The alleged gunman who opened fire on two Colorado State Patrol troopers Aug. 25 had an outstanding warrant for violating parole, a violent side and a major distrust of government, according to estranged family members and court records.

Robert Rudolf Richards Jr., 51, lived an unknown life separate from his family, according to his cousin, David Foruria. The two had basically no contact for around 17 years, and he had no idea Richards was living in Colorado or that he was killed after allegedly shooting and injuring troopers Skylar Hoehn and Clark Tinan following a traffic stop.

Richards’ motive is as much of a mystery to the family as it is to the public.

“He was lone-wolfing it. I guess family wasn’t very important to him,” Foruria said. “He lived a mysterious life from us. We had no clue where he was or what he was doing at any given time.”

In an interview, Richards’ ex-wife said he had a desire to live off the grid because he hated the government and thought like a sovereign citizen, an anti-government activist who believes that federal, state and local laws do not apply to them without their consent.

He also believed in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, she said.

A Facebook account registered to the username Robert.Richards.12 of Loveland, where authorities say Richards was living before his death, has dozens of anti-government posts and pictures.

“Every corporation is owned by BlackRock. BlackRock is a Jewish Trojan horse. Their business model is to kill you for a profit and steal everything you have, like this country,” one post read.

Richards’ desire to be off the grid led to a life of dealing and using drugs, the ex-wife alleged. She said he smoked marijuana like it was cigarettes and would take unknown pills at the same time.

She said he had a violent streak, alleging that he strangled her and almost pushed her over a railing at a hotel in another state after kidnapping their three children to force her to sign a tax refund check for him.

“He had a high temper. It was like walking on eggshells in our relationship,” she said of their six years together.

He was never charged, but she said the incident led to her filing a restraining order against him in 2001.

After that, he practically vanished.

Until 2018 when a stranger tracked her down on social media and told her that his girlfriend was having issues with Richards, her roommate, being “very verbally aggressive.”

The stranger’s message said Richards didn’t have a valid Idaho, no banking accounts and that he worked “under the table” handyman-type jobs with no sort of tax records associated with them.

“These things lead me to believe that he may be keeping a low profile financially in efforts to either avoid some sort of garnishments; or that he may possibly be trying to avoid being ‘found’ altogether,” the stranger wrote in a message viewed by The Gazette.

None of it came as a surprise to the ex-wife.

When Richards came to Colorado around 2022, he almost immediately got into trouble with law enforcement.

Colorado court records show Richards pleaded guilty to resisting arrest and harassment in Larimer County in April of that year after prosecutors dismissed charges of felony menacing and harassment for allegedly striking, shoving or kicking someone.

More recently, records show Arapahoe County authorities filed a warrant for his arrest in March after he failed to appear at his bond hearing for allegedly violating a protection order a month prior.

According to Foruria and the ex-wife, Richards was always moving around.

Public records indicate he rented a place in Aurora in November 2024. He’s also had listed addresses in Loveland, Huntington Beach, Calif., Oklahoma City, Boise and Emmett, Idaho.

Richards’ short stint in California ended after he had a “rough patch of sorts” around 2009, Foruria said.

That’s when Foruria and other family members picked him up from a storage unit he was living in and took him to Idaho, where Richards lived with them for several months before finding another place to stay.

At the time, Richards was supposedly working as a stock trader, but Foruria questioned if it was something else because his cousin never had the wealth to back it up.

“It felt more like a client or accountant type of job,” Foruria said. “It didn’t feel like him personality wise. That’s why I say it felt like a temporary gig.”

Foruria knew Richards to be an “aggressively playful” person who always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. He didn’t know much about how Richards grew up, only that his father had died at a young age.

The two talked about conspiracy theories from time to time, but, at the time, Foruria said they felt like intellectual conversations. Upon reflection, he said Richards pegged him as someone who would “fall off the deep end and get radicalized.”

“There’s this brick in the stomach that he did what he did. We really feel for the troopers that were injured, and I was relieved to hear of their condition,” Foruria said. “I did lose a family member, but he also did something tremendously violent, stupid and I have more remorse for who he hurt.”

The harrowing chain of events that unfolded came to an end after a Teller County Sheriff’s deputy exchanged fire with the gunman, striking him.

The suspect, identified as Richards by the Teller County coroner, was injured and transferred to the UCHealth Pikes Peak Regional Hospital, where he died at around noon on the day of the shooting.