The Devil in Red Lake

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.

Then on April 19, 2004, posting on nazi.org Weise wrote that there was a suspected plot to shoot up his school the next day, the anniversary of Hitler’s birth. “Just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they’ve pinned?” And yet one can almost sense glee, in what he described on another site, at the commotion stirred up by the threat. “The feds were all around the place, watching, cop cars on nearly every corner around the school and a few large unmarked black vans sitting around. I bet they were on standby. So they WERE prepared for something to happen.” School-district officials have so far refused to discuss their investigation of the incident.

Online, he also created two animated shorts. One shows a young man strangled by a demented clown. The other, “Target Practice,” cuts quickly from a man decapitated by a gun blast, to a standing figure and a man on a park bench who are both shot through the chest, to a police car flipping over after a grenade is lobbed into it, to a Klansman and his pointy hood scalped by another shot, and finally to the marksman stuffing the muzzle of a pistol into his mouth, squeezing the trigger and turning the screen crimson. The credits roll, and Weise signs off under the name “Regret.”

He did not discuss his father’s suicide with his few friends, but he discussed the subject online. He argued about the courage in not only accepting death but also bringing about your own. Those who disagree about the virtue of suicide, he wrote, “have never dealt with people who HAVE faced the kind of pain that makes you [physically] sick at times, makes you so depressed you can’t function, makes you so sad and overwhelmed with grief that eating a bullet or sticking your head in a noose [seems] welcoming.” Months later, he wrote about slicing his wrist with a box cutter, “painting the floor of my bedroom with blood I shouldn’t have spilt. After sitting there for what seemed like hours (which apparently was only minutes), I had the revelation that this was not the path.” At least, not yet. He sought help and said he went on antidepressants (a friend later said they were Prozac). He wrote of drinking alcohol and blacking out. He claimed to use marijuana.

He also wrote of strange tingly feelings that woke him out of a sound sleep and dark visions of small creatures sitting by his bed that he would reach out to touch before falling unconscious. But whatever demon finally compelled Weise to act also made him plan his assault. First he needed an arsenal and armor. He had only a .22-cal. weapon. So he used it to kill his grandfather Daryl Lussier, who was separated from the grandmother Weise lived with. Lussier was a veteran sergeant with the Red Lake police department. After shooting Lussier and his girlfriend Michelle Sigana, Weise stole his grandfather’s .40-cal. handgun and 12-gauge shotgun. He strapped on Lussier’s bullet-proof vest and grabbed his grandfather’s keys to the Red Lake police car parked in the driveway.

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.

The search for healing began the night after the shootings. People gathered at a gymnasium, forming circles around circles. The families of the dead sat in the inner circle, surrounded by a semicircle of drummers who were in turn surrounded by the rest of the community. Tribal elders lit sage, sweet grass and tobacco, and let them burn until the gym was full of smoke. Then the drummers started tapping out the traditional song of healing. Crying and wailing ensued. No one in the tribe knew how one of their own could have strayed so far from the traditional path. The rest of the night was spent discussing, often in the Ojibwa’s language, the need to spend more time with children, talking to them in the native tongue and teaching them the traditional dances, meeting more often, watching less TV. Meanwhile, the flashing sign in front of the Seven Clans Casino at Red Lake read WE ARE ONE IN OUR SORROW AND OUR LOVE. –With reporting by Sarah Sturmon Dale/ Minneapolis