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.