A shotgun-wielding gunman targeting Jews killed two Methodists and a Catholic in the parking lots of a Jewish community center and a Jewish assisted living facility in a Kansas City suburb Sunday afternoon. He also shot at, but missed, two other people. A suspect was captured by police at a nearby elementary school a short time later.
Police identified the suspect as Frazier Glenn Cross, a/k/a Frazier Glenn Miller, 73, of Aurora, Missouri. Cross, a lifelong white supremacist, is well known to organizations who track hate groups. In the 1980s, he organized and served as “Grand Dragon” of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in South Carolina, and later organized a violent militia group. He once was the subject of a nationwide manhunt. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as a “raging anti-Semitic” who advocates exterminating Jews in online forums. Some witnesses of Sunday’s rampage said the shooter asked the victims if they were Jewish before shooting them, and shouted “Heil Hitler” as he was being placed in a patrol car..
The police chief of Overland Park, Kansas, said at a Sunday press conference that FBI agents and a federal prosecutor are working with local authorities in the investigation, and said Monday there is enough evidence to charge Cross with first-degree murder and hate crimes. Grand jury indictments will be sought against Cross. It’s not clear whether he will be tried in a federal or state court.
CNN identified the two victims at the community center as Dr. William Lewis Corporan and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, who were attending a singing competition. CBS identified the female victim as Terri LaManno, 53, an occupational therapist, who was visiting her mother, a resident of the assisted living facility.
CNN said the Anti-Defamation League warned last week of a potential for violent attacks against community centers coinciding with the Jewish Passover holiday and Hitler’s birthday on April 20, a period which in the United States “has historically been marked by extremist acts of violence and terrorism.”
Sunday’s shooting is reminiscent of the 1986 Christmas Eve murders of Washington Public Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark’s brother and his family in their Seattle home by a white supremacist who mistakenly believed the Goldmarks are Jews. In August 2012, at a Sikh temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a white supremacist gunned down 10 Sikhs, 6 of whom died, mistaking them for Muslims. All across the country, Sikh taxi drivers get targeted by Muslim-haters. If you ask the average racist moron what a Sikh is, you’ll get a blank stare. To ne0-Nazis, skinheads, and white supremacists, all turbans look the same. As for the twisted sociopath who killed three Christians yesterday because he hates Jews, what can I say? I just don’t know how to fill in that blank space, so I won’t try. Bigotry, racism, and hate are ugly no matter who the target is, and it spills over into all of our lives.