Teen gunman was 'a loner'
2005-03-22 22:51
Red Lake - The 15-year-old student suspected of carrying out a shooting rampage on a US Indian reservation in Minnesota was a quiet, much-teased loner, who had professed an admiration for Adolf Hitler.
And while authorities have not yet begun to offer possible explanations for why Jeff Weise killed his grandfather, a woman in their home and seven people at his high school before turning his gun on himself, the boy had exhibited a number of signs that he was disturbed.
He also claimed to have been questioned by police about a threat to "shoot up the school" in 2004.
"I guess I've always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations," wrote Weise, an American Indian, in an online forum frequented by neo-Nazis last year.
In comments posted at 23:41 on April 19 2004, Weise wrote: "By the way, I'm being blamed for a threat on the school I attend because someone said they were going to shoot up the place just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they've pinned."
Five weeks later, he wrote that "the school threat passed and I was cleared as a suspect, I'm glad for that. I don't much care for jail, I've never been there and I don't plan on it".
Father committed suicide
School workers described Weise as "a mixed-up kid who seemed lost in life."
Relatives said that his father committed suicide four years ago and that his mother was in a nursing home because of brain injuries after a car accident.
With 10 people dead - including five students, a teacher and a security guard - and a dozen others wounded, the Monday afternoon shootings mark the deadliest killing rampage at a US school since the 1999 killings at Columbine High School in Colorado.
In that one, two students killed 13 people and wounded 23 others before turning their guns on themselves.
Authorities said students and teachers hid inside classrooms and used their cellphones to alert police.
Roman Stately of the Red Lake fire department said: "Apparently, he walked down the hallway shooting and then he entered a classroom.
"He shot several students and a teacher, then himself."
'...and then no more screaming'
One student, Sondra Hegstrom, told the local newspaper, The Pioneer, that she heard the carnage from an adjoining classroom at the school on Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation, 120km south of the Canadian border.
"You could hear a girl saying: 'No, Jeff. Quit! Quit! Leave me alone. Why are you doing this?' Boom, boom, boom, and then no more screaming," she said.
"I looked him in the eye and ran in a room, and that's when I hid," she said.
"I called 911 from a cellphone and they said, 'Just sit there and wait until the cops come.'"
The newspaper's editor quoted a student at Red Lake High as saying the killer pointed his gun at a boy, changed his mind, smiled, waved and shot somebody else.
- SAPA