Shooting Rampage by Student Leaves 10 Dead on Rese

VisibilityMissing · Postby **VisibilityMissing** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 4:44 pm

I know this is a few days behind, but I thought this was something we probably would want some discussion about here.  <table border='0' align='center' width='95%' ><tr><td class='quotetop'>Quote: </td></tr><tr><td class='quotebody'> March 22, 2005 Shooting Rampage by Student Leaves 10 Dead on Reservation By JODI WILGOREN CHICAGO, March 21 - A high school student went on a shooting rampage on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota on Monday, killing his grandparents, five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard, as well as himself, the authorities said. A dozen others were injured in the barrage, which erupted at the 300-student Red Lake High School about 3 p.m., officials said. The grandparents were apparently killed at their home earlier in the day, and the authorities were investigating whether guns used in the shooting were taken from the grandfather, a veteran officer on the tribal police force. "It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together," Paul McCabe, an F.B.I. spokesman in Minneapolis, said at a briefing. "It's still a very fluid investigation. Right now there's still a lot of work to do." Mr. McCabe did say that "we do have evidence that we believe that the shooter is dead," and that "we believe he was acting alone." He identified the gunman's grandfather as Daryl Lussier, a longtime officer with the Red Lake Police Department and said Mr. Lussier's guns may have been used in the shootings, The Associated Press reported. The shooting was the worst at a school since 15 people were killed at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., in 1999, and came just 18 months after two students were fatally shot at Rocori High School in the central Minnesota town of Cold Spring, 200 miles away. Roman Stately, director of the Red Lake Fire Department, told The A.P. and local television stations that the police found the grandparents' bodies an hour after the school shooting and that the young man used his grandfather's shotgun and two pistols in the rampage. "Apparently, he walked out in the hallway shooting and then he entered a classroom," Mr. Stately told KARE-TV, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul. "Shot several students and a teacher." He added, "And then himself." Witnesses told The Pioneer, a newspaper in Bemidji, the nearest town, an hour's drive away, that the gunman was "grinning and waving" as he fired his weapon and that students pleaded with him to stop, according to The A.P. "You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff, quit, quit, leave me alone, what are you doing?' " The A.P. quoted Sondra Hegstrom, a student, as telling The Pioneer. "I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that's when I hid." A teacher, Diane Schwanz, told The Pioneer that she herded students under benches as she dialed 911 on her cellphone. "I just got on the floor and called the cops," she said. Mr. McCabe said the victims at the high school were all found in one room. The dead teacher was a woman, he said, the security guard a man; four students, including the gunman, died at the scene and two more later at a hospital. The Red Lake reservation, about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities and about 120 miles south of Canada, is home to about 5,000 Ojibwa Indians, commonly called Chippewa. The tribe operates three casinos and other tourist attractions on some half-million acres. Clyde Bellecourt, founder of the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement, said he could not "remember anything as tragic as this happening" on a reservation. "Everyone in the Indian community is feeling really bad right now, whether they're a member of the Red Lake or not, we're all an extended family, we're all related," he said. "Usually this happens in places like Columbine, white schools, always somewhere else. We never hear that in our community." Mr. Bellecourt and his brother Vernon, another longtime American Indian leader, said that the gunman's grandfather had been on the local police force for perhaps 35 years, and belonged to one of the tribe's most prominent and respected families. "No one would ever think that that type of violence would visit itself in our communities, it's not part of our culture and our traditions, so we're kind of puzzled by it all," Vernon Bellecourt said. "But our young people are not exempt from the same problems young people have across the country," he added, "so our communities are now being victimized by this same kind of violence." Sherri Birkeland, a spokeswoman for North Country Regional Hospital in Bemidji, said six of the injured were treated at her emergency room, two of them later airlifted to MeritCare Healthcare Systems in Fargo, N.D. One of the remaining four died, Ms. Birkeland said, declining to release information about the conditions of the others or describe any injuries. The hospital was shut for several hours afterward, she said. In Fargo, Carrie Johnson, a spokeswoman for MeritCare, said the first victim arrived by helicopter at 5:55 p.m. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota issued a statement Monday evening expressing "profound sorrow" and extending "heartfelt prayers and condolences to the families who lost loved ones in this senseless tragedy." Reporting for this article was contributed by Mikkel Patesfrom Fargo; Kermit Pattison from Minneapolis; and Gretchen Reuthling from Chicago. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company </td></tr></table>  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  <table border='0' align='center' width='95%' ><tr><td class='quotetop'>Quote: </td></tr><tr><td class='quotebody'> March 24, 2005 Signs of Danger Were Missed in a Troubled Teenager's Life By MONICA DAVEY and JODI WILGOREN BEMIDJI, Minn., March 23 - Looking back at all the pieces, some who knew Jeff Weise say they wonder why someone did not see his eruption coming months, or even years, ago. There was the threat Mr. Weise, 16, once made on his own life, sending him away from his home on the Red Lake Indian Reservation for psychiatric treatment. There were the pictures of bloodied bodies and guns he drew and shared freely with classmates. There was the story he apparently wrote about a shooting spree at a school in a small town. "The clues were all there," said Kim DesJarlait, Mr. Weise's stepaunt, who lives in Minneapolis. "Everything was laid out, right there, for the school or the authorities in Red Lake to see it coming. I don't want to blame Red Lake, but did they not put two and two together? This kid was crying out, and those guys chose to ignore it. They need to start focusing on their kids." Others, including the principal of the high school where, on Monday, Mr. Weise killed five students, a security guard, a teacher and then himself, defended their handling of the teenager, saying that the authorities had seen all there was - at the time - to see, and had actually been struggling madly to help a boy through his difficult youth. "We may need people to be more aware," the principal of Red Lake High School, Chris Dunshee, acknowledged on Wednesday, after teachers and school board officials met privately for the first time for counseling. "But I think most of us felt like this was a troubled young man, and someone whose problems we felt like we were addressing." Beyond the outward signs of stress, however, there was another indication, far darker and more explicit, that people on the reservation said they had never seen or heard of: Mr. Weise's vast Internet life. Though many here said Mr. Weise spent a lot of time on his computer, many said they themselves did not have access to a computer, and all said they had never seen the alarming postings submitted under Mr. Weise's name. A loner in real life, Mr. Weise, who also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion and wounded seven people on Monday, found a community of sorts in cyberspace, confiding his problems with depression, loneliness and abuse to people who cheered his macabre short stories and drawings and sympathized with his racial ideologies. On Wednesday, some of his Internet pen pals lamented that there had been warning signs they missed, including a gory zombie tale Mr. Weise apparently wrote about a school shooting that mentioned Columbine, an animated film he posted in which a killer committed suicide, and an eerie message that, in retrospect, seems to foreshadow his fate. Things are "kind of rocky right now so I might disappear unexpectedly," Mr. Weise wrote Feb. 6 on a Web forum where members collaborate to write fiction. Last October, he posted an animated film on newgrounds.com. In it, a man shoots people with a rifle, unleashing flashes of red blood across a simple black and white drawing, then tosses a hand grenade into a police car, puts a pistol in his mouth and commits suicide. When another member of the site wrote, "Was that like a warning message? Hmm dude you need help badly," Mr. Weise, posting under the name Regret, responded: "You obviously can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality," adding, "Don't try judging my mental health based upon a simple animation, capisce?" In a Yahoo profile last updated in June 2004, Mr. Weise used the moniker verlassen4_20, combining Hitler's birthday (April 20) with a German word meaning "forsaken" or "abandoned," said his nickname was Totenkopf, German for "death's head" or "skull," and included a doctored picture of himself with a monster's teeth and empty eyes. Under "latest news" he said he was on antidepressants, seeing a therapist and had "a brand new pair of cuts on my wrists"; his favorite quote, which he attributed to Hitler, was "The law of existence requires uninterrupted killing ... So that the better may live." On one Web site, Mr. Weise said last year that he had been accused of threatening to "shoot up" the school last April 20, the fifth anniversary of the Columbine shootings in Colorado, but that he had been cleared. On Wednesday, Mr. Dunshee declined to say whether Mr. Weise was suspected of such a threat. "That will come out in the investigation," he said. It is difficult, if not impossible, to verify Mr. Weise's authorship of these Internet postings without reviewing his computer; the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it would investigate them. The postings are linked to a profile on www.nazi.org in which he introduced himself by name and said he was a high school student on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. Several people who communicated with him on the sites confirmed that the posts were made long before Monday's massacre. A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the company's privacy policy prevented her from discussing the account; operators of the other sites either refused to authenticate the postings or did not respond to inquiries. The administrator of one forum, who asked that it not be named for fear the site would be crashed by overwhelming traffic, shared several private messages Mr. Weise sent in which he said his mother drank excessively and abused him before the car accident that rendered her brain-damaged and confined to a nursing home. "I have friends, but I'm basically a loner inside a group of loners," Mr. Weise wrote, according to the administrator. "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." In another message, Mr. Weise wrote that his mother "would hit me with anything she could get her hands on," and "would tell me I was a mistake, and she would say so many things that its hard to deal with them or think of them without crying." Most troubling, perhaps, was the story of a shooting spree he posted on a site called Writer's Coven in December 2003. In it, he wrote of a character dressed all in black, a teacher with a Hitleresque moustache, and complaints about how the shooting at Columbine High had led to increased security on campus. As in Monday's rampage, one of the victims at his fictional school was the security guard - "or what was left of him," the story said, his throat having "been ripped out, replaced by a bloody mass of torn tissue." It went on: "In the distance, somewhere else in the school, the sound of a blood curdling scream echoed through the hallways." But in Mr. Weise's real school, Red Lake High, and among those who knew his family, the only true danger people said they had sensed was for Mr. Weise's future and his happiness. The high school students, who will not be allowed to return to the bullet-ridden school for at least a few more days, were expected to gather for counseling on Thursday for the first time since Monday's deaths. "There were a lot of signs of real trouble," said T'Anna Hanson, 21, who knew Mr. Weise and was the cousin of one victim. "He was confined to a computer all the time, and he had said last year that he was going to kill himself. But somehow I was never scared of him. I don't know why not. He never really showed that it could be directed this way." Some students said Mr. Weise had shown them elaborate, disturbing drawings he made in his notebook, some of them depicting people with bullet holes in their heads, of half-living people with blank stares, of skeletons. None of the students interviewed said they reported the drawings to school officials. They said they had viewed them as the odd but harmless doodlings of a strange boy. "He was different, you could say, out of place around here," said Patrick Tahahwah, 23, who knew Mr. Weise. Katherine S. Newman, a professor at Princeton University, who edited the book "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings" in 2004, said Mr. Weise showed indications nearly identical to earlier gunmen: his comments, his drawings, his social life. "They were classic signs of a pathway leading to a shooting - the kid was literally giving off warnings," Professor Newman said. But she cautioned against blaming school officials or others for not recognizing that, saying, "It is exceedingly difficult to see these kids coming, to put it together and see the pattern." Mr. Weise, who wore eye makeup and a black trench coat that fell to the ground over his 6-foot, 250-pound frame, had been told recently not to study at school, but to study privately with a teacher at home. The reason, the principal said, was to offer Mr. Weise the extra help he needed, given what the principal described only as his "issues." Mr. Weise, who had been held back in school, was teased because he was larger than most of the other sophomores, because he dressed in Goth style and wandered around by himself, and, Mr. Tahahwah said, because of his parents' fates. Everyone at Red Lake knew about that. In July 1997, Mr. Weise's father, Daryl Lussier Jr., killed himself in a standoff with the police on the Red Lake reservation, the tribe's home in far northern Minnesota, about 30 miles from Bemidji, the nearest city. In March 1999, his mother, Joanne, suffered a brain injury when the car she was riding in struck a tractor-trailer on a highway in Minneapolis, Ms. DesJarlait said. The driver, a cousin of his mother, had been drinking and was killed. After the accident, Ms. DesJarlait said, Mr. Weise, who had lived most of his life in Minneapolis with his mother, was sent back to Red Lake to live with his grandparents. He did not want to go, family members said. Though she knew Mr. Weise had had a difficult adolescence, Ms. DesJarlait said she still finds it hard to reconcile Monday's shootings with the stepnephew she remembered from his younger years. While he was growing up in Minneapolis, she said, Mr. Weise was a sweet boy who liked to go to movies, play outside, go to restaurants, and have friends over for sleepovers. Now, Ms. DesJarlait said, the family is left to explain what happened - something she said she has no answers to - to Mr. Weise's half brother, 7, and half sister, 8. "They know that he killed himself, but they don't understand about the others - about the size of it," she said. "I guess I don't either. I don't how know it came to this." But in a blog Mr. Weise apparently kept on livejournal.com, he seemed to explain his swirl downward. "Right about now I feel as low as I ever have," the January posting said. "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." Monica Davey reported from Bemidji, and Jodi Wilgoren from Chicago. Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting from Chicago. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company </td></tr></table>

Miles E Traysandor · Postby **Miles E Traysandor** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 7:56 pm

that's a shame, I heard in in the news... *Plays appropriate funeral tribute music for the victims*

allison · Postby **allison** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 8:14 pm

*Sad sigh* What a world.

Zaaphod · Postby **Zaaphod** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 4:31 am

Columbine all over again. A terrible tragedy.

VisibilityMissing · Postby **VisibilityMissing** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 2:32 pm

And, the plot thickens:  <table border='0' align='center' width='95%' ><tr><td class='quotetop'>Quote: </td></tr><tr><td class='quotebody'> Juvenile Arrested In Minn. Shootings Suspect Might Be Charged as Adult By Dan Eggen and Dana Hedgpeth Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page A01 Federal authorities have arrested a relative of a Red Lake tribal leader in connection with the shooting spree that killed 10 people on the tribe's Minnesota reservation last week, officials said yesterday. U.S. Attorney Thomas B. Heffelfinger in Minneapolis announced the arrest yesterday but declined to provide details about the juvenile suspect or his alleged connection to the killings, citing federal confidentiality rules governing juveniles. But two law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation said the teenager, arrested Sunday in Duluth, Minn., is suspected of helping Jeff Weise, 16, plan last week's assault and had expected to be part of the rampage. Prosecutors are considering whether to charge the juvenile as an adult with conspiracy to commit murder, the officials said. Authorities have not ruled out more arrests and are continuing to question other teenagers about whether they knew about Weise's plans beforehand, the law enforcement officials said. The arrest represents a surprising shift in the investigation of the March 21 killings, and was announced on the same day that Weise and three of his victims were laid to rest in funerals. Weise killed nine people, including five students and a teacher, before killing himself. He has been portrayed as a troubled loner with a history of depression, family tragedy and violent fantasies. Heffelfinger said that the juvenile was arrested "as a result of the ongoing and continuing investigation into the events of March 21st" and that the case is being handled by U.S. District Court in Minneapolis. Some local and national news outlets identified the juvenile by name. The Washington Post does not name juvenile criminal suspects unless they are charged as adults or have been publicly identified by family members. FBI officials in Minneapolis declined to comment on the arrest. The agent in charge of the probe, Michael Tabman, said in a statement that "from the beginning, we made a promise to close every loop, to leave no stone unturned, and to ensure that the investigation is thorough and complete." "We are committed to ensuring the continued safety of the Red Lake Nation," Tabman said. Meanwhile, tribal members and outsiders continue to mourn those who were killed. Funerals were held yesterday for Weise; security guard Derrick Brun, 28; student Alicia White, 14; and Neva Rogers, 62, a schoolteacher. Three funerals were held Saturday. Jeffrey May, 15, who was shot in the head, was listed in serious condition. Steven Cobenais, 15, was also shot in the head and was listed in critical condition. They are in MeritCare Hospital in Fargo, N.D. Since shortly after the shootings last week, FBI agents have been aggressively interviewing Weise's classmates and acquaintances, angering some tribal members on the remote Red Lake reservation in northern Minnesota. "It's a trying time," said Allen Pemberton, a Red Lake tribal council member. "People are in shock. They can't eat. They can't believe it. It's hard on us -- just everything. Then they hear this and they just can't believe it. I went to a lot of funerals. I'm just numb." Leo Downwind, stepfather of Sky Grant, a friend of Weise's, said his son was interrogated Easter Sunday. He said FBI agents and tribal police officers came in a black Suburban to his small house -- about five miles from the high school -- at 8:30 Sunday morning and asked Sky to come to the tribe's police station. Downwind said his son was questioned for about four hours about his relations with Weise. "They went through a whole interrogation of my son," Downwind said. He said the police told him there was information on Weise's computer and on a computer of "another of Jeff's buddies." He said his son does not have a computer. Sky's sister, Lee Ann Grant, 20, was a security guard at the high school and saw Weise when he came in with guns. She ran and helped get students out of the school, while her colleague, Brun, tried to talk to Weise but was killed. "Everybody's up in turmoil here," Downwind said of the Sunday arrest. "We don't know what's going to happen with the school or what's going to happen with the government." The shooting at Red Lake is the deadliest school-related massacre since 15 died at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999. Authorities and witnesses have said Weise first killed his grandfather, who was a tribal police officer, and his grandfather's companion at a home on the reservation. Weise then armed himself with some of his grandfather's weapons and drove to the reservation's high school, where he killed a security guard, a teacher and five students. After an exchange of gunfire, Weise -- who frequented neo-Nazi Web sites -- killed himself, officials said. 2005 The Washington Post Company</td></tr></table>

Joe3210 · Postby **Joe3210** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 12:36 am

Man, this blows.

Burning Sheep Productions · Postby **Burning Sheep Productions** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 8:46 am

I've got a friend just like this guy who's all gothy and showed off his diary full of depictions of rape and death and gore and kinks and all that stuff and letters and dialogue on how he's gonna kill himself. Eight people went to the school councellors after reading it. Eight!! And he dresses up in goth clothes too, the full set. But he's got friends to hang out with and have fun doing random stuff to raise their testosterone level.

Joe3210 · Postby **Joe3210** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 12:44 pm

Friends to hang out with usually means the difference between life and death in those situations.

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Shooting Rampage by Student Leaves 10 Dead on Rese

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