10 dead in school shooting

[TB4000]

10 Dead in Minn. Teen Rampage, Police Say

3 minutes ago



By JOSHUA FREED, Associated Press Writer

BEMIDJI, Minn. - A high school student went on a shooting rampage on an Indian reservation Monday, killing his grandparents at their home and then seven people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired, authorities and witnesses said. The suspect apparently killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.




It was the nation's worst school shooting since the Columbine massacre in 1999 that killed 13 people.

One student said her classmates pleaded with the gunman to stop shooting.

"You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?" student Sondra Hegstrom told The Pioneer of Bemidji, using the name of the suspected shooter.

Before the shootings at Red Lake High School, the suspect's grandparents were shot in their home and died later. There was no immediate indication of the gunman's motive.

In addition to the shooter, the death toll at the school included five students, a teacher and a security guard, FBI (news - web sites) spokesman Paul McCabe said in Minneapolis.

Fourteen to 15 other students were injured, McCabe said. Some were being cared for in Bemidji, about 20 miles south of Red Lake. Authorities closed roads to the reservation in far northern Minnesota while they investigated the shootings.

Hegstrom described the shooter grinning and waving at a student his gun was pointed at, then swiveling to shoot someone else. "I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that's when I hid," she told The Pioneer.

McCabe declined to talk about a possible connection between the suspect and the couple killed at the home, but Red Lake Fire Director Roman Stately said they were the grandparents of the gunman. He identified the shooter's grandfather as Daryl Lussier, a longtime officer with the Red Lake Police Department, and said Lussier's guns may have been used in the shootings.

Stately said the shooter had two handguns and a shotgun.

"After he shot a security guard, he walked down the hallway shooting and went into a classroom where he shot a teacher and more students," Stately told Minneapolis television station KARE.

Students and a teacher, Diane Schwanz, said the gunman tried to break down a door to get into her classroom.

"I just got on the floor and called the cops," Schwanz told the Pioneer. "I was still just half-believing it."

Ashley Morrison, another student, had taken refuge in Schwanz's classroom. With the shooter banging on the door, she dialed her mother on her cell phone. Her mother, Wendy Morrison, said she could hear gunshots on the line.

"'Mom, he's trying to get in here and I'm scared,'" Ashley Morrison told her mother, according to the newspaper.

All of the dead students were found in one room. One of them was a boy believed to be the shooter, McCabe said. He would not comment on reports that the boy shot himself and said it was too early to speculate on a motive.

Martha Thunder's 15-year-old son, Cody, was being treated for a gunshot wound to the hip.



"He heard gunshots and the teacher said 'No, that's the janitor's doing something,' and the next thing he knew, the kid walked in there and pointed the gun right at him," Thunder said, standing outside the hospital in Bemidji.

Police officers were posted at the hospital Monday night to discourage reporters from entering. When a reporter approached three men walking across a hospital parking lot, one broke down in tears, and the others said they had no comment.

The school was evacuated after the shootings and locked down for the investigation, McCabe said.

"It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together," he said.

Floyd Jourdain Jr., chairman of the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe, called it "without a doubt the darkest hour" in the group's history. "There has been a considerable amount of lives lost, and we still don't know the total of that," Jourdain said.

It was the nation's worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 before killing themselves on April 20, 1999.

The rampage in Red Lake was the second fatal school shooting in Minnesota in 18 months. Two students were killed at Rocori High School in Cold Spring in September 2003. Student John Jason McLaughlin, who was 15 at the time, awaits trial in the case.

Red Lake High School, on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, has about 300 students, according to its Web site.

The reservation is about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities. It is home to the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe, one of the poorest in the state. According to the 2000 census, 5,162 people lived on the reservation, and all but 91 were Indians.

[yoMAMA]

This is so sad..................

:frown:

rest in peace and prayers to all the victims.

[Banana]

This guy was a Native American nazi and went by the name "NativeNazi."

Can't help but smirk when I heard that.

[yoMAMA]

Red Lake Reservation: A troubled history
Sharon Schmickle
Star Tribune
Published March 22, 2005

The secluded Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota has been plagued over the decades by more than its share of the seeds of violence: troubled schools, poverty, unemployment and bitter intertribal battles over basic rights and control of the reservation.

Red Lake High School scored second-lowest of Minnesota schools last year on state comprehensive tests for 11th-grade math and third-lowest for 10th-grade reading. According to the state Department of Education's 2004 report card on the school, nearly one-fourth of the 355 students required special education, and the school failed to meet federal standards for reading and math. Four in five of the students met government poverty standards making them eligible for free and reduced-price lunches and other benefits.

On the reservation, which is largely closed to outsiders, all of the Red Lake High School students are American Indian, the state report said.

While school shootings have become a tragic reality for American students from a range of ethnic and economic backgrounds, many of the Red Lake students were born into a legacy of violence. And teens have lost their lives in earlier flare-ups on the reservation.

In 1979, dissidents staged an insurrection after tribal leaders removed one of the dissidents' sympathizers from the Tribal Council. Five armed dissidents broke into the reservation's law enforcement center and took several hostages. The FBI quickly ordered all police and sheriff's officers off the reservation, saying they faced life-threatening gunfire.

With no police presence on the reservation, dissident tribal members captured the police department's weapons and raided the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs storage area for confiscated liquor.

Then the insurgents set the law enforcement center on fire and went on a rampage of shooting and looting. The home of Roger Jourdain, who was then the tribal chairman, and other government buildings were burned to the ground.

When the rioting ended, two teenagers were dead of gunshot wounds, several were wounded and about $4 million in property was damaged, primarily by fire.

Five men were convicted and sentenced to prison in connection with the rioting.

In the 1980s, there was more unrest at the reservation over allegations of civil-rights abuses. Lawyers had been barred from tribal courts, and defendants were routinely denied bail, jury trials and other rights that federal laws were supposed to extend to Indians.

In 1986, a Red Lake band member, Gregory Good, accused Chief Tribal Judge George Sumner of running a court system that violated civil rights. One night after a dispute, Good shot Sumner to death. After hearing that Sumner had chased and beaten Good, a federal jury accepted arguments of self-defense and acquitted Good of homicide charges.

Under pressure of a losing federal funding, tribal officials moved to improve the courts during the 1990s.

Because of its isolation, Red Lake has had little luck with casino gambling, which has pulled some Minnesota Indians out of poverty. While the tribe has run casinos, revenues have been relatively low and many of the customers have been Red Lake residents.

Red Lake has pulled itself up recently, reducing its poverty rate during the 1990s, but more than four in 10 residents remained unemployed, according to a recent census report. During the 1990s, a new generation of tribal leaders also moved toward a more open and less autocratic government than the reservation had known earlier.

Sharon Schmickle is at sschmickle@startribune.com
© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

[TB4000]

They claim that the shooter "admired" Hitler.

[yoMAMA]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7259823

A troubled kid, with a father who commited suicide and a mother comfined to nursing homes.

:(

[kpih]

Reservations are the most disadvantaged communities in the US unequivocally.

Now the media is out of the woodwork to dig up any sort of sordid past. Yeah the kid is the devil, and he worships the Anti-Christ, Hitler, GWB, and Condi Rice...

I don't specialize in mass murderers or individual homicide cases, but personally I think the family history has more to do with his behavior than all the crap about Hitler worshipping...

Sheesh if we look at most mass murderers and serial killers, most of these guys (guys mostly) are quite "normal" people (e.g. BTK).

[Grasshopper]

I don't specialize in mass murderers or individual homicide cases, but personally I think the family history has more to do with his behavior than all the crap about Hitler worshipping...


Yes, the Hitler stuff is the effect not the cause of the sickness.

They have severe problems and then they start looking for what society tells them is the most unacceptible people or beliefs and they go - "Oh yeah, that's for me."

That's why "Satanic" cults always pop up in extremely religious areas.

They rebel by going for what they were told is the worst set of beliefs.

If kids in a community were told squirrels are evil and terrible you'd have a certain number of reject kids going around calling themselves "Squirrel Men" and getting pet squirels and having photos of squirrels on their bedroom walls.

[TB4000]

Here's a pic of the kid that did the shooting...I almost fell outta my seat because he resembled a "gothy" mexican heavy set dude I went to high school with, in the face.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/050222/050322_schoolshooting_suspect_bcol2p.standard.jpg

[applehead]

he looks about 12 in that picture...

[Chu Chi]

This guy was a Native American nazi and went by the name "NativeNazi."

Can't help but smirk when I heard that.

Nawh, don't do that.

Think about where you must be mentally to commit such an act.

The best reference I could come up with is a song by Jimi Hendrix which he dedicated to the American Indian called "I don't Live Today".

Listen to the words, its chilling.

CC

[rice cracker]

The kid admired Hitler and joined nazi.org because of his views on eugenics. That makes him a fucker in my book. Killing people because he's all mad that other students "want to be black?" That makes him a piece of shit.

[Chu Chi]

Why would a non white teenager worship a White supremacist?

This child was mentally ill and nobody was helping him.

Another tragic event.

CC

[Grasshopper]

Why would a non white teenager worship a White supremacist?
CC

Because he was pissed off with the world and believed that everything and everybody was against him so he was like "F**k it, I'm hookin' up with the baddest mother****er y'all ever heard of ".

It's the effect not the cause.

Here's the kids life..................

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/24/MNG7UBU2GT1.DTL

'The clues were all there'

School shooter depicted as deeply disturbed, ignored teen

Ceci Connolly and Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post

Thursday, March 24, 2005

Redlake, Minn. -- Two days after a shooting rampage on the Indian reservation here left 10 dead, friends, relatives and neighbors of Jeff Weise -- the 16-year- old assailant -- began to sketch a portrait of a deeply disturbed youth who had been treated for depression in a psychiatric ward, lost several close family members, sketched gruesome scenes of armed warriors and was removed from the school where he gunned down most of his victims Monday.

"The clues were all there," said Kim Desjarlait, Weise's step-aunt, 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."

On the Red Lake Indian Reservation, officials held a private prayer service Wednesday night and met to discuss when students might be able to return to school. Superintendent Stuart Desjarlait said it may take months for the high school to reopen because of the extensive damage from Monday's rampage. Five students, a teacher and a guard were killed at the school. Seven students were wounded and two remained in critical condition Wednesday at a hospital in Fargo, N.D.

Federal authorities said they were conducting autopsies on Weise and his nine victims, but FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said he did not anticipate releasing any information in the near future. Tribal leaders were even less forthcoming, strictly limiting reporters' movements.

Tensions rose throughout Wednesday, with some residents whispering fears that if they spoke to outsiders they would suffer retribution. Residents of neighboring communities offered cautionary tales about violence on the reservation, and the Justice Department created a task force to deal with gangs when Red Lake suffered five homicides in seven months in 2002. Because Red Lake is a closed reservation, it operates as a sovereign nation, running its own police force and dictating who may set foot on the property.

Those willing to be interviewed described Weise as a young man who drifted among various homes on the reservation, listening to heavy metal music, proclaiming his affinity for Adolf Hitler and periodically showing up at the high school, even though Stuart Desjarlait said that six months ago he had ordered Weise to stay at home for tutoring.

He was taking the antidepressant Prozac and at least once was hospitalized for suicidal tendencies, said Gayle Downwind, a cultural coordinator at Red Lake Middle School, who taught Weise. It was not uncommon for Weise to spend at least one night a week at her home. "He considered my house a safe place to be," she said.

In his 16 years, Weise had lost many relatives. He was estranged from other family members and had a strained relationship with Daryl Lussier, the grandfather he killed at the start of Monday's rampage.

Family and friends said Weise's father, Daryl Lussier Jr., committed suicide in 1997. Two years later, a serious automobile accident killed a cousin and left Weise's mother partly paralyzed and brain damaged.

Then, about two years ago, "his other grandfather on his mom's side passed away," Kim Desjarlait told NBC's "Today" show. "You are dealing with three deaths within eight years. I think for a kid starting at 10 years old, that's a lot to take." At the time, she wanted to help raise Weise in Minneapolis, but he was sent to the reservation about 260 miles to the north.

In the sixth grade, Weise met Downwind's son, Sky Grant, and the two became close friends, often playing video games together. Grant recalled that Weise hated his mother and had a tendency to skip ahead to violent parts in movies they rented.

When Weise flunked eighth grade, he joined Downwind's special "Learning Center" program at the school. "He didn't function academically. He just sat there and drew pictures of army people with guns," she said. "He was a talented artist, but he drew terrible, terrible scenes."

Last June, Weise was suicidal. John Dudley, a part-time bus driver for the Red Lake health center, was called at the time to transport Weise to the hospital in Thief River Falls, about 60 miles from the reservation.

To some in the school, Weise was long a frightening figure, towering over many of the youngsters in all-black clothing. Because of recent bomb threats and other safety concerns, Red Lake High School insisted students secure a pass to go to the restroom, a requirement that agitated Weise, said Lee Ann Grant, Downwind's daughter, who had worked as a guard there since August.

[Grasshopper]

Apparently the shooter thought Nazis were a distinct breed from Klansman/White supremacists according to what he says below.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-03-24-minn-shooter-blog_x.htm

Shooter in Minn. school case chatted, blogged frequently

By Martiga Lohn, Associated Press Writer

3/24/2005

MINNEAPOLIS — "Overkill" and Adolf Hitler fascinated him, but the self-described "Native Nazi" was frustrated with teachers.

Internet chatter attributed to Jeff Weise, the Red Lake teenager who went on a shooting rampage at his high school, outlined his mental state in the months before he killed nine people and himself Monday.

"The only one's 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," he posted under the name "NativeNazi" at a National Socialist forum. "Many of the Natives I know have been poisoned by what they were taught in school."

Authorities and witnesses say Weise killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion Monday, then attacked the high school on the Red Lake Indian reservation in northern Minnesota. A security guard, five students and a teacher were killed and seven students were wounded before Weise apparently shot himself.

The 16-year-old was staying home after he had been put in the school's Homebound program for an undisclosed policy violation. In one post, he said, "I'm on home-bound schooling so I've got a s—-load of freetime."

More frustration with school showed up in other posts: "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 ..."

In bleak postings on Live Journal, an online site for bloggers, Weise's bio describes himself as "nothin but your average Native American stoner."

"I'm living every mans nightmare and that single fact alone is kicking my ass, I really must be ... worthless," he wrote in a Jan. 27 posting. "This place never changes, it never will."

In an earlier Jan. 4 posting, he wrote: "The instrument of my resurrection was supposed to be my freedom. 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. ... I don't know, but what I do know is I'm a retarded (expletive) for ever believing things would change for me. 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 soon?"

Weise spent a lot of time online, where he had profiles on a number of Web sites, using names that included "Todesengel" ("Angel of Death" in German) and "verlassen4_20," which means "abandoned" in German, and refers to Hitler's April 20 birthday. He said he had a "natural admiration" for Hitler and attached a Hitler quote — "Obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be broken" — to some posts.

When another Internet user praised "Target Practice," a bloody computer animation showing a murder-suicide fantasy, attributed to Weise under the name "Regret," he responded: "I'm a big fan of overkill."

The movie shows a person shooting four people, blowing up a police car and putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. A second film, "Clown," depicted a sinister clown picking a man off his feet and killing him.

One user suggested that the media could take the blame for the massacre shown in "Target Practice."

Weise responded: "Random violence, a suicidal mass-murderer, and people who blame the media afterwards. Yep. must be the 21st Century. God bless America."

Users who saw the animation after the school shooting — the worst since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, in which 15 people died — had a different take.

"I wonder how his own movies may have effected him, or even pushed him, off the edge," wrote one user. "It was stupid of you to do that, what ever your message was."

"What kind of screwed up crap is that?" wrote another. "I hope you have a nice time in hell with that clown."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

he looks about 12 in that picture...

Maybe he is. It's probably a very old photo because .........

....Weise, who had been left back several grades, wore dark eye makeup and a large black trenchcoat, and, at six feet tall and 250 pounds, towered over many of his smaller classmates. In a school picture from this year, an unsmiling Weise is seen all in black, his hair pulled up into a pair of devil's horns.

[yoMAMA]

The kid admired Hitler and joined nazi.org because of his views on eugenics. That makes him a fucker in my book. Killing people because he's all mad that other students "want to be black?" That makes him a piece of shit.

I think, to be fair, he was more of a troubled youth [father died of suicide, mother disabled] than a hater.

[rice cracker]

I think, to be fair, he was more of a troubled youth [father died of suicide, mother disabled] than a hater.

Lots of nazi wannabe murderers had troubled childhoods, I'm sure.

If this kid was white and held these views I'm certain there would be a lot less sympathy.

[Martino]

I think, to be fair, he was more of a troubled youth [father died of suicide, mother disabled] than a hater.

Sympathising with a mass murderer. Troubling.

[yoMAMA]

Sympathising with a mass murderer. Troubling.

not sympathizing, just pointing out the larger context and the historical plights native americans has been put under, not that i'm justifying his actions [all of his victims are native americans as well].

all i'm saying is, the kid is not a monster. he is a murderer but not a monster.

[rice cracker]

Um, yeah, he kind of is.

[Martino]

not sympathizing, just pointing out the larger context and the historical plights native americans has been put under, not that i'm justifying his actions [all of his victims are native americans as well].

all i'm saying is, the kid is not a monster. he is a murderer but not a monster.

No, I think he pretty much qualifies as a monster. Whatever his troubles, I'm not going to try and 'feel' or understand or use phrases like 'to be fair' about a kid who has destroyed the lives of so many families.

[applehead]

not sympathizing, just pointing out the larger context and the historical plights native americans has been put under, not that i'm justifying his actions [all of his victims are native americans as well].

all i'm saying is, the kid is not a monster. he is a murderer but not a monster.

very nice of you to say that.
but i can not CAN NOT see him as anything
but some kind of sick lunatic.
and i think the word monster describes him
perfectly.

i'm really tired of people making excuses
for troubled teens. there are plenty of
troubled children in this country and in this
world that doesn't decide to one day
go to school with a gun and randomly shoot people.

[mr. x]

well i heard there was this dude who was biracial (black/white) who robbed a bank and turned out he was a white supremacist.

also the deguzman guy who damn near shot up DeAnza (while my mom was taking classes) wasn't exactly white but liked the Columbine kids who worshipped hitler

[yoMAMA]

Minnesota Killer Chafed at Life On Reservation
Teen Faced Cultural Obstacles And Troubled Family History

By Blaine Harden and Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 25, 2005; Page A01

RED LAKE, Minn., March 24 -- In the months before he killed his grandfather, his classmates and himself, Jeff Weise painted an utterly nihilistic -- and often eloquent -- word portrait of life here on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

He described the reservation in Internet postings as a place where people "choose alcohol over friendship," where women neglect "their own flesh and blood" for relationships with men, where he could not escape "the grave I'm continually digging for myself."

In his dark and self-pitying depictions of life on the reservation, Weise appears to have drawn from his troubled personal history: When he was 8, his father committed suicide on the reservation after a standoff with police. About four months later, his mother suffered severe brain damage in an alcohol-related car accident.

Before that accident, while Weise was living with her in the suburbs of Minneapolis, his alcoholic mother often locked him out of her house and her boyfriend locked him in a closet and made him kneel for hours in a corner, said his grandmother, Shelda Lussier, 54, in whose home on the reservation the boy had lived since age 9.

In an interview outside her home, Lussier said that Weise, a hulking boy who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and was almost always dressed in black, tried to hurt himself 14 months ago by jabbing his arms with a pen.

With his self-professed loathing of reservation life and burdened by the psychopathologies of his parents, Weise on Monday joined the ranks of America's schoolhouse mass murderers. The 16-year-old killed nine people -- his grandfather, his grandfather's female companion, a school guard, a teacher and five schoolmates -- before killing himself.

Still, Weise was not all wrong in his assessment of Red Lake. Like many Indian reservations, especially the poor and isolated ones in and around the Great Plains, this can be a dangerous, soul-crushing place to grow up.

Compared with the tidy Denver suburb where two teenage boys went on a well-armed rampage at Columbine High School, killing 13 people and then themselves in 1999, Red Lake exists in a distant and exponentially more dismal dimension of the American experience.

"I'm living every mans nightmare," Weise wrote online in January. "This place never changes, it never will."

If that sounds like teenage overreaching, Sister Sharon Sheridan, 73, principal at St. Mary's Mission School on the reservation, said this of the shootings: "You can't condone what happened here, but you sure can understand it."
Warning Signs

In Washington this week, the director of behavioral health for the Indian Health Service, which provides health care here and for hundreds of other reservations, said the complex behavioral problems that have scarred several generations of Weise's family are all too common.

"This is a tragedy that I have seen the potential for in so many other places in Indian country," said Jon Perez, who is also a psychologist for adolescents. "I am worried about making sure that this doesn't have to happen again."

As the months, weeks and days ticked by before Monday's shooting, Weise was sending clear signals -- what Joe Conner, a clinical psychologist and expert on mental health care for Native Americans, described as "huge red flags and baggage everywhere" -- of serious adolescent mental illness.

Twice in the past school year, he stopped attending Red Lake High School -- and received home tutoring -- because he became severely depressed and was unable to handle teasing from his classmates, his grandmother said. She said the last time he had been at school -- before he stormed in with guns blazing on Monday -- was about five weeks ago.

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 Hardships

A 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?"
The Region's History

Compared with other reservations in Minnesota and across the country, Red Lake appears to have had an especially toxic history of violence, drug problems and gang activity. The curriculum now includes courses in anti-gang training, anti-bullying training, drug and alcohol abuse prevention, and instruction in fetal alcohol syndrome.

School Superintendent Stuart Desjarlait said a gang shooting at the high school in 1996 prompted federal funding for metal detectors, security cameras and security guards. The security system, however, proved all but useless when Weise showed up at the high school on Monday, driving a police cruiser he had stolen from his slain grandfather, wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with three weapons. Police responded quickly, but it took only about 10 minutes for Weise to kill seven people and himself.

Across the reservation in the past 30 years, there have been periodic outbreaks of violence that caused fatalities. During a riot over tribal leadership in 1979, two teenagers were killed and several buildings were burned as scores of tribe members, many drunk and carrying rifles, took over the tribal police station.

The tribe's geographic isolation here in the northwest corner of Minnesota has been exacerbated by a long tradition of self-enforced isolation. For more than a century, the tribe has resisted federal programs that would open up the reservation to private land ownership. "We have just not ever been too crazy about white people coming around the reservation," said Lee Cook, a former member of the tribal council.
Portrait of a Boy

Weise 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 that afternoon, he was gone. He did not leave a note.

Staff writers Ceci Connolly in Minneapolis and Sylvia Moreno in Red Lake and special correspondent Dalton Walker in Red Lake contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company


native americans outraged at bush's silence (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64317-2005Mar24.html)

[applehead]

not sympathizing, just pointing out the larger context and the historical plights native americans has been put under, not that i'm justifying his actions [all of his victims are native americans as well].

all i'm saying is, the kid is not a monster. he is a murderer but not a monster.

oh bleh. i forgot to mention.
i wasn't talking about you speficially
but people in general.
:biggrin:

[deez nuts]

I think, to be fair, he was more of a troubled youth [father died of suicide, mother disabled] than a hater.

i agree. he was native american. the minority amongst minorities. the neglected of the neglected.

for some odd reason i feel sorry for him. i didn't feel sorry for the kids responsible for the columbine shooting.

i too am troubled by this feeling of feeling sorry for the kid. the idea of feeling sorry for somebody is oh so foreign to me. i must dwell on this new found emotion and explore it some more.

[applehead]

whatever happened to shooting yourself in the
head when you have problems?

[deez nuts]

whatever happened to shooting yourself in the
head when you have problems?

and he did just that after his rampage.

[Grasshopper]

i agree. he was native american. the minority amongst minorities. the neglected of the neglected.

for some odd reason i feel sorry for him. i didn't feel sorry for the kids responsible for the columbine shooting.

i too am troubled by this feeling of feeling sorry for the kid. the idea of feeling sorry for somebody is oh so foreign to me. i must dwell on this new found emotion and explore it some more.

CB, you aren't really Pat Morita are you? :biggrin:

[nola]

Maybe we sympathize with his extreme troubles and being a person of color. The Columbine kids were middle-class white boys.

[yoMAMA]

Maybe we sympathize with his extreme troubles and being a person of color. The Columbine kids were middle-class white boys.

yes, i think so.

[Napoleon Chynamite]

^Given the seriousness of this tragedy perhaps this is in bad taste but...

I remember Chris Rock was talking about how the trench coat mafia responsible for the Columbine shootings traveled in like a group of six. Then he was like "Boo hoo, they were mad cause people picked on them, they didn't have any friends......there were six of the motherfuckers! I didn't have six friends in high school. I don't have six friends now!" etc etc etc

[nola]

Maybe we also sympathize with him because he spent alot of time on the internet, had a blog, etc. :biggrin: :frown:

[YuheiCarreau]

^Given the seriousness of this tragedy perhaps this is in bad taste but...

I remember Chris Rock was talking about how the trench coat mafia responsible for the Columbine shootings traveled in like a group of six. Then he was like "Boo hoo, they were mad cause people picked on them, they didn't have any friends......there were six of the motherfuckers! I didn't have six friends in high school. I don't have six friends now!" etc etc etc

Harris and Klebold didn't actually hang out with those kids; if I remember correctly, most of the "Trenchcoat Mafia" people had already graduated by the time they shot up the school, and they were never really friends with anyone besides themselves anyways.

[nonamerasian]

Maybe we sympathize with his extreme troubles and being a person of color. The Columbine kids were middle-class white boys.

Right or wrong, I have slight sympathy for him more because of his class.

He's a loner from a poor reservation.

The other guys were two rich kids from upper middle class Columbine.

[Martino]

Right or wrong, I have slight sympathy for him more because of his class.

He's a loner from a poor reservation.

The other guys were two rich kids from upper middle class Columbine.

Not one word has been said yet about the five other young lives he ended, nothing about their greaving parents, not even any comments about how America's gun culture makes it so easy for (pardon the following bad language, but I so rarely swear) these FUCKS to go out on these gun rampages, simply because they can't cope with their lives.

Sympathise with him if he just turned the gun on himself, yes. Not if he decides to take nine people with him first.

[yoMAMA]

Not one word has been said yet about the five other young lives he ended, nothing about their greaving parents, not even any comments about how America's gun culture makes it so easy for (pardon the following bad language, but I so rarely swear) these FUCKS to go out on these gun rampages, simply because they can't cope with their lives.

Sympathise with him if he just turned the gun on himself, yes. Not if he decides to take nine people with him first.

I think this tragedy does raises the questions [yet again] about gun controls.

However it think all politicians/medias are affraid to bring up this issue for being accused of taking advantage of a tragedy for political agendas.