Archive of NativeNazi's posts: http://www.nativenazi.com/ ___________________________________________
Eerie Parallels Are Seen to Shootings at ColumbineBy JODI WILGOREN - NY Times
In 34 postings to
www.nazi.org, a forum operated by the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, that the authorities said Tuesday they were investigating for hints to motive, someone identifying himself as Jeff Weise, a high school student on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, expressed frustration at the lack of racial purity and pride among his people. Calling himself "NativeNazi" or "Todesengel," German for "angel of death," Mr. Weise said he had found few sympathizers for his racial views and had sometimes been persecuted for them. "I already had a fist fight with a communist not too long ago over me being what I am (I also won), but it was worth it," he wrote on May 26 at 2:27 a.m.
In another post, Mr. Weise complained that "less than 1 percent of all the people on the reservation can speak their own language," and said that his peers eschewed their culture to emulate rappers. He said his parents were American Indians, but that he had German, Irish and French-Canadian ancestry as well, and that when he had spoken of the need for his tribe to have "more pure bloods" he was called a racist.
Mr. Weise also frequently contributed to stories about zombies on an Internet forum called "Rise of the Dead," according to The Associated Press. Parston Graves Jr., a Red Lake student, told The A.P. that Mr. Weise had displayed a sketch of a guitar-strumming skeleton captioned, "March to the death song 'til your boots fill with blood," in class, and had shown off his drawings of people shooting each other.
Paul Viollis, author of the 2001 book "Avoiding Violence in Our Schools," said "the Nazi issue is a collateral issue," a way for someone not on the football team or in the popular clique to find an identity. "This individual found some type of solace," he said.
People who monitor neo-Nazi groups said the Libertarian forum frequented by Mr. Weise is a little-known Internet-only organization with no known links to violence, whose niche is to welcome people of all races who oppose race-mixing.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/national/23rampage.html?Behind the Why of a Rampage, Loner With a Taste for Nazismhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/national/23shoot.html?8br>>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."
Investigators say they are now trying to learn all they can about Mr. Weise, 16, to figure out why he killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion, then drove to Red Lake High School and killed a security guard, a teacher and five students before killing himself. Seven students were wounded, some of them shot in the head or the chest.
Among the areas of inquiry the Federal Bureau of Investigation is likely to pursue is a neo-Nazi Web forum on which someone identifying himself as Jeff Weise left messages, including one saying he was being accused of threatening to "shoot up" the school on Hitler's birthday, April 20, in 2004.<<
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Associated Press
School shooter liked to create macabre drawings and storiesby AMY FORLITI
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/politics/11198353.htmNBC, MSNBC and news services
BEMIDJI, Minn. - A troubling profile of the teenager who shot dead nine people emerged on Tuesday — one of a Native American who allegedly described himself as a "NativeNazi" and who other students said was regularly picked on for his odd behavior.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7259823/ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Minneapolis Star Tribune
An Internet trail of a boy's death wishIn the last few months of his life, Jeff Weise was obsessed with death.
The clues are sprinkled along a long trail the troubled 16-year-old boy left on Internet websites, blogs and postings where he weighed in on everything from Hitler and Bigfoot to suicide attempts and school shootings.
"They pegged me as a school shooter earlier this year," Weise wrote last year in one of the dozens of postings he made on AboveTopSecret.com, which bills itself as the world's most popular site for conspiracies, coverups, UFOs and other such topics.
On one site, he posted a short story about surviving a school shooting. On another, he illustrated a profile page with a still image from the movie "Elephant," which is based on the 1999 Columbine High School shootings.
On a third site, under the Web name "Regret," he posted a short but bloody animated video in which four people are shot and a police car is blown up with a grenade before the gunman shoots himself in the head.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7283619/ __________________________________________
THE BRITISH PRESSShooting spree student had obsession with Nazi ideologyHigh-school students on a Native American reservation have told how a classmate burst in on them during afternoon lessons and opened fire in the worst school shooting in the United States for six years.
Police said that 16-year-old Jeff Weise, a disaffected Native American student fascinated with Nazi ideology,
...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=622767BBC News
Minnesota killer 'admired Hitler' Jeff Weise, the teenager who police say shot nine people in Minnesota, was a disaffected young man who may have expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler on a neo-Nazi website.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4371803.stmfrom
www.timesonline.co.uk'Nazi' student calling himself Angel of Death shoots nine dead in rampage at Red LakeBy James Bone and James Doran in Minnesota
>>Weise, a loner who usually wore black and liked Marilyn Manson music, was viewed as “weird” by fellow students and was teased a lot at school. A staff member said he had recently been suspended and was receiving instruction at home under the school’s disciplinary programme.
“He’s antisocial,” one unidentified student who had shared a class with Weise told the St Paul Pioneer Press. “In pictures he draws, his people have little hats with Nazi signs on them,” she said. Weise declared himself “a Native American National Socialist” in posts on the website of a group calling itself the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party.
In a statement on its website, the group “refused to wring hands” over the shooting and said “such events are to be expected when thinking people are crammed into an unthinking, irrational modern society”.
In his web posts, Weise described himself as “a Native American from the Red Lake Indian reservation in Minnesota” who had “stumbled across the site in my study of the Third Reich as well as Nazism, amongst other things”. <<
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1537641,00.htmlSchool killer was admirer of Hitlerby Alec Russell in Red Lake
An American teenager who killed nine people on an Indian reservation, including five classmates and a teacher at his school, was an admirer of Hitler and had dubbed himself an "angel of death".
Weise identified himself on a neo-Nazi internet forum as "Todesengel" - German for "angel of death" - and "NativeNazi," according to the St Paul Pioneer Press.
"I've always carried a natural admiration for Hitler," Weise said on the internet.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/23/weise23.xml____________________________________
Minnesota Killer Chafed at Life On ReservationTeen Faced Cultural Obstacles And Troubled Family History
By Blaine Harden and Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 25, 2005
The last time he saw a mental health professional at the Red Lake hospital was on Feb. 21, she said. She remembers the date because it was the same day he refilled his prescription for 60 milligrams a day of Prozac, which he had been taking since last summer.
Online, he seemed to be reaching out in strange directions, especially for a Native American kid. He wrote sympathetically about Hitler and grumbled about racial interbreeding among tribal members.
But there appears to have been no one in the school or on the reservation who saw the red flags.
Ethnic HardshipsA bleak mountain of federal research suggests the extraordinary risks and hardships of growing up Indian, compared with growing up as a member of any other ethnic group in the United States.
The annual average violent crime rate among Indians is twice as high as that of blacks and 2 1/2 times as high as that for whites, according to a survey last year by the Justice Department.
Indian youths commit suicide at twice the rate of other young people, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The overall death rate of Indians younger than 25 is three times that of the total population in that age group.
Compared with other groups, the commission found, Indians of all ages are 670 percent more likely to die from alcoholism, 650 percent more likely to die from tuberculosis, 318 percent more likely to die from diabetes and 204 percent more likely to suffer accidental death.
And despite considerable income gains in the past 15 years, some of it because of Indian gambling operations, Native Americans remain the poorest ethnic group in the country, with about half the average income of other Americans.
When it comes to young Indians, the statistical picture here on the Red Lake reservation, home to about 5,000 tribal members, is even bleaker than the national average. A third of teenagers on this reservation are not in school, not working and not looking for work (compared with 20 percent on all reservations), according to census figures.
A survey last year by the Minnesota departments of health and education found that young people here are far more likely to think about suicide, be depressed, worry about drugs and be violent with one another than children across the state. At St. Mary's Mission School, an elementary school student recently painted a poster for her father: "Dad, don't do cocaine any more."
The state survey of ninth-graders found that at Red Lake High, 43 percent of boys and 82 percent of girls had thoughts about suicide, with 20 percent of boys and 48 percent of girls saying that they tried it at least once.
Three months ago, Weise wrote online about suicide: "I'm starting to regret sticking around, I should've taken the razor blade express last time around. . . . Well, whatever, man. Maybe they've got another shuttle comin' around sometime soon?"
Portrait of a BoyWeise was born in Minneapolis but spent most of his first three years with his father on the reservation, his grandmother said. His parents never married, she said, and his mother took the boy back to Minneapolis when he was 3. This shuffling from reservation to city is common among Native Americans, as two-thirds of them now live in and around cities.
The boy was often unhappy with his mother. According to Gayle Downwind, a teacher on the reservation who knew Weise and whose son, Sky Grant, was one of his best friends, he was often tormented by his mother's problems with alcohol.
"When he was younger, he said he would run out of the house because there would be yelling and alcohol," she said. "He wasn't sure where he would be going. He ended up at a police station."
He did not like being on the reservation, said his friend Grant, who had Weise at his home for sleepovers nearly once a week for seven years. He refused to participate in powwows and avoided all traditional Indian activities, Grant said.
At school, he was an indifferent student. Peers teased him about his black outfits and his ungainly bulk (well over 200 pounds), and he often became agitated in class. He failed eighth grade and was required to take a nonacademic class, making wigwams, growing wild rice and doing other traditional activities. His friend's mother, Downwind, was his teacher.
"He wasn't doing any work," she said. "He didn't function academically. He just sat there and drew pictures."
Grant called all of Weise's drawings "dark," saying, "He drew pictures of war, people getting shot."
Seventeen days before the shooting, Weise brought a videotape of the movie "Elephant," based on the killings at Columbine High, to Grant's house and insisted that they fast-forward to the shooting scenes. "He liked the gore," Grant said.
When the gory part was over, Grant said, Weise got up and went to his grandmother's house. He said he was going home to get his medication and gave the impression that he would be right back. He never came back, and that was the last time Grant saw him.
Whatever the trigger might have been for Weise to turn fantasy in action, it was not apparent to the people he lived with -- his grandmother, an aunt and a 15-year-old cousin.
At noon on the day of the shootings, his grandmother returned home for lunch and found Weise sitting on the couch in the living room, eating a turkey sandwich and drawing. When she came home again at 3, he was gone. He did not leave note.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64315-2005Mar24.html _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
For his 2005 class photo, Jeff Weise, top center, fashioned his hair into horns. Other students teased him for his size. Last summer, his grandmother said, he began taking Prozac. "He wasn't doing any work," a former teacher recalled. "He didn't function academically. He just sat there and drew pictures."
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Relatives: Did meds play a role? Chuck Haga, Star Tribune
March 25, 2005
Weise's relatives "knew he had a problem with depression, and they took him to treatment," Cook said. "He was getting counseling." His medication dosage had been increased a week earlier, Cook added.
His grandmother, Shelda Lussier, 54, said he saw a mental health professional at Red Lake Hospital on Feb. 21, the same day his prescription was refilled for 60 milligrams a day of Prozac, which he had been taking since last summer, the Washington Post reported.
Studies have linked Prozac and similar antidepressants to a greater risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior in kids. In October, the Food and Drug Administration revised the drugs' packaging to warn health professionals that they should closely monitor young patients when an antidepressant is prescribed or the dose is changed.
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Newsday.com
Shooter 'tapped into a world of hate'... But an article on the organization's Web site Tuesday confirmed Weise had joined its forums, but "refused to wring hands over a 'tragedy' instead pointing out that such events are to be expected ... "
Marilyn Mayo, of the Anti-Defamation League, said the organization has existed for several years, has no known headquarters, and provides a forum for its supporters only through the Internet.
Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman called Weise's postings "sad and ironic."
"Hitler is about as far removed from an Indian kid on a reservation in Minnesota as the moon," Foxman said.
In one posting, Weise mentioned he had been blamed for "a threat on the school I attend," but does not indicate any intention of committing the shootings. Still, Foxman said, "he clearly felt empowered. ... He had tapped into a whole world of hate."
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Knight Ridder Newspapers:
Internet postings shed light on teen's inner turmoilby DAVID HANNERS AND BETH SILVER
© 2005, St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.).
ST. PAUL, Minn. - (KRT) - Kim Desjarlait wondered Wednesday how the nephew she knew as polite and happy when he lived in the Twin Cities could have killed nine people and himself on a northern reservation.
Cyberspace confessionals attributed to Jeff Weise provided answers dating back to the supposedly happy childhood he found almost too painful to address.
One posting claimed that before she suffered a debilitating injury in a car crash, Weise's mother struck him often "with anything she could get her hands on," drank excessively and told him his birth was "a mistake."
"She would say so many things that its hard to deal with them or think of them without crying," the teen wrote before the Red Lake rampage.
As authorities try to figure out why Weise turned violent, the Internet offered possible clues - in contrast to his aunt's impressions.
While many postings were attributed to Weise or e-mail addresses friends said he used, the anonymity of the Internet does allow one person to use another's name. However, the postings linked to Weise appear consistent in content, style and language, and they contain personal data confirmed through other means.
"16 years of accumulated rage suppressed by nothing more than brief glimpses of hope, which have all but faded to black," he wrote in an undated personal biography on one Web site. "I can feel the urges within slipping through the cracks, the leash I can no longer hold ..."
With so many dark postings surfacing and being attributed to Weise, FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said the agency is aware of their potential importance in helping understand a mass murderer's frame of mind.
McCabe, who is based in Minneapolis, said the agency will subpoena the records of Internet service providers to authenticate or disprove authorship.
"Anyone can post anything under any name they want," McCabe said, explaining that the FBI nevertheless is very interested in the content of any postings that can be verified as coming from Weise.
Though the teen's slide toward violence was apparent in comments he made and the drawings he showed to classmates, his aunt puzzled over when and why he lost his way.
"Jeff was a really good kid," Desjarlait said in an interview. "I felt that he was a bright kid. He loved to draw. He loved to play video games. He loved to go out and eat. He was a really polite kid. Any time he wanted something or needed something, he always asked for it."
Weise was acquainted with pain and sorrow. His father, Darryl "Baby Dash" Lussier, committed suicide in 1997 and his mother, Joanne Weise, was left brain damaged by a car accident in 1999.
At the time of the accident, Jeff Weise was living with his mother and two aunts in Shakopee, Minn. After it happened, his mother divorced and the boy moved back to the Red Lake reservation and moved in with his grandfather, Darryl Lussier Sr., Desjarlait said.
Desjarlait said she had wanted Jeff Weise to stay with her family in Shakopee.
"It was never explained to us what was going on," she said. "All we knew was he was going back to Red Lake and going to stay with his grandparents."
She said she saw the boy later during short visits and "he didn't seem like he had changed."
"That's why I just don't understand what happened when he headed to Red Lake," she said. "It had to be that he didn't want to be there. He did not feel like he fit in."
In an online posting last year, Weise said he was on anti-depressants, was seeing a therapist and had attempted suicide by slitting his wrists. He said the cuts "are gonna turn into beautiful scars some day."
Such journals and discussion board entries were sometimes thoughtful, often cryptic and only occasionally hopeful. One thing permeated all the writings: a great, weighty darkness.
"I sacrifice no more for others, part of me has f---ing died and I hate this s--t," read a Jan. 27 entry. "I'm living every mans nightmare and that single fact alone is kicking my ass, I really must be f---ing worthless. ..."
The writings show a youth who seemed to revel in his anger and trouble.
When he did reveal details, they were riveting. The administrator of an online forum catering to zombie lore posted some undated excerpts of private messages he said were from Weise.
One referred to the traffic accident that left Weise's mother brain-damaged.
"My mom got drunk one night and wrecked her car and had to relearn how to tie her shoes, I was too young to fight back or too young to stick up for myself without getting struck down when this was happening."
Another addressed life as if it were a dead-end street in a bad neighborhood.
"I'm nothin' but your average Native American stoner," it said. "I'm mellow half the time, mostly natural, but mostly drug induced as well. I'm not a junkie, or an alcoholic, MJ is my gal' of choice. Enough about that though, I don't know why you're reading this anyway. I'm gonna roll this joint so I'll c'ya later ..."
A private message on the zombie-related site said:
"I have friends, but I'm basically a loner inside a group of loners. Most of my friends don't know the real me, I've never shared my past with anyone, and I've never talked about it with anyone. I'm excluded from anything and everything they do, I'm never invited, I don't even know why they consider me a friend or I them ..."
Entries in his online journal, "Thoughts of a Dreamer," provide a sense of someone on a mental slide; even the photo chosen to adorn the journal was of Nirvana, whose founder, Kurt Cobain, committed suicide in 1994.
The first entry, written Dec. 14, introduces "my new journal, in which I will put my thoughts down to words. My view on the days past events and whatnot, my two cents on the world in general."
Weise invited readers to visit a message board for the band he played in, named 6sik6. He played guitar, but it could not immediately be determined if 6sik6 got beyond garage-band dreams.
"We haven't heard of the band, and we have heard of most local bands," said Larry Overbeek, who runs Overbeek Electronics and Music in Bemidji, a half-hour's drive south of the Red Lake reservation where Weise lived.
"We're the only ones around here who have live entertainment and we ain't never heard of that band here," said Bob Lind at the Hard Times Saloon in Bemidji. He said there are few places for teen bands to play in the area.
In his various posts, he talks about listening to music - The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever," Johnny Cash's "When the Man Comes Around," and he said he liked "classic rock."
The next journal entry, dated Jan. 4, alludes to suicide, and Weise says he regrets not doing it sooner.
"I'm starting to regret sticking around," he said. "I should've taken the razor blade express last time around. ... Well, whatever, man. Maybe they've got another shuttle comin' around sometime soon?"
An autobiography on a Web site that was last updated in June included this entry from Weise under "Latest News:"
"On anti-depressants. Seeing a therapist ..."
Favorite hobbies were listed as "Drawing, Listening to Music. Chillin. Getting high. Being a smart kid. Being a Native American National Socialist."
In another journal, Weise's depression bleeds through.
"The instrument of my resurrection was supposed to be freedom," said his Jan. 4 entry. "But there isn't an open sky or endless field to be found where I reside, nor is there light or salvation to be discovered. Right about now, I feel as low as I ever have. I don't think it's a big secret why, really. My biggest disappointment and downfall came from what was supposed to be the one thing to lift me from the grave I'm continually digging for myself. Nah, never. Only the worthy are saved, y'know."
His last journal entry, posted at 9:37 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 27, offers a cryptic example or two of what he's seen.
"Always expecting change when I know nothing ever changes. I've seen mothers choose their man over their own flesh and blood, I've seen others choose alcohol over friendship."
Drawings Weise made at school and online activity suggested he was a neo-Nazi, to which Desjarlait expressed surprise.
"That's just coming out of the blue," she said. "That's not how he was raised."
In many of the online biographical sketches, the authors are asked to provide their favorite quotes.
In one destined for review by the FBI in its investigation of Weise, Adolf Hitler was quoted: "The law of existence requires uninterrupted killing ... So that the better may live."
The other was from Erich Maria Remarque's World War I novel, "All Quiet on the Western Front." It is uttered by the story's narrator, Paul Baumer, a private in the German Army:
"We are little flames, poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out."
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Others Aware of Red Lake Plans, Officials Say
As Many as Four Believed to Have Helped Plot AttackBy Dana Hedgpeth and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 2, 2005; Page A03
RED LAKE, Minn., April 1 -- As many as 20 teenagers may have known ahead of time about plans for the shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of 10 people on the Indian reservation here March 21, tribal and federal officials said Friday.
Capt. Dewayne Dow of the tribal police told a group of parents, teachers and staff at a three-hour school board meeting that authorities believe as many as 20 students were involved.
One law enforcement official said the FBI believes that as many as four students -- including gunman Jeff Weise and Louis Jourdain, a classmate arrested Sunday -- were directly involved in planning an attack on Red Lake High School, and well over a dozen others may have heard about the plot.
"There may have been as many as four of these kids who were active participants in the plot," said the official, who declined to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation. "The question is, how many other kids had some knowledge of this or had heard about it somehow? We think there were quite a few."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19704-2005Apr1?language=printer
