Tragedy in Overland Park, Kansas over the weekend:
A longtime white supremacist from rural Missouri was arrested Sunday and held on a charge of premeditated first-degree murder in connection with a shooting spree in Kansas that killed three people at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home.
Frazier Glenn Cross, 73 — known in Aurora, Mo., as Frazier Glenn Miller — was arrested at 1:28 p.m. and was booked into the Johnson County, Kan., jail in Olathe at 8:48 p.m. CT, according to the booking report.
Before being driven off to jail, Miller began ranting while in police custody, police said. A TV news video shows the suspect yelling what appears to be "Heil Hitler!" from the backseat of a police car.
The
Southern Poverty Law Center has provided a profile:
Miller, who was arrested using the alias Frazier Glenn Cross, has been in the movement nearly his entire life. Miller is the former “grand dragon” of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which he founded and ran in the 1980s before being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for operating an illegal paramilitary organization and using intimidation tactics against African Americans.
After subsequently forming another Klan group, the White Patriot Party, he was found in criminal contempt and sentenced to six months in prison for violating the court settlement. He went underground while his conviction was under appeal but was caught by the FBI with a weapons cache in Missouri. He served three years in federal prison after being indicted on weapons charges and for plotting robberies and the assassination of SPLC founder Morris Dees. As part of a plea bargain, Miller testified against other Klan leaders in a 1988 sedition trial.
Miller is a raging anti-Semite who has posted more than 12,000 times on Vanguard News Network (VNN), whose slogan is “No Jews, Just Right.” VNN founder Alex Linder has openly advocated “exterminating” Jews since December 2009. Miller, a close partner to Linder, has called Jews “swarthy, hairy, bow-legged, beady-eyed, parasitic midgets.” Miller is also one of VNN’s largest donors and he printed and distributed thousands of copies of VNN’s newsletter, The Aryan Alternative.
This isn’t the first time a VNN user has been arrested for violence. On January 17, 2011, less than 12 hours after posting on VNN, Kevin William Harpham placed an improvised explosive device concealed in a backpack along a Martin Luther King parade route in Spokane Washington. The lead sinkers in the radio-detonated IED were coated with Warfarin rat poison, evidently intended to increase bleeding. Had the device functioned, dozens of men, women and children would have been killed or injured. Harpham also distributed The Aryan Alternative.
Among the victims, a young high school student and his grandfather, who were there auditioning for a
singing competition:
Reat Griffin Underwood loved life. A freshman at Blue Valley High School, he participated in debate and theater and had already attained the rank of Eagle Scout.
On Sunday afternoon, he was with his grandfather outside the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park when the vehicle they were in was struck by gunfire. Reat’s grandfather, William Lewis Corporon, who had taken the teen there to audition for a contest, died at the scene. Reat, 14, died later at a hospital.
A third victim, a woman, was killed shortly afterward outside the Village Shalom senior living community, less than a mile south of the community center. No further information about her was available Sunday night.
Kansas City's KMBC.com has an
extensive 2006 interview with suspect about his activities as a white supremacist.