Category: School Violence

Red Lake Investigation Continues:

The victims’ names have been released…

The five students were identified by the FBI as Thurlene Stillday, 15; Chase Lussier, 15; Chanelle Rosebear, 15; Alicia Spike, 15; and Dwayne Lewis, 15.

The FBI identified the remaining victims as Daryl Lussier, 58, the suspect’s grandfather; Michelle Sigana, 32, Lussier’s companion; Neva Winnecoup Rogers, 52, a teacher; and Derrick Brun, 28, a security officer.

Separate sources have identified six injured students: Jeffrey May, 15; Steven Cobenais, 15; Jeffrey Green; Cody Thunder, 15; Lance Crowe, 15; and Ryan Auginach.

A victims’ fund has also been established…

Friends and family established a fund for the victims and their families. Donations can be made at any Wells Fargo Bank to The Red Lake Band of Chippewa Memorial Fund.

Again, my thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by this tragedy.

Father of Columbine Victim: America ‘Callous’ to School Shootings:

Darrell Scott, the father of Columbine victim Rachel Scott, has said that there hasn’t been enough coverage of the Red Lake shooting in the mainstream media…

“One of the things that concerns me … is that I noticed there wasn’t [much] exposure in the media to what had happened [in Red Lake],” Scott observes. “When Columbine’s tragedy happened, there was massive coverage for months, and [now with] the second-largest shooting in American history in schools, it was like the third and fourth story in different places that I looked.”

Scott says the anemic media coverage of this most recent incident indicates that Americans have become “callous” toward such things. He says what he told congressional leaders in 1999 still rings true.

You know what kids? He’s right. I didn’t find out about the shooting until 4 hours after it happened, and someone had to e-mail me about it. And when I did turn on the major news channels, it was barely a blip on their coverage. All the news channels were talking about was Terri Schiavo. Nine people are killed by this scumbag and all the news can talk about is a woman who, by all rights, is still alive.

Now, this part may cost me some readers and friends, but I don’t care. It’s not just the mainstream media, either, it’s also the “blogosphere”. Out of all the blogs that I frequent, only two made any mention of the Red Lake shooting. No mentions of the shooting, no thoughts or prayers for the families of the victims. The worst school massacre since Columbine, and all you all can talk about is Terri Schiavo. Which leads me to believe one of two things. You either are deferring to me as the authority on this subject, which I doubt since I am far from an authority, or you just don’t care. Have we become so jaded since Columbine?

Classmates say there may have been warning signs that school shooter was troubled :

Parson Graves says Jeff Weise’s (weesez) artwork might have been a red flag. Graves says one of Weise’s pictures, which was hanging in class, was of a skeleton wearing a helmet with a swastika on it. It bore the words “march to the death song ’til your boots fill with blood.”

Weise also is said to have joked that he thought it would be cool to shoot up a high school. Classmate Ashley Morrison says nobody took Weise seriously — but now she wishes they had.

This is why I get upset when people say that schools and police overreact to situations like this and dismiss it as “artistic expression” or “kids being kids”. I’d rather there be an overreaction than an underreaction.

Columbine on the reservation:

Here’s how it went down…

What is known at this time is that Weise shot his grandfather and his grandfather’s companion before he drove to the school. His grandfather, Daryl Lussier, was a police officer with the Red Lake police department.

According to Michael Pabman, FBI, Weise took his grandfather’s bullet-proof vest, his police car and multiple weapons, and drove to the school.

Weise first encountered school security guard Derrick Brun, who was unarmed. Weise drove up to the school, confronted Brun and shot him before he entered the school.

He then proceeded down the hallway, saw teacher Neva Rogers, 62, and some students, and fired shots in their direction. Rogers and the students rushed into a classroom; Weise pursued them into the classroom and opened fire, killing Rogers.

He said police officers arrived while the shooting was in progress and entered the school. Weise shot at the officers and one returned fire. It is not known whether one of the shots fired by an officer injured Weise.

Weise then went back into the classroom and continued firing on the students.

The entire rampage took about 10 minutes, but there is an abundance of damage to the school, Pabman said. He was not sure how many rounds were fired. He said one of the weapons was a 22-caliber and that may have been the weapon that Weise used to kill his grandfather.

The authorities don’t know what happened at the grandfather’s house.

Two victims in critical condition:

Two victims of the Red Lake shooting are now in critical condition after being shot in the head at close range by Jeff Weise. They have been flown to a larger hospital in North Dakota, where two extra neurosurgeons have been called in.

Again my thoughts and prayers to those recovering from this atrocity and hoping that all may have a quick and complete recovery.

High School Rampage Leaves 10 Dead:

More information out of Red Lake. The shooter’s name is Jeff Weise, a 17-year-old student. He had been placed in the school’s Homebound program for an unknown violation of school policy. School officials are not allowed to reveal the nature of the violation. Students in that program are tutored at home by a traveling teacher. Also, according to the article…

Relatives told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that Weise was a loner who usually wore black and was teased by other kids. Relatives told the newspaper his father committed suicide four years ago, and that his mother was living in a Minneapolis nursing home because she suffered brain injuries in a car accident.

A hard life, but still no reason to commit such an atrocity.

Weise believed he was the angel of death, and he was a neo-Nazi, more on that later. School officials were concerned that he was going to try something violent in April 2004.

One of the students, Reggie Grave, heard Weise ask his friend Ryan if he believed in God, then he shot him.

Originally, he was thought to have killed his grandparents, but it turns out it was his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend.

According to The Scotsman, Weise posted on a Nazi message board under the names Todesengel, German for “angel of death”, and NativeNazi. Here are some of the posts…

“I guess I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations,”

“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 school on 4/20, Hitlers birthday, and just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they’ve pinned,”

“When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi’s were evil and that Hitler was a very evil man ect,”

“Of course, not for a second did I believe this. Upon reading up on his actions, the ideals and issues the German Third Reich addressed, I began to see how much of a like had been painted about them. They truly were doing it for the better.”

“The only ones who oppose my views are the teachers at the high school, and a large portion of the student body who think a Nazi is a Klansman, or a White Supremacist thug. Most of the Natives I know have been poisoned by what they were taught in school.”

The public school system, he wrote, “has done more harm than good, and as a result it has left many on this reservation misled and misinformed.”

“I get the same old argument which seems to be so common around here. ‘We need to mix all the races, to combine all the strengths.’

“They (teachers) don’t openly say that racial purity is wrong, yet when you speak your mind on the subject you get ‘silenced’ real quick by the teachers and likeminded school officials,” he wrote.

According to MSNBC, he fits a familiar profile…

Student Sondra Hegstrom, 17, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that Weise was into goth culture, wore “a big old black trench coat,” drew pictures of skeletons, listened to heavy metal music and “talked about death all the time.”

Not that any of that led him to be the shooter, but I’ll discuss that a little bit later.

Allegedly this is his LiveJournal and his Yahoo Profile.

Opinion: I bet if they dig harder, they’ll find he probably had some admiration for the original scumbags Harris and Klebold. Columbine laid the foundation for the myth that violent retaliation against tormentors, real or imagined, is acceptable.

However, wearing a dark trench coat and listening to heavy metal does not automatically make you a shooter. If that were the case, I would have been in jail a long time ago.

Getting back to the matter at hand, once again a shooter takes the cowards way out. Not only did this scumbag shoot unarmed people, he took his own worthless life before he could face retribution. Nine victims are dead because of his worthless hate.

If you profess to everyone that you are a Nazi, you’re bound to invite some trouble on yourself. I feel bad about what happened to this scumbag’s parents, but it’s still no excuse for the deaths of nine innocents. Harris and Klebold now have a playmate in hell.

Again, my thoughts and prayers go out to the friends and families of the victims.