Posted for BISD, Brownwood Law Enforcement & Brownwood Media (see note at end of post)

“ Sondra Hegstrom, who said she had had classes with Weise, said he was quiet and "never said anything." He was teased -- "terrorized," she said -- by people who thought he was weird. ”
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Tuesday, March 22, 2005 · Last updated 1:24 p.m. PT
Communication often security gap at school
By BEN FELLER
AP EDUCATION WRITER
 WASHINGTON -- Bill Bond was the principal at Heath High School in western Kentucky when a freshman opened fire in 1997, shooting eight students and killing three of them. That was before the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, when two students in Colorado went on a rampage that stunned the nation and prompted a wave of stronger school security.
Yet on Tuesday, Bond was again counseling a peer in the middle of a horror story: Chris Dunshee, principal at Red Lake High School in northern Minnesota. One of Dunshee's students killed himself Monday after committing the worst school shooting spree since Columbine.
"People want to have metal detectors and security guards and all of this, but the real thing that makes a difference is working with the kids and adjusting to the kids," said Bond, now a national consultant for principals on preventing bullying and other violence.
"These kinds of situations are just like terrorist situations," he said. "When people have so much hate in them that they don't mind dying, you don't have any deterrents left."
School violence experts said Tuesday that the country improved campus safety after the Columbine shootings, most notably by restricting access to schools, increasing the number of school police officers, developing emergency plans and adding phones and radios in schools.
But much of the momentum for such safety measures has been lost over the last couple years, as public attention wanes and budget cuts erode staffing and training, experts said.
"People always ask, 'Is this a wake-up call?'" said Kenneth Trump, a school safety consultant who has worked with school leaders in 44 states. "The question isn't whether this is a wake-up call - it's whether we're going to hit the snooze button and go to sleep again."
In the Minnesota case, police say a student shot his grandfather and the grandfather's companion before heading to school and killing five students, a teacher, an unarmed guard and himself.
There have been 29 deaths on school campuses or otherwise associated with schools this academic year, said Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. Last year, he tallied 49, more than in any recent year, including the year of the Columbine shootings.
"In almost every school safety assessment we do across the country," Trump said, "we find staff awareness is down, the vigilance is not there, the emergency plan content is questionable, and people have not practiced what would work in a real emergency."
Federal government figures show violent crime against students in school fell significantly between 1992 and 2002. But critics say such self-reported data is dated and often doesn't reflect the scope of trouble in schools.
More broadly, the numbers don't capture what school safety specialists say is the most critical goal: changing school culture. That means adults who model appropriate behavior, monitor warning signs of violence and even train students to help stop peers from bullying.
"It's not a problem that can be fixed with money," Bond said. "It's a problem that can only be fixed with courage. And if you think money is in short supply, try finding courage."
Money, however, is an issue, too, said Curt Lavarello, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. Federal budget cuts have forced schools to drop the police who are trained to talk to kids and pick up on signs of impending violence, he said.
The Columbine shootings created an awareness that led to more physically secure buildings, said William Lassiter, school safety specialist at the Center for the Prevention of School Violence in Raleigh, N.C.
"What's missing is we need to make sure that students feel connected to their community and to their school," Lassiter said. "We must make sure they have a trusted adult."
After Columbine, the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, created a video program to help faculty and students recognize underlying signs of violence. Its premise is that ignorance and fear lead to hatred - and potential tragedy. Said Jerald Newberry, who oversees health and safety for the NEA: "Our goal is to stop that chain."
On the Net:
Center for the Prevention of School Violence: http://www.ncdjjdp.org/cpsv/
National Association of School Resource Officers: http://www.nasro.org
National School Safety and Security Services: http://www.schoolsecurity.org

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Shooting%20Protecting%20Schools
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A neo-Nazi teenager who called himself the Angel of Death went on a shooting rampage on a remote US Indian reservation yesterday, killing his grandparents and then seven people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired.
Jeff Weise, 17, who openly admired Adolf Hitler and had been questioned before about threats at his Minnesota school, killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.
It was the worst school shooting in the US since the Columbine massacre in 1999 that killed 13 people.
One student said her classmates pleaded with Weise to stop shooting.
“You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?”’ said student Sondra Hegstrom.
He asked one of his victims whether he believed in God, witnesses said.
Reggie Graves, a student at Red Lake High School, said he was watching a film about Shakespeare in class when he heard the gunman blast his way past the metal detector at the school’s entrance, killing a guard.
Then, in a nearby classroom, he heard the gunman say something to his friend Ryan: “He asked Ryan if he believed in God,” Graves said. “And then he shot him.”
The victims included the gunman’s grandfather; the grandfather’s wife; a school security guard; a teacher; and five other students. At least 14 others were wounded, officials said.
“There’s not a soul that will go untouched by the tragic loss that we’ve experienced here,” said Floyd Jourdain, chairman of the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe,.
Police said the Weise killed himself after exchanging fire with officers. Red Lake Fire Chief Roman Stately said the gunman had two handguns and a shotgun.
“We ask Minnesotans to help comfort the families and friends of the victims who are suffering unimaginable pain by extending prayers and expressions of support,” state Governor Tim Pawlenty said.
Weise had been placed in the school’s Homebound programme for some violation of policy, said school board member Kathryn Beaulieu.
Students in that programme stay at home and are taught by a travelling teacher.
During the rampage, teachers herded students from one room to another, trying to move away from the sound of the shooting, said Graves, 14. He said some students crouched under desks.
Student Ashley Morrison said she heard shots, then saw the gunman’s face peering though a door window of a classroom where she was hiding with several other students. After banging at the door, the gunman walked away and she heard more shots, she said.
“I can’t even count how many gunshots you heard, there was over 20. ... There were people screaming, and they made us get behind the desk,” she said.
FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said the gunman exchanged gunfire with Red Lake police in a hallway, then retreated to a classroom, where he was believed to have shot himself.
All of the dead students, including the killer, were found in one room
Relatives said Weise was a loner who usually wore black and was teased by other kids.
They said his father committed suicide four years ago, and his mother was nursing home after suffering brain injuries in a car accident.
Weise admired German dictator Adolf Hitler and was a suspect following threats made at his school last year, he revealed in an internet forum frequented by neo-Nazis.
“I guess I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations,” Weise wrote on the website.
He said he was interested in finding like-minded Indians, a goal other messages on the website encouraged. He also admitted he was a suspect in a threat at school.
“Once I commit myself to something, I stay until the end,” he wrote.
In a message on a website last year that foreshadowed yesterday’s events, Weise said he had been questioned by police in connection with an alleged threat at the school.
“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,” he wrote in comments posted at 11:41 p.m. on April 19, 2004.
Five weeks later, he wrote that “the school threat passed and I was cleared as a suspect, I’m glad for that. I don’t much care for jail, I’ve never been there and I don’t plan on it.”
Alternately using the online pen names Todesengel -German for Angel of Death - and NativeNazi, Weise wrote several messages in which he said he believed Hitler and the Nazi movement that embroiled the world in war and caused millions of deaths got a bad rap.
“When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi’s were evil and that Hitler was a very evil man ect,” he wrote in one posting replete with misspellings.
“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.”
In other messages, he wrote that he believed a National Socialist movement could work on his reservation and planned on trying to recruit some members at school when it started up last fall.
“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.”
He wrote that when he talked in school about maintaining the tribe’s ethnic purity by not marrying outside the bloodline, “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.
It 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 has about 300 students, according to its Web site.
The reservation is about 240 miles north of Minneapolis. 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.

source: http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=113001400&p=yy3xxy98x
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And then there's the whole Minnesota school shooting
A Leader's Guide to the Struggle to Be Strong: How to Foster Resilience in Teens (Teen-Focused Coping Skills)
Sean Chambers
Book from Free Spirit Publishing
Release date: 01 May, 2000
Yesterday 17-year-old Jeff Weise, a student at the 300-student Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn. killed his grandfather and his grandfather's girlfriend, five students, a teacher and a guard. (There was a metal detector)
He also killed himself at the school, which is on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.
Washington Post: The reservation has seen violence before.
In January 2004, locals raked police buildings with gunfire, prompting a crackdown by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Three years ago, the Justice Department launched a major crackdown on drugs and guns on the reservation, which has a population of about 9,000 people. Officials found evidence of executions, drive-by shootings and ritualistic violence.
Local residents blamed poverty, discrimination, and endless cycles of drug and alcohol abuse. They said gangs often offered the only refuge for aimless youngsters.
As early as 1979, FBI agents had to be sent into the reservation to investigate widespread rioting and looting triggered by internal politics and dissatisfaction with the management style of the BIA. Several dozen Indians stormed the jails, locked up police officers and damaged property.
Red Lake is a closed reservation, meaning it is owned entirely by tribes, in this case the Chippewa Indians.
When this school schooting, which happened yesterday in case you hadn't heard, is mentioned at all it's compared to 1999's Columbine High School shootings (And I thought more than 12 people were killed there). It's not like Columbine you sorry excuse for a news outlet. I'm sure the Littleton students, too, will be interviewed about their reactions.
Weise also was not a "gunman" but a killer or a boy. We shall learn more about him. I wonder what we'll do with that information?

More fine reading at Blogcritics.org. Scroll down to read comments on this story and/or add one of your own. Support Blogcritics.org by shopping at Amazon.com from this page.

Comment 2 posted by Phillip Winn on March 22, 2005 11:46 AM:

Similar to the Littleton spree, the news reports I've heard have mentioned that the person in question was teased heavily by his peers.

And yeah, they also mentioned that he dressed in black, which is an interesting common thread but by no means definitive. Correlative, not causative.

Comment 3 posted by DPitzer on March 22, 2005 01:32 PM:

Wonderful about how the interviewee that got printed talking was the one who linked him to Goths.

But, as a country, I think it's about time we straightened our act out, anyway. We've got a government that's letting religion into state matters...well, how about that part for Christianity that preaches love and tolerance for everyone? If our children had that pounded into their heads from an early age. I have my doubts that we would have so many bullies in school. But our children seem to learn to be intolerant before they learn tolerance. It's a shame, because backing someone into a corner sometimes causes them to strike out. Back someone dangerously unstable into a corner, and you can guarantee they'll strike out.
People need to learn to treat each other better, and I can almost certainly guarantee that things like this will become a thing of the past.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/03/22/100745.php

Copyright © 2003-2005 Red Lake Net News
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Jeff Weise: A mystery in a life full of hardship
 
By Chuck Haga/Howie Padilla/Richard Meryhew
Star Tribune
RED LAKE, MINN. -- Even as a member of a loose confederacy of loners, Jeff Weise seemed to be an afterthought.
"He was a goth," said Allan Mosay, 14, who saw Weise occasionally on the Red Lake Reservation but didn't really know the 16-year-old, who affected the black fashion, musical tastes and often dark moods of the outsider subculture.
"He had no friends," Mosay said. "He didn't communicate."
On a sparsely populated reservation where everybody knows everybody, few seemed to know Weise and fewer still claimed to know him well.
"I knew Jeff when he was 4 or 5 years old," said Delan Steven Omen, 42, who said he was the best man at the wedding of Weise's parents. "His family used to live in the neighborhood where I lived. But I haven't really seen him since then."
Sharon Garrigan, 62, a Head Start teacher on the reservation for 39 years, smiles at adults on the reservation and remembers when they were little. "But I can't remember him," she said of Weise.
"He was having a little problem, I heard," said Alicia Meadow, a Red Lake High School student who may have avoided being shot Monday by skipping her last-period class. She heard the gunfire grow close as she and other students huddled in a classroom that Weise apparently passed.
"He seemed like a pretty good guy," she said. "Whenever I talked with him, he seemed all friendly. I never thought that anything like that would come from him."
FBI officials said Tuesday that they had no information about Weise's motive, but "the nature of the activities would indicate there was some planning," said Michael Tabman, special agent in charge.

Talk of death
In the hours after the shootings, witnesses told of students pleading with Weise by name -- "No, Jeff, no!"
Sondra Hegstrom, who said she had had classes with Weise, said he was quiet and "never said anything." He was teased -- "terrorized," she said -- by people who thought he was weird.
He often wore "a big old black trench coat," she said, and drew pictures of skeletons. "He talked about death all the time."
A couple of his friends had said he was suicidal, she said. They quoted him as saying once, "That would be cool if I shot up the school."
The friends dismissed it as talk, Hegstrom said.
But Willy May, 18, who knew Weise from school, said people shouldn't have been surprised.
"He fits the profile of a Columbine shooter, man," he said.
May said Weise always wore combat boots "with red shoelaces," similar to those of the shooters at Columbine High School.
He said that Weise "always had stacks of drawings, disturbed drawings." Some, he said, would show people with bullets going through their skulls.
May also said that "a while back," Weise "got blamed" for phoning in bomb threats at the school. "I'm not sure if it was him or not, but he got blamed," May said.
Joey Johnson, 18, who also knew Weise from school, saw a different side to the teen.
"He's a pretty bright kid, man," Johnson said. "I thought he was going to make it. He was smart."
Recently, school officials relegated Weise to a home tutoring program. He was known to post messages on a Nazi website.
Using the screen name Native Nazi, Weise wrote: "As a result of cultural dominance and interracial mixing there are barely any full blooded Natives left. ... It's hard though, being a Native American National Socialist; people are so misinformed, ignorant, and closed-minded it makes your life a living hell."
Posting under the name "Blades11," Weise appeared to be a regular contributor to fiction websites. On one, Weise wrote, "I'm a fan of zombie films, have been for years, as well as fan of horror movies in general," he wrote. "I like to write horror stories, read about Nazi Germany and history, and someday plan on moving out of the [United States]."
Family member Lorene Gurneau said that despite those issues, there were no harbingers of Monday's horror. "I've talked to other relatives, and everyone is just in shock," she said.
Family life
As she spoke about Weise, she remembered a young boy raised in Minneapolis who played alone. When Gurneau and her children -- who were about six years older than Weise -- would visit the boy and his mother, Joanne, he would close himself in his room.
It's similar to the teen she saw daily as of late, she said.
"He would always wear that long dark coat and those baggy pants," she said. "I couldn't even tell you what shoes he ever wore because of those clothes."
Gurneau attributes some of Weise's troubles to his beleaguered life. His father, Daryl Lussier Jr., known to relatives as "Baby Dash," committed suicide in July 1997 following a police standoff that lasted for more than a day, Gurneau said. Not even Lussier's father, Red Lake officer Daryl Lussier, could negotiate a peaceful ending. The senior Lussier was one of Weise's first victims Monday.
Years later, Joanne Weise suffered brain damage in a car accident after she and a friend had been drinking, Gurneau said.
At 6 feet and 250 pounds, Jeff Weise also was the target of constant razzing. "Plus he was held back a couple of grades," Gurneau said.
Tribal police and the FBI haven't said that Weise was high on their radar prior to Monday.
Though school officials refused to comment on Weise's student status, he apparently left school last year for unspecified medical reasons. Since his mother's accident, he had lived with his paternal grandmother.
"This was a young man with a tragic history," said Audrey Thayer, who works on the reservation as part of the Greater Minnesota Racial Justice Project. "There is a lot of that kind of loss and devastation [at Red Lake]."

http://www.rlnn.com/ArtMar05/JeffWeiseMystFullHardship.html
Staff writer Bob von Sternberg contributed to this report.
http://www.rlnn.com/ArtMar05/JeffWeiseMystFullHardship.htmlJeff Weise at age 9
nPioneer Editorial: Grief and pain are universal
 
Shock, grief, incomprehension - soon we will move into anger.
The events Monday at Red Lake High School, taking the lives of nine unsuspecting people, and damaging seven more, will live as a day of incredible sorrow on the Red Lake Reservation. A 16-year-old boy, for reasons no one understands, stole his police sergeant grandfather’s guns and squad car, killed the elder and his companion in their home and went on a rampage of random shooting at the his school.
After the initial trauma, we weep. Now, we ask questions that may never have answers. What was the motive? Or was there no motive? Was there just a deranged youngster playing out some hallucinatory drama comprehensible only to his own twisted mind? We may never know, much less figure out how to short circuit another such act.
We will soon have 10 wakes, 10 funerals, 10 burials to attend. No words of comfort can console the families and friends of the victims. And almost everyone in the small community of Red Lake has a connection with the murdered and the maimed.
An Ojibwe custom is to silence the name of the deceased loved one for a year after the funeral. Pictures and other mementoes of the lost life are put away. When the cycle of seasons turns once more, then families can hold a give-away or feast or publish a memorial to celebrate the loved one’s life.
It hardly seems as if that tradition can be honored with so many questions swarming around Jeff Weise’s 10-minute swath of devastation, gunning down a security guard, a teacher and students at his school. Granted, as with any community, acts of violence happen at Red Lake. But never a mass shooting, never a crime attracting worldwide media attention.
Nevertheless, we have to respect the privacy and need for grief of those closest to the tragedy. Those of us inclined to prayer will pray for the bereaved. Those trained in counseling will provide sounding boards. Others will offer condolences. And some of us won’t have a channel for outreach.
The media frenzy will die down, the mobile broadcast vehicles will wind up their cables and move on and the surveillance helicopters will fly away. The 20,000 hits per day on the Red Lake Nation Web cite will diminish to the normal local interest. The phone calls from Australia, England, Canada and states east and west will dry up. Another crisis will receive public attention.
But treasured children will never grow up to reach their potential. As Dennis Banks, an elder, said during Tuesday’s prayer vigil at North Country Regional Hospital, the deaths of the students stripped the community of people who might one day have been its leaders.
The loss reminds us of another piece of wisdom offered at the prayer service by another elder, George Whipple. “We are all together. We are all born under one heart.”
Grief and pain are universal.
http://www.rlnn.com/ArtMar05/EDGriefPainUnversial.html
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http://www.thetrenchcoat.com/
http://www.redlakenation.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=52
http://www.livejournal.com/users/weise/
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0323051weise1.html
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note: This information is made available to those in the community who have been heard on KXYL saying they just can't get their head around why someone would do such a thing. Terrorists are created and as President Bush agrees, enviromental issues do play a role in the equation. Unfortunately Brownwood Talking Heads don't get it and would rather spend their airtime bashing the ACLU, PETA or gays ! Can't believe they are soooooooooo concerned with the Easter Bunny (secular symbol) being removed from Shopping Malls (they call this an attack on Christianity! ).

rest of story...