Behind the Why of a Rampage - Minnesota

[Staff]

Behind the Why of a Rampage, Loner With a Taste for Nazism

By MONICA DAVEY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=MONICA%20DAVEY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=MONICA%20DAVEY&inline=nyt-per)
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Published: March 23, 2005

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/r.gifED LAKE, Minn., March 22 - Before Monday, before his storm of bullets that left 10 people on this Indian reservation dead, Jeff Weise was rarely noticed here. But when he was, people saw a confused, brooding teenager with few friends, a peculiar attraction to Nazism and a lifetime, already, of family troubles.

He was a loner, in part, by happenstance, his parents having vanished from his life because of quieter tragedies. Emily Parkhurst, who like many other residents of the Red Lake Indian Reservation knew nearly everyone killed or hurt in the shootings, said Mr. Weise's father shot himself to death four years ago. Not long after that, Mr. Weise's mother was in a serious car accident that left her using a wheelchair and living in a nursing home.

"It was a lot to handle for a kid with no one to guide him or help him," Ms. Parkhurst said. "Nobody took the time to get to know him either."


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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/national/23shoot.html?th&emc=th

[Staff]

Excerpts for people who do not subscribe to the NYTimes.


By KIRK JOHNSON (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=KIRK%20JOHNSON&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=KIRK%20JOHNSON&inline=nyt-per)
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Published: March 25, 2005

BEMIDJI, Minn., March 24 - Many students at Red Lake High School ignored Jeff Weise, with his weird hairstyles and his talk about guns. Cody Thunder, who is 15, was one of the few who reached out and tried to make a connection. Just ordinary conversation, he said, nothing too deep.

But on Monday afternoon, as Cody sat in biology class - the usual spot at the front row, he said, near the door for a quick exit when the bell rang - there was Jeff outside in the hallway, visible through a glass partition, armed with a pistol.

"He was aiming at me," Cody said. An instant later, a bullet crashed through the glass into Cody's hip.

The violence that ripped through Red Lake High, on the reservation of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, will probably always be on some level inexplicable.

Eight people died at the school, including Mr. Weise, 16, who killed himself. He also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion a few minutes earlier.

Cody, who spoke to reporters on Thursday from the hospital where he is being treated, said Mr. Weise liked to talk about "shooting people and stuff." But Cody said he never worried that anything would come of it.

Other students have spoken of Mr. Weise's fascination with violence, and even Mr. Weise himself said on a neo-Nazi Web site last year that he had been suspected of threatening to shoot people at school last April 20, Hitler's birthday. He wrote that he had been cleared.

In a report posted last April on the Red Lake School District's Web site, the school superintendent noted that on April 19, the middle and high school received threats of a drive-by shooting the next day. The schools canceled after-school activities and notified the police, the superintendent wrote. School officials have declined to say whether Mr. Weise was suspected of making the threat.


Excerpt...
For the survivors like Cody, there is an added question: Why them? Cody said it seemed clear that the gun was not pointed randomly, but specifically at him, a person who had offered friendship.

"That school is always going to be a fear for me now," he said.


Excerpt...
The criminal investigation continues. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Paul McCabe, said Thursday that agents had issued subpoenas to Internet service providers and analyzed computers they had seized - trying to follow the trail of cyberspace influences on the gunman - and are now trying to reconstruct what happened inside the high school with the help of ballistics experts.

Evidence is mounting that Mr. Weise was an avid participant in Internet discussion groups for more than a year, with postings under his name that mention weapons and violence amid broader conversations about politics, the paranormal, time travel, reincarnation and Big Foot.

In a posting on Jan. 23, 2004, for example, he wrote that he believed he had lived a past life as a German soldier in World War II.

"I've always felt a certain affinity with conflict," he wrote.

The Red Lake superintendent of schools, Stuart Desjarlait, said students did not notify school officials of Mr. Weise's talk of guns and violence, and he thought that would probably have been the case in most schools. "Kids have their own little networks with each other," Mr. Desjarlait said.

Other people spoke of healing on Thursday. Lauren Bohn, who was a student at Columbine High School when the shootings occurred there and now lives in Minnesota, met the hospitalized boys in Bemidji and said they felt like family to her.

"I was there to tell them: this is not the end," she said. "They can be strong."

Monica Davey contributed reporting from Bemidji for this article, Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago and Jodi Wilgoren from New York.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/national/25shoot.html?th&emc=th