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School kid guns down eight in US
The Times of India ^ | TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 2005 11:10:13 AM | AP

Posted on 03/21/2005 10:31:27 PM PST by Gengis Khan

MINNESOTA (US): A disturbed US high school student went on a shooting rampage killing his grandparents at their home and then eight people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired, authorities and witnesses said.

The suspect apparently killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.

It was the worst school shooting in the United States since the Columbine massacre in 1999.

One student said her classmates pleaded with the gunman to stop shooting.

"You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?"' student Sondra Hegstrom told The Pioneer of Bemidji, using the name of the suspected shooter.

Before the shootings Monday at Red Lake High School, the suspect's grandparents were shot in their home and died later. There was no immediate indication of the gunman's motive.

In addition to the shooter, the death toll at the school included five students, a teacher and a security guard, FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said in Minneapolis.

McCabe said the gunman first killed a school security officer near the school entrance. At some point, the shooter exchanged gunfire with Red Lake police in a hallway, then retreated to a classroom, where he was believed to have shot himself, Mc Cabe said.

Fourteen to 15 other students were injured, McCabe said. Authorities closed roads to the Indian reservation in far northern Minnesota while they investigated the shootings.

Hegstrom described the shooter, who had two handguns and a shotgun, grinning and waving at a student his gun was pointed at, then swiveling to shoot someone else.

McCabe declined to talk about a possible connection between the suspect and the couple killed at the home, but Red Lake Fire Director Roman Stately said they were the grandparents of the gunman.

He identified the shooter's grandfather as Daryl Lussier, a longtime officer with the Red Lake Police Department, and said Lussier's guns may have been used in the shootings.

"After he shot a security guard, he walked down the hallway shooting and went into a classroom where he shot a teacher and more students," Stately told Minneapolis television station KARE.

Students and a teacher, Diane Schwanz, said the gunman tried to break down a door to get into her classroom.

"I just got on the floor and called the cops," Schwanz told the Pioneer. "I was still just half-believing it."

The school was evacuated after the shootings and locked down for the investigation, McCabe said.

"It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together," he said.

It was the nation's worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 before killing themselves on April 20, 1999.

The rampage in Red Lake was the second fatal school shooting in Minnesota in 18 months. Two students were killed at Rocori High School in Cold Spring in September 2003. Student John Jason McLaughlin, who was 15 at the time,


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Government; News/Current Events; US: Minnesota
KEYWORDS: america; education; homeschool; minnesota; redlakereservation; us; usa

1 posted on 03/21/2005 10:31:29 PM PST by Gengis Khan
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To: Gengis Khan
Today, kids are being raised by the public school system. There's day care, pre-pre school, pre school, before school programs, after school programs, weekend programs, and summer programs. Outcome based education was designed to remove the kids from their parents care in order to change society through a Socialist revolution using the minds of the children.
They're not doing a very good job of creating that Marxist utopia they so covet, are they?

Support school choice candidates.

2 posted on 03/21/2005 10:40:10 PM PST by concerned about politics (Vote Republican - Vote morally correct!)
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To: Gengis Khan; All

Here is the unedited AP article.


HS Student Kills 10 in Minnesota Rampage

By JOSHUA FREED, Associated Press Writer

BEMIDJI, Minn. - A high school student went on a shooting rampage on an Indian reservation Monday, killing his grandparents at their home and then seven people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired, authorities and witnesses said. The suspect apparently killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.


It was the nation's worst school shooting since the Columbine massacre in 1999 that killed 13 people.


One student said her classmates pleaded with the gunman to stop shooting.


"You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?" student Sondra Hegstrom told The Pioneer of Bemidji, using the name of the suspected shooter.


Before the shootings at Red Lake High School, the suspect's grandparents were shot in their home and died later. There was no immediate indication of the gunman's motive.


Authorities didn't identify the gunman, but a few media outlets identified him as Jeff Weise, citing students and tribal leaders. Accounts of Weise's age varied from 15 to 17, as did whether he was a current student at the school.


Relatives told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that Weise was a loner who usually wore black and was teased by other kids. Relatives told the newspaper his father committed suicide four years ago, and that his mother was living in a Minneapolis nursing home because she suffered brain injuries in a car accident.


In addition to the shooter, the death toll at the school included five students, a teacher and a security guard, FBI (news - web sites) spokesman Paul McCabe said in Minneapolis. Among the dead was Neva Rogers, 62, a teacher at the school for five or six years, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.


Fourteen to 15 other students were injured, McCabe said. Some were being cared for in Bemidji, about 20 miles south of Red Lake. Authorities closed roads to the reservation in far northern Minnesota while they investigated the shootings.


Hegstrom described the shooter grinning and waving at a student his gun was pointed at, then swiveling to shoot someone else. "I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that's when I hid," she told The Pioneer.


McCabe declined to talk about a possible connection between the suspect and the couple killed at the home, but Red Lake Fire Director Roman Stately said they were the grandparents of the gunman. He identified the shooter's grandfather as Daryl Lussier, a longtime officer with the Red Lake Police Department, and said Lussier's guns may have been used in the shootings.


Stately said the shooter had two handguns and a shotgun.


"After he shot a security guard, he walked down the hallway shooting and went into a classroom where he shot a teacher and more students," Stately told Minneapolis television station KARE.


Students and a teacher, Diane Schwanz, said the gunman tried to break down a door to get into her classroom.


"I just got on the floor and called the cops," Schwanz told the Pioneer. "I was still just half-believing it."


Ashley Morrison, another student, had taken refuge in Schwanz's classroom. With the shooter banging on the door, she dialed her mother on her cell phone. Her mother, Wendy Morrison, said she could hear gunshots on the line.


"'Mom, he's trying to get in here and I'm scared,'" Ashley Morrison told her mother, according to the newspaper.





All of the dead students were found in one room. One of them was a boy believed to be the shooter, McCabe said. He said it was too early to speculate on a motive.

Martha Thunder's 15-year-old son, Cody, was being treated for a gunshot wound to the hip.

"He heard gunshots and the teacher said 'No, that's the janitor's doing something,' and the next thing he knew, the kid walked in there and pointed the gun right at him," Thunder said, standing outside the hospital in Bemidji.

Police officers were posted at the hospital Monday night to discourage reporters from entering. When a reporter approached three men walking across a hospital parking lot, one broke down in tears, and the others said they had no comment.

The school was evacuated after the shootings and locked down for the investigation, McCabe said.

"It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together," he said.

Floyd Jourdain Jr., chairman of the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe, called it "without a doubt the darkest hour" in the group's history. "There has been a considerable amount of lives lost, and we still don't know the total of that," Jourdain said.

It was the nation's worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 before killing themselves on April 20, 1999.

The rampage in Red Lake was the second fatal school shooting in Minnesota in 18 months. Two students were killed at Rocori High School in Cold Spring in September 2003. Student John Jason McLaughlin, who was 15 at the time, awaits trial in the case.

Red Lake High School, on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, has about 300 students, according to its Web site.

The reservation is about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities. It is home to the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe, one of the poorest in the state. According to the 2000 census, 5,162 people lived on the reservation, and all but 91 were Indians.


http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050322/ap_on_re_us/school_shooting


3 posted on 03/22/2005 12:18:17 AM PST by Righty_McRight
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To: concerned about politics
Good thing he offed himself, the Supremes say we can't execute under 18. What a tragedy all of this is.

Nam Vet

4 posted on 03/22/2005 12:27:05 AM PST by Nam Vet (MSM reporters think the MOIST dream they had the night before is a "reliable source".)
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To: Gengis Khan

Ritalin!


5 posted on 03/22/2005 12:28:51 AM PST by lawdude (Liberalism is a mental disease.)
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To: lawdude

I was just wondering about that.


6 posted on 03/22/2005 12:33:14 AM PST by Smokin' Joe (Repeal the NFA of '34! the GCA of '68! and the '86 ban!)
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To: Gengis Khan

"the suspected shooter" "the suspect"

We're not sure?


7 posted on 03/22/2005 12:35:18 AM PST by TheLawyerFormerlyKnownAsAl
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To: Gengis Khan

He was a chippewa off the old block and he's gonna get souixed.


8 posted on 03/22/2005 12:58:37 AM PST by Manic_Episode (OUT OF ORDER)
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To: Righty_McRight

why do they always count the killers and suicide bombers with the rest of the dead...i dont think they deserve that honour...


i rekon it will be about 20 minutes before the anti gun brigade arrives


9 posted on 03/22/2005 1:02:07 AM PST by Irishguy (How do ya LIKE THOSE APPLES!!!! HUH)
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To: Irishguy
i rekon it will be about 20 minutes before the anti gun brigade arrives

Yep. It will be interesting to see how they spin this. It seems that his grandfather was a LEO and the weapons used were department issue. He even drove the police cruiser to school to do the shooting.

10 posted on 03/22/2005 1:08:32 AM PST by bad company (Stupid SHOULD hurt)
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To: bad company

yikes...a lot of major moaning point there...but lets ignore the fact he was insane...much better to blame inanimate objects...


11 posted on 03/22/2005 1:57:59 AM PST by Irishguy (How do ya LIKE THOSE APPLES!!!! HUH)
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To: Gengis Khan

"MINNESOTA (US): A disturbed US high school student went on a shooting rampage ..."

I found an instance of a school shooting by a student in Oklahoma in 1937. The news media did not go into histerics.
It was the same day over 400 students were killed in a natural gas explosion in a school in Texas.


"It is inevitable , that eventually people will demand absolute security from the state....and absolute security is absolute slavery....Taylor Caldwell


12 posted on 03/22/2005 2:41:04 AM PST by Ruy Dias de Bivar
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To: lawdude
"Ritalin!"

Yup, sooner or later we'll find out he was on some anti-depressant. Every one of these shootings have that one thing in common.

13 posted on 03/22/2005 3:37:39 AM PST by #1CTYankee (New tag-line under-construction.)
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To: Gengis Khan

As horrible as this event is, contrast how the media and even Freepers approach the story as compared to how they compared the mass murder of members or the Living Church of God.

At the very least, will anyone call for a close examination of the religious doctrines of this closed in society of racially-oriented people?

Will anyone worry that something might be wrong with a group that discourages its members to select a mate from within the group?

Will the also delve into the background of this society and examine decades-old literature about what they teach their members?

To all three questions I would hope not. But I only raise them to illustrate the absurdity of the reaction to Ratzmann's murdering of 7 fellow members of the LCG.


14 posted on 03/22/2005 5:15:36 AM PST by ewin
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To: Gengis Khan

If I were a betting man I'd say he was on ADD medications.


15 posted on 03/22/2005 5:24:05 AM PST by Centurion2000 (Nations do not survive by setting examples for others. Nations survive by making examples of others)
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To: Gengis Khan

FYI:

Yesterdays thread in "Breaking News"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1367462/posts


16 posted on 03/22/2005 5:25:53 AM PST by wallcrawlr (http://www.bionicear.com)
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To: Gengis Khan
I dunno how this can happen....

There's at least three signs around the local H.S. here...that say it's a "Gun Free Zone"....

I'd guess this school had signs too...So how did the gun's get on campus?

17 posted on 03/22/2005 5:26:50 AM PST by Osage Orange (Democrats....appear as confused as goats on AstroTurf.)
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To: ewin
"But I only raise them to illustrate the absurdity of the reaction to Ratzmann's murdering of 7 fellow members of the LCG."

Religious cult murderers have different motives than depressed loner murderers. It could have been that Ratzman's primary motive was depression also, but that isn't usually the case in religious group killings. Thats just the way it is, and denying the truth isn't particularly helpful.
18 posted on 03/22/2005 8:05:45 AM PST by monday
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