FBI: Shooting suspect drove police cruiser to high school

RED LAKE, Minn. – The 16-year-old shooter in Monday’s bloody rampage at a high school on a Northern Minnesota Indian reservation had earlier that day killed his grandfather and stolen his police cruiser, which he drove to the front door of the school before racing inside to begin a spasm of gunfire, authorities said Tuesday.

Jeff Weise, whose record of antisocial behavior had led to his removal from school and placement in a home tutoring program, was wearing his grandfather’s police-issued bulletproof vest and toting three firearms as he strode past a metal detector at Red Lake High School. Yelling taunts at some of his victims, in rapid succession he shot and killed an unarmed security guard who confronted him at the school’s entrance, then did the same to a teacher and five students, according to federal investigators and family members of survivors.

“Jeff is going to kill me; Jeff is going to shoot me,” yelled English teacher Neva Winnecop Rogers before she was struck down, a survivor recounted.

Weise had followed Rogers and the students into a classroom after they fled the bullets ricocheting down a crowded hallway. Though they locked the door, Weise “shot out the window, reached in, and unlocked it,” said Karla Lajeunesse, whose daughter Ashley, 15, was huddled inside the class but lived to describe the ordeal.

After spraying bullets randomly, Weise left to stalk the hallways again, continuing to shoot as he walked. Soon, as police arrived and began firing back at him, the young man returned to the classroom and shot himself, said Michael Tabman, an FBI agent running the investigation.

The episode at the school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a chronology Tabman gave reporters. Weise was accused of killing nine people, including a female companion of his grandfather’s, before his suicide. Five other people remained hospitalized, two with critical injuries.

While the sequence and logistics of the killings – in what was the most violent school mass murder since the 1999 incident at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. – were becoming more clear, the motivation behind them remained opaque. Most clues came from Weise himself, who had left a trail of rambling Internet postings on a neo-Nazi site in which he described his alienation from school and his surroundings and professed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

As described by law enforcement authorities and reservation residents, the random killings – all at close range – were at once unthinkable and hauntingly familiar. Like many previous school shooting incidents, this incident featured a sullen adolescent male struggling to cope.

The poverty rate on the reservation, which is nearly the size of Rhode Island, is 40 percent. The Drug Enforcement Agency has found high levels of illegal use of cocaine, methamphetamine and OxyContin, and has placed an agent at the nearby Bemidji airport to combat drug importation to Red Lake and other reservations, according to spokesman Christopher Hoyt.

It was amid this dreary setting that, sometime before 3 p.m. local time Monday, Weise arrived at his grandfather’s home carrying a .22-caliber handgun. He shot Daryl Lussier, 58, a sergeant on the tribe’s local police force, and also Lussier’s companion, Michelle Sigana, 32.

Weise, who police said did not live at the residence, donned Lussier’s bulletproof police vest and a gun belt loaded with ammunition. The teen also stole two of his grandfather’s police-issued weapons – a 12-gauge shotgun and .40-caliber handgun – and his cruiser.

Once at Red Lake High School, the first person he encountered was the security guard, Derrick Brun, 28, who fell to the floor bleeding from his fatal wounds. Weise walked past the school office and the “cultural room,” down the hallway where he spotted Rogers and some students.

With bullets flying, they escaped into Missy Dodd’s math class, which proved to be no refuge. As Weise barged in, Ashley Lajeunesse was sharpening her pencil, her mother said. Classmate Chase Lussier, 15, yelled for Ashley to dive under the desk, then lay in front of her. “Chase got shot and Ashley laid down on him and pretended she was dead,” Karla Lajeunesse said in an interview.

Some of Weise’s movements in the school are captured on videotape, Tabman said, but not any of the shootings. After he left the classroom, he was soon confronted by four police officers and fired upon them. No officers were hurt, but one returned fire. Tabman said he did not know if Weise was hit. In any event, he was soon back in the classroom, where he put the gun in his mouth and pointed upward, Tabman said.

Inside the classroom, someone announced Weise had shot himself, and the few who remained alive left. “Chase was still alive and told her to get out,” Karla Lajeunesse said, describing the event as her daughter related it to her. The boy later died.

In the immediate vicinity, arrayed in something close to a semicircle, were the bodies of several victims, including Lussier and Alicia Spike, 14, who had been in the Lajeunesse home for a taco lunch a few hours before.

Even after Weise was dead, there remained moments of terror. As Ashley left the classroom, she spotted a man – who actually was a police officer – dressed like Weise in bulletproof vest, and she feared it was another assassin, her mother said. The girl spun around and ran in the opposite direction, circling the school gymnasium and racing past the dead guard as she escaped out the same door through which Weise had entered just minutes earlier.

Red Lake school officials have closed all of the campuses for the rest of the week. Grief counselors from the Red Cross and other agencies are providing help to traumatized residents in local community centers, officials said.