This story about the killings at the Red Lake High School appeared in the Scotsman, published in Edinburgh, Scotland. It contains some details that I have not seen in American media, such as that the killer had painted his face white.
Wed 23 Mar 2005
Horror as teen goes on school shooting rampage
JACQUI GODDARD
Key points
• Native American boy murders grandfather before starting school massacre
• Teen praised Hitler in chatroom before killing 9 and wounding 14
• US gun control debate re-opens; murder ended when boy ran out of bullets
Key quote
"You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, quit, no Jeff. Quit, quit, leave me alone, why are you doing this?’ And then boom, boom, boom, boom, and then no more screaming" - Sondra Hegstrom, school pupil
Story in full
JEFFREY Weise always liked to finish what he had started. "Once I commit myself to something, I stay to the end," he boasted in a statement posted on the internet last year.
He remained true to his word. With a smile and a wave to horrified bystanders, the 16-year-old Hitler admirer turned a gun on himself after shooting dead nine other people and wounding 14 more in the most deadly school massacre in the United States since the notorious Columbine incident in Colorado in 1999.
The story behind the latest shooting, on Monday, in Red Lake, a native American Indian community in Minnesota, bore chilling echoes of Columbine, featuring a suicidal, mentally disturbed loner with a love of gothic culture and a fascination for Nazis.
"I guess I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals," he stated on a national socialist website last year, signing on under the names "NativeNazi" and "Todes-engel" - German for Angel of Death.
"Without doubt, this is the darkest hour in the history of our tribe," said Floyd Jourdain, chairman of the Chippewa native American Indians, as shocked members of his community huddled in tears on street corners yesterday, consoling one another.
"This is a small community. There won’t be one soul that will go untouched by the tragic loss that we’ve experienced here. Right now, we are in disbelief and shock."
Weise claimed last year to have been questioned, but then cleared, by police over an alleged threat against the school. At the time of the shooting, he was barred from Red Lake High School because of an unspecified incident.
Eyewitnesses told how late on Monday afternoon, Weise, dressed in a dark trenchcoat and with his face painted white, strode through the corridors and classrooms with a grin on his face as he fired on students, teachers and security staff, ignoring their pleas for mercy.
"You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, quit, no Jeff. Quit, quit, leave me alone, why are you doing this?’ And then boom, boom, boom, boom, and then no more screaming," recalled Sondra Hegstrom, a pupil who survived.
Reggie Graves was in a class watching a film about Shakespeare when he heard gunfire in the corridor, followed by the voice of Weise in the next classroom speaking to a friend called Ryan. "He asked Ryan if he believed in God," Graves said. "And then he shot him."
Molly Miron, the editor of the Pioneer newspaper in nearby Bemidji, said: "One of the students told me he pointed his gun at a boy and then changed his mind, smiled, waved at him, and shot somebody else."
Earlier, Weise had gunned down his grandfather, Daryl Lussier, 58, a sergeant with the Red Lake police department who had been the boy’s guardian. Weise’s father committed suicide four years ago and his mother has been cared for in a nursing home since she suffered brain damage in a car accident.
It is believed that the two handguns and one shotgun used in the rampage were police-issue weapons belonging to Mr Lussier, whose girlfriend was also killed by Weise. The teenager took his grandfather’s bulletproof vest and squad car and drove to the school, where he shot his way in past security guards before firing on a group of students and a teacher.
"Understandably, they fled. Mr Weise continued to pursue them into a classroom. It’s there that he opened fire, killing a number of students and the teacher. After that, Mr Weise continued to move through the school firing randomly," Special Agent Michael Tabman, of the FBI said last night.
Five students, a female teacher, 52, and a male security officer, 28, died in the assault that ended only when Weise ran out of bullets following a shoot-out with four police officers.
"Shortly after that exchange, Mr Weise went back into the classroom and he took his own life," Mr Tabman explained.
Mr Jourdain said the "huge question" hanging over Weise’s actions was: "Why?" Clues lay in messages posted on Nazi.org, a website on which Weise had foreshadowed his shooting spree. "When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazis were evil and that Hitler was a very evil man. Of course, not for a second did I believe this," he stated.
He added in the essay posted in April last year: "I’m being blamed for a threat on the school I attend because someone said they were going to shoot up the school on 4/20, Hitler’s birthday - and just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they’ve pinned."
In other written comments, he spoke of his desire to launch a National Socialist group on the Red Lake reservation.
The shooting resurrected the familiar debate on gun control in the US and opened up a new round of hand-wringing over security in schools. Last year, 49 people died in school shootings in the US - more than any other year before Columbine, in which 12 students and a teacher were killed before the teenage perpetrators committed suicide. The killing also echoed the infamous 1975 school shooting which inspired the Boomtown Rats hit I Don’t Like Mondays.
Ken Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, said that posting police officers at school gates and security officers on the doors, installing metal detectors and enforcing strict weapons-control policies were all measures enacted around the US since the Columbine massacre. "But time and distance breathe complacency," Mr Trump added.
"It really comes down to, ‘Do we know our kids?’ We may know what little Johnny is about on a Monday when he has a problem, but do we know what Johnny is about on Tuesday, Wednesday , Thursday and Friday when there’s not a crisis?"
Poverty of tribe in reservation home
ABOUT 5,000 people live on the Red Lake Reservation - almost all of them Native Americans - in a remote area of northern Minnesota that is home to one of the poorest tribes in the state.
Nearly 39 per cent of the families on the reservation are below the poverty line.
The reservation is about 240 miles northwest of Minneapolis, and the town of Red Lake is about 75 miles south of the Canadian border.
Because the reservation is so remote, the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe has largely missed out on the lucrative casino revenues that some other tribes enjoy.
The reservation reduced its poverty rate during the 1990s, but more than four in ten residents remain unemployed, according to census figures.
Red Lake High School scored second-lowest out of all Minnesota schools last year on tests for 11th-grade maths and third-lowest for tenth-grade reading.
The Department of Education’s report card on the school for last year said it failed to meet federal standards for both subjects.
Four in five students were poor enough to be eligible for free and reduced-price lunches and other benefits.
The tribe and the federal government have primary law enforcement authority on the reservation, and serious crimes that happen there are prosecuted in federal court instead of state court. The tribe can jail someone for only up to a year.
Outsiders are sometimes unwelcome on the reservation. Tribal police ordered reporters off the reservation after the shootings, and non-members of the tribe are not allowed to fish on much of the two lakes that make up most of the reservation.
Grim catalogue of killing
THE Minnesota shootings were the worst at a US school since 20 April, 1999, when Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 12 pupils and a teacher and wounded 23 others before killing themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
On 24 March, 1998, two boys, aged 11 and 13, fired on their Jonesboro, Arkansas, school from woods, killing four girls and a teacher and wounding ten others. Both were convicted of murder.
Two teenagers were killed and more than 20 people wounded on 21 May, 1998 when Kip Kinkel, 17, opened fire at a high school in Springfield, Oregon, after killing his parents.
Charles "Andy" Williams, 15, killed two fellow students and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, California, on 5 March 2001. He was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison.
MARGARET NEIGHBOUR
©2005 Scotsman.com
