in these cases, the second man to release pepper spray in this video was originally brought to public attention by Christopher Cantwell, the man who sprayed first in that clip. After two of the counter protesters Cantwell assaulted that night swore out a criminal complaint, Cantwell filed a lawsuit against them. In both his criminal defense and throughout the course of that lawsuit, Cantwell argued that it was not his pepper spray that had affected his victims, but the pepper spray released by the mysterious man with a dragon tattoo on his forearm, referred to throughout Cantwell's filings only as 'Dragon Arm.' The attention Cantwell drew to 'Dragon Arm' in that doomed effort to save himself from criminal charges led directly to Wil Smith being identified as the mysterious tattooed man and indicted as the man behind the felonious spray. Smith was indicted on the malicious release of gas charge in June 2018, with Cantwell's plea deal downgrading his felony charge for the same offense to misdemeanor assault entered the following month.

After four and a half years living openly in his hometown of Nocona, TX while wanted on a felony charge in Virginia, Wil Smith's luck finally ran out. He was taken into custody on the pepper spray charges in January 2023. He is currently being held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail awaiting a bond hearing.

While Smith was in custody awaiting trial for malicious release of gas, a February 2023 grand jury returned a second indictment against him - this time for burning an object with intent to intimidate. Because he was already in custody for the malicious release of gas charge, the second indictment was never sealed. His will likely be the test case for what is to come - as the first of the torch marchers to be arrested, Wil Smith will go on trial for both charges in May.

And Azzmador is still missing.

*A note on Wil Smith's name: Birth records show Wilton Riley Atteberry born to Riley Monroe Atteberry and Lisa Euthelva Smith on September 21, 1984. Both parents went on to remarry more than once. Wil's father Riley Atteberry married Julia Weatherread in 1999, the same year Riley Atteberry's nephew Selden Atteberry married Julia's sister India Weatherread. India Weatherread was Wil's aunt by marriage twice over when he married her daughter Lydia Weatherread in 2004. All of these marriages have since ended.

I've been unable to turn up court records for a formal name change, but Montague County records show a civil filing from 2007 listing Wil Smith and Wil Atteberry as aliases for the same individual. A 2003 Montague County criminal case lists him only as "Wil Zachary Smith" with the same date of birth.
I would probably also start using my mother's maiden name if I married my cousin, even if that was just a technicality, though I have no primary source indicating the exact timing of or reason for the change.
Albemarle County court records list his charges under the name "Will Zachary Smith."