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.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS