Jeff Weise is responsible for the worst school shooting since Columbine. On Monday, he went on a shooting rampage on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. He killed nine people, severly injured five others and then killed himself.
People who knew him as a child tell the story of a much different Jeff Weise. He spent the first ten or eleven years of his 16-year-long life in the Twin Cities.
Weise?s aunt, Kim Desjarlait, still lives in the metro area. She fondly remembers a younger Jeff, a more innocent, happy Jeff, ?Jeff, when he lived here in Minneapolis, was never in trouble. He was a good kid. The Jeff I know was into drawing, into video games, into watching movies. You know, he played a lot with his sister and his nephew. He just was not a bad kid.?
But around the time Weise was nine or ten, his life began falling apart. His father, 31-year-old Daryl Lussier, committed suicide in 1997 in Red Lake.
Two years later his mother was disabled after a car accident in Shakopee. Because she could no longer care for her son, Jeff Weise was sent to live with his grandfather on the Red Lake Reservation, more than 200 miles north of the Twin Cities.
His aunt says that move was really hard on the boy, ?I think probably what transpired is Jeff had no say in the very end where he was going to live. You know, your dad's gone, your mom's been in a car accident and everything you know that is normal has been wiped out and now you have to go live with people that you know and love, but it's not your daily routine.?
It seems that it was about this time that the shy, quiet boy, who liked to draw, turned to the internet for friends or understanding. Whatever reason, Weise began frequenting neo-nazi internet chat rooms. Last year, he claimed to be studying the Third Reich, expressed admiration for Hitler and claimed to be a "national socialist".
Eerily, he wrote "once I commit myself to something, I stay until the end."
Classmates in Red Lake, say Weise' was a loner, wearing black eyeliner and dressing in a black trench coat. They point to a high school class picture where he had twisted his hair into devil-like spikes.
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."
Michael Tabman, the FBI's agent in charge of the investigation, said Tuesday authorities had not established a motive for the shootings. Investigators said they did not know if there had been some kind of confrontation between Weise and his grandfather.
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.
To Weise's aunt Kim Desjarlait, that doesn't sound like the boy she watched grow up in Minneapolis. She said she?ll always remember the boy with the shy smile, not the angry teen who killed nine people and critically injured five others before killing himself.
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