Shooter an admirer of Nazis
BEMIDJI, Minn. – He created comic books with ghastly drawings of people shooting each other and wrote stories about zombies. He dressed in black, wore eyeliner, apparently admired Hitler and called himself the “Angel of Death” in German.
His father committed suicide about four years ago, and his mother is in a nursing home after an auto accident, according to news reports.
On Monday, 17-year-old Jeff Weise went on a rampage, shooting to death his grandfather and the grandfather’s companion, then invading his school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. Armed with two pistols and a shotgun, he killed nine people and wounded seven before shooting himself to death in the nation’s bloodiest school shooting since Columbine High in Colorado six years ago.
Investigators are not sure exactly what set Weise off, but fellow students at Red Lake High said they saw what looked, in retrospect, like warning signs.
About a month ago, his sketch of a guitar-strumming skeleton accompanied by a caption that read “March to the death song ‘til your boots fill with blood” was displayed in his English class, said classmate Parston Graves Jr.
Graves, 16, said he was thinking about that picture Tuesday. “I thought that was him letting everyone know” that he was going to do something, Graves said.
Graves said Weise had also shown him comic books he had drawn, filled with well-crafted images of people shooting each other. “It was mental stuff,” he said. “It was sick.”
Weise, who routinely wore a long black trench coat, eyeliner and combat boots, has been described by several classmates as a quiet teenager. Some of them knew about his troubled childhood – relatives told the St. Paul Pioneer Press his father had committed suicide and his mother suffered head injuries in an auto accident.
Audrey Thayer, a friend of the family who works for the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union office in Bemidji, about 30 miles from the town where the shooting occurred, said Weise’s story was one of “devastation and loss.”
Thayer said Weise had been living with his 58-year-old grandfather, Daryl Lussier, and Lussier’s 32-year-old companion, Michelle Sigana. Thayer said Weise had been teased at school, but she didn’t think that set him off. “In high school, you always have jabs at each other,” she said.
Authorities said that during the rampage inside the school, Weise appeared to choose his victims at random. Some witnesses said he smiled and waved as he fired.
Michael Tabman, the FBI’s agent in charge of the Minneapolis office, said Tuesday authorities had not established a motive for the shootings. Investigators said they did not know if there had been some kind of confrontation between Weise and his grandfather.
If Weise was quiet in school, he became an extrovert in cyberspace. It appeared he may have posted messages on a neo-Nazi Web site operated by the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party expressing admiration for Hitler and calling himself “Todesengel,” German for the “Angel of Death.” One member told him, “We welcome you, brother.”
In a statement Tuesday, the shadowy supremacist group that befriended Weise said it “refused to wring hands” over the tragedy, contending that the shooting justified its core beliefs in “eugenics, racial separation and removal of elements hostile to a healthy society.” Its members confirmed Weise’s use of the internet ID. The group did not respond to a request for an interview.
Weise expressed the belief that intermixing cultures and blood had stripped native tribes of their language and traditions. Much of Weise’s anger was directed at fellow teenagers in Red Lake who he felt were unduly influenced by black culture.
“As a result of cultural dominance and interracial mixing, there is barely any full blooded Natives left,” Weise wrote in a posting in July, which the Nazi group made public Tuesday. “Where I live less than 1% of all the people on the Reservation can speak their own language, and among the youth wanting to be black has run ramped (rampant).”
Weise wrote, “I can’t go 5 feet” without hearing someone “blasting some rap song over their speakers” and said that under a National Socialist government, the official name of Hitler’s Nazi party, “things for us would improve vastly.”
While the writing of his postings on the neo-Nazi Web site may have been sloppy and full of typos, Weise was also able to write more polished prose for stories published on the Internet about zombies.
Weise’s Hotmail address links him to frequent postings on one Internet forum called “Rise of the Dead,” a site where contributors collaborate on stories about “average people attempting to survive in a zombie-infested world,” according to the site.
Weise, posting under the handle “Blades11,” appeared to be a regular contributor to numerous fan fiction sites related to zombies. On one, Weise identifies himself as being from Red Lake and lists himself as an amateur writer.
He goes on to write, “I’m a fan of zombie films, have been for years, as well as fan of horror movies in general. I like to write horror stories, read about Nazi Germany and history, and someday plan on moving out of the US.”
In a posting from Feb. 6, he agreed to continue contributing to a story line but added that things are “kind of rocky right now so I might disappear unexpectedly.”
Fellow student Ashley Morrison, 17, said Weise liked heavy metal music and dressed like a “goth,” with black clothes, chains on his pants and black spiky hair.
“He looks like one of those guys at the Littleton school,” Morrison said, referring to the two teen gunman, members of the so-called Trench Coat Mafia, who killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves at Columbine High near Littleton, Colo., in 1999.