2005 — March 21, 16-year-old killing spree, Red Lake HS & vic., Red Lake, MN–[1] 9-10

–9-10  Enger, John. “The shooting at Red Lake: What happened.” MPRnews, 3-18-2015.

–9-10  FBI. A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the [U.S.]…2000-2013. 9-16-2013, p. 25.

–9-10  Helms, Marisa. “Shooting fuels debate over safety of Prozac for teens.” MPR, 3-25-2005.

–9-10  Maag, Chris. “The Devil in Red Lake.” Time Magazine, 3-27-2005.

 

Narrative Information

 

Enger: “Jeffrey Weise killed his grandfather first. He shot his grandfather, Daryl “Dash” Lussier, then Lussier’s companion, Michelle Sigana, in the house they all shared on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

 

“Weise took the guns Lussier used as a tribal police officer, a Glock pistol and a shotgun. He strapped on Lussier’s police-issued Kevlar vest and set off for Red Lake High School in his grandfather’s squad car. That is how Weise began his shooting spree on March 21, 2005.

 

“Weise walked in the front doors of the high school and started shooting. The first two rounds hit Derrick Brun, an unarmed security guard, in a hallway as he stepped forward to confront Weise.

 

“Weise moved on to math teacher Missy Dodds’ classroom, where he shot another teacher, Neva Rogers, and five students. In the midst of the killing, student Jeff May rushed Weise with a pencil, embedding the thing in Kevlar.

 

“Within minutes of Weise’s first shots, a team of four tribal police and conservation officers rushed into the school and came down the hall in a tactical diamond formation and confronted Weise. Weise retreated back into Dodds’ classroom, where he shot himself.

 

“Including Weise, 10 people died. At the time it was the deadliest school shooting since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. It remains the largest mass homicide in Minnesota history….

 

“ Shortly after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn., President Obama asked the FBI to use its national crime statistics to determine whether the number of such crimes was on the rise. In September 2014, the FBI report[2] chronicled shootings over a 13-year period in which people set out to kill others in populated areas. It was the first documentation of such cases. From December 2000 to 2013, there were 160 “active shooter” incidents in the U.S., in which 1,043 people were wounded or killed. The average number of such cases per year went from six incidents in the first seven years to 16 cases, on average, in the last seven years.” (Enger, John. “The shooting at Red Lake: What happened.” MPRnews, 3-18-2015.)

 

FBI: “On March 21, 2005, at 2:49 p.m., Jeffery James Weise, 16, armed with a shotgun and two handguns, began shooting at Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minnesota. Before the incident at the school, the shooter fatally shot his grandfather, who was a police officer, and another individual at their home. He then took his grandfather’s police equipment, including guns and body armor, to the school. A total of nine people were killed, including an unarmed security guard, a teacher, and five students; six students were wounded. The shooter committed suicide during an exchange of gunfire with police.” (FBI. A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013. 9-16-2013, p. 25.)

 

Helms: “Family members of Jeff Weise say they have questions about the medication he was taking up until the day of the shootings in Red Lake. Authorities say Weise shot and killed nine people before turning the gun on himself. Weise was taking the antidepressant Prozac. The shootings are likely to renew the controversy over the use of antidepressants in children and adolescents.

 

“St. Paul, Minn. – Jeff Weise’s aunts, Shauna and Tammy Lussier, say they had no idea he would carry out the grisly shootings in Red Lake. He had been living with them for the past seven or eight years. The two aunts spoke recently to Fred de Sam Lazaro of PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Twin Cities Public Television.  They told him they took Jeff to get help for problems he was having with police and at school. They say his treatment included the antidepressant Prozac. “Actually, they had just recently upped his dosage. He was taking two pills a night, they upped it to three. We think that was too much for him, too much medication for him,” they said.

 

“Prozac is the only antidepressant approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use with adolescents. In October, the FDA ordered that all antidepressants carry prominent warnings about an increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children. And now, groups opposed to the use of antidepressants in children are calling on the FDA to investigate the possible relationship between Prozac and the Red Lake shootings.

 

“Critic Vera Sharav is president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a New York-based nonprofit, promoting openness and accountability in medical research. Her group has been calling attention to the potential dangers of giving children and adolescents Prozac. Sharav points out that Eric Harris, one of the killers in the 1999 Columbine shootings, reportedly was prescribed Prozac. Sharav says Prozac and other antidepressants in the class of drugs known as SSRIs interfere with a person’s inhibitions. “Lots of us have violent thoughts. ‘I would like to take this man by the throat, he’s bothering me.’ But we don’t do it. The drug removes that inhibition to act out and that is why you have these explosive situations,” says Sharev.

 

“”That’s just not a correct scientific statement,” counters John M. Plewes, medical advisor at Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac….” (Helms, Marisa. “Shooting fuels debate over safety of Prozac for teens.” Minnesota Public Radio, 3-25-2005.)

 

Maag: “Ashley Lajeunesse was doing math homework in study hall when she heard the first shotgun blast. She thought it was a student dropping a stack of textbooks. Then came another bang. Then another. The other students in the room looked up in sudden, knowing panic. No one could speak. The teacher in charge, Neva Rogers, walked to the door, turned the lock and shut off the lights. She too sensed what was happening. A gunman was in the school, and he was heading their way.

“Rogers ordered the students to the back of the room and told them to hide wherever they could. Freshman Felicia Hanks, 14, stuck her head inside a bookshelf as the shooting grew deafeningly near. Lajeunesse crouched near her friend Chase Lussier. “Chase shoved me down and told me to stay behind him,” says Lajeunesse, 15. The door handle jiggled. A gunshot exploded the glass panel beside it and then, through the opening, a hand reached in to open the door. In strolled a hulking figure, more than 6 ft. tall, with a 12-gauge shotgun held with both hands. He wore a black hooded trench coat, a black bandanna and black pants. His black military boots crunched the broken glass. Lajeunesse peeked over Lussier to look at the gunman. “His face was a mixture of anger and fear,” she recalls. Their eyes met. He raised his gun and fired. Lajeunesse ducked. She felt something warm and wet coating her jeans. It was Lussier’s blood. “I thought I was going to die,” Lajeunesse says, but her friend had taken the fatal blow. “Chase saved my life.”

“The teacher spoke up. “God be with us,” said Rogers. Provoked, the gunman shot her. He then aimed at another student, Chon’gai’la Morris, and asked, “Do you believe in God?”  “No,” came the answer. The gunman turned away and found other targets, shooting and killing Dewayne Lewis, Thurlene Stillday, Chanelle Rosebear and Alicia White as they huddled on the floor. He left the room and exchanged fire with police officers, who were advancing down the hallway. Retreating into Rogers’ classroom, he yelled, “I have hostages!” Then he turned a gun on himself and pulled the trigger. Silent throughout the ordeal, the surviving students began to scream.

 

“The massacre at Red Lake, with 10 dead, was the worst school shooting since 15 died at Columbine on April 20, 1999. There are clear parallels with the Colorado incident: merciless gunfire, the black trench coat, the life-or-death question. But Red Lake has its disturbing distinctions. Instead of an affluent community, the setting this time was an impoverished reservation of the proud Ojibwa Nation in Minnesota. The terrifying revelation of Columbine was that caring parents could overlook signs of trouble in their offspring; the trouble in Red Lake centered on a clearly confused young man who had no parent to turn to for counsel or support, who used box cutters to slit his wrists in abortive suicide attempts even as he experimented with identities in the shadows of cyberspace.

 

“Jeff Weise, 16, didn’t really grow up in Red Lake; he just ended up there. His earlier years were spent in Minneapolis, about 250 miles to the south. His family moved often between the city’s suburbs, and for a year they lived in a rented mobile home behind a pickle factory. “He seemed like a normal kid to me, except that he liked to be alone,” says Patrick Tahahwah, a family member who lived two doors down from Weise when the boy was 7. In 1997, his father committed suicide. In 1999, his mother was in a car accident that led to major brain damage. Weise was then sent to live with his relatives on the Red Lake reservation. “There wasn’t anywhere else for him to go,” Tahahwah says. The main town on the reservation is made up of mobile homes and factory-built houses. Its roads have no street signs. “This place is crap,” says Cory Desjarlait, 27, the son of the Red Lake school’s superintendent.

 

“At school in Red Lake, Weise became known as a goth, dressing almost exclusively in black and sculpting his hair into spikes and horns. Many classmates saw his drawings of guns, Nazi soldiers, and people being shot and hanged. “I’d go over and talk to him, ask him how he was doing,” says Cody Thunder, 15, whom Weise later shot in the hip during the school rampage. “He always talked about guns.”

 

“Still, he didn’t entirely fit the stereotype of the school shooter. While he may not have been popular, he had a small but close group of friends. They hung out a few times a week at one another’s houses, talking and watching TV. “The people saying he didn’t have any friends are just talking to each other,” says Jen Stately, 16, who wears Vans skateboarding sneakers and a metal stud in her lip. “They never talked to him. He was the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.” Among the girls in the group, Weise was known as the rare boy who could talk about his feelings and listen to others. “He was always trying to help other people with their problems,” says Marissa White, 14. “When he talked, he made a lot of sense.”

 

“But Weise also lived in other worlds and, in postings made available by a number of websites after the shootings, had a disturbingly energetic online existence. In January 2004, he purportedly posted this message on a website: “I’ve been feeling a strong connection towards Nazi Germany, and it’s not necessarily the most pleasing thought, though I can’t help it. I feel like in a past life I was a German soldier.” Two months later, he seemed to have become much more comfortable with that identity, allegedly signing on to nazi.org first as Todesengel (German for angel of death) and then as NativeNazi. “I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations,” he wrote. Racial purity became an issue for him, and he lamented that Native American stock was being diluted by intermarriage….

 

“The drive to the front door of the high school took less than five minutes. Security guards LeeAnn Grant and Derrick Brun watched in shock as Weise drove right up to the door. Weise climbed out of the car and fired two shotgun blasts into the air. Grant started to run away from the door, herding students as she went. Brun, unarmed, walked toward Weise. The security guard was shot with the 12-gauge shotgun at point-blank range. Weise walked on, firing down the hallways. And then, in what seems to have been a random decision, Weise blasted the glass panel of Rogers’ study hall to find more targets and seal his fate….”  (Maag, Chris. “The Devil in Red Lake.” Time Magazine, 3-27-2005.)

 

Sources

 

Enger, John. “The shooting at Red Lake: What happened.” MPRnews, 3-18-2015. Accessed 9-28-2015 at: http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/03/18/red-lake-shooting-explained

 

Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Dept. of Justice. A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013. Washington, DC: 9-16-2013, 47 pages. Accessed 9-28-2015: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2014/september/fbi-releases-study-on-active-shooter-incidents/pdfs/a-study-of-active-shooter-incidents-in-the-u.s.-between-2000-and-2013

 

Helms, Marisa. “Shooting fuels debate over safety of Prozac for teens.” MPR, 3-25-2005. Accessed 1-15-2013: http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/03/25_helmsm_prozacfolo/

 

Maag, Chris. “The Devil in Red Lake.” Time Magazine, 3-27-2005. Accessed 1-15-2013 at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1042470,00.html?promoid=googlep

 

[1] Shooter killed nine people before committing suicide when confronted by police.

[2] FBI, U.S. DOJ. A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013. 9-16-2013.