He created comic books with ghastly drawings of people shooting each other and wrote stories about zombies. He dressed in black, wore eyeliner and apparently admired Hitler and called himself the "Angel of Death" in German.
His father committed suicide about four years ago, and his mother is in a nursing home after an auto accident, according to news reports.
On Monday, 16-year-old Jeff Weise went on a rampage, shooting to death his grandfather and the grandfather's companion, then invading his school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. Armed with two pistols and a shotgun, he killed nine people and wounded seven before shooting himself to death in the nation's bloodiest school shooting since Columbine High in Colorado six years ago.
PHOTO: EPA
Investigators are not sure exactly what set Weise off, but fellow students at Red Lake High said they saw what looked, in retrospect, like warning signs.
About a month ago, his sketch of a guitar-strumming skeleton accompanied by a caption that read "March to the death song 'til your boots fill with blood" was displayed in his English class, said classmate Parston Graves Jr.
Graves, 16, said he was thinking about that picture Tuesday.
"I thought that was him letting everyone know" that he was going to do something, Graves said.
Graves said Weise had also shown him comic books he had drawn, filled with well-crafted images of people shooting each other.
"It was mental stuff," he said. "It was sick."
Weise, who routinely wore a long black trench coat, eyeliner and combat boots, has been described by several classmates as a quiet teenager. Some of them knew about his troubled childhood -- relatives told the St Paul Pioneer Press his father had committed suicide and his mother suffered head injuries in an auto accident.
Audrey Thayer, a friend of the family who also works for the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union office in Bemidji, about 50km from the town where the shooting occurred, said Weise's story was one of "devastation and loss."
Thayer said Weise had been living with his 58-year-old grandfather, Daryl Lussier, and Lussier's 32-year-old companion, Michelle Sigana.
Authorities said that during the rampage inside the school, Weise appeared to choose his victims at random. Some witnesses said he smiled and waved as he fired.
Michael Tabman, the FBI's agent in charge of the Minneapolis office, said on Tuesday that a motive for the shootings had not been established.
If Weise was quiet in school, he became an extrovert in cyberspace. It appeared he may have posted messages on a neo-Nazi Web site expressing admiration for Hitler and calling himself "Todesengel," German for the "Angel of Death."
Several notes signed by a Jeff Weise, who identified himself as "a Native American from the Red Lake `Indian' Reservation," were posted beginning last year on a Web site operated by the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party.
In one posting, he criticized interracial mixing on the reservation and slammed fellow Indian teens for listening to rap music.
"We have kids my age killing each other over things as simple as a fight, and it's because of the rap influence," he wrote.
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