[h=1]Alleged KC shooter has long Missouri history of anti-Semitic politics[/h]
18 hours ago •
By Kevin McDermott [email]kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com[/email] 314-340-8268
Four years before Frazier Glenn Cross was accused in Sunday's triple killing at a Kansas City-area Jewish community center and retirement complex, he was a Missouri U.S. Senate candidate whose radio ads called on white people to “take our country back.”
It's part of a long public history in Missouri by the vocal anti-Semite turned alleged killer – a history that included a teargas showdown with U.S. Marshals in an Ozarks trailer home in 1987, the publication and distribution of his own “Newspaper for White Men,” fervently racist letters to newspapers on immigration policy and other issues, and at least two attempts to run for Congress on openly racist and anti-Semitic platforms.
“The Zionist Jews and their gentile prostitute government managers want to create a one-world government inside a world populated overwhelmingly by mix-racial, therefore leaderless and easily controlled zombie slaves, forever unable to free themselves – a world void of white people,” he wrote in one typical letter to the Springfield News-Leader in 2005.
Cross, 73, of Aurora, Mo., has been booked on a preliminary charge of first-degree murder after the shootings in Overland Park, Kan., on Sunday. At a news conference Sunday afternoon, Overland Park police Chief John Douglass declined to publicly identify the man suspected in the attacks. But an official at a suburban Kansas City jail, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the case, identified the suspect as Cross, according to the Associated Press.
Officials today officially designated the shootings as a hate crime. The designation means Cross could face both federal and state charges.
None of the three victims was Jewish, but the rampage happened at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home. And it happened on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Passover, which begins at sundown Monday.
Police today identified the victims as 14-year old Reat Griffin Underwood, his grandfather, 69-year old William Lewis Corporon, and occupational therapist Terri LaManno.
Corporon was a retired doctor and Underwood, his grandson, was an Eagle Scout, according to a family statement. Police said LaManno was visiting her mother at the Village Shalom Retirement Center at the time of the shooting.
Cross is a former Ku Klux Klan leader who was once the subject of a nationwide manhunt. The Anti-Defamation League, in a statement to reporters about his background, describes "a career in hatred and white supremacy that has spanned more than three decades." Multiple published and broadcast reports have identified Cross as the same vocal Missouri white supremacist who has gone by the name Frazier Glenn Miller.
It was under that name that Miller attempted to run for Congress in 2006, in Missouri's 7th Congressional district, then held by Republican Roy Blunt, who is now a U.S. senator.
In a March 2006 interview with the Post-Dispatch, Miller, then 65, complained that the Democratic, Republican and Libertarian parties in the state were “making it virtually impossible to get my name on the ballot.” In fact, all three parties had taken the unusual step of rejecting Miller's $100 filing fee and refusing to allow him spots on the primary ballot, citing his fervent anti-Semitic views.
“It would be extraordinary for us to turn someone down,” a Missouri GOP spokesman said at the time, “but as the party of Lincoln, we can't accept him on the ticket."
Four years later, Miller, ran for the U.S. Senate from Missouri as a write-in candidate. He made waves by buying radio ads to encourage white people to “unite” and “take our country back.”
“I'm going to reach every nook and cranny in the state of Missouri because that's where the votes are,” Miller said at the time. A spokesman for the retiring incumbent, Republican then-Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, termed the ads “abhorrent.”
Miller's political forays were preceded, years earlier, by a standoff with U.S. marshals in southwest Missouri. He'd been the subject of a nationwide manhunt in 1987 for violating the terms of his bond while appealing a North Carolina conviction for operating a paramilitary camp. The search ended after federal agents found him and three other men in an Ozark mobile home, which was filled with hand grenades, automatic weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Marshals flushed the men from the trailer home with teargas.
Police said Sunday's attacks happened within minutes of one another. At around 1 p.m. a gunman shot two people in the parking lot behind the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City. He then drove a few blocks to a retirement community, Village Shalom, and gunned down a woman or girl there, said Douglass, the Overland Park police chief. Officers arrested him in an elementary school parking lot a short time later.
As Miller was sitting in a police car after his arrest Sunday, he could be heard to shout "Heil Hitler" at a local TV crew filming the arrest.
Police said the gunman never entered any buildings. Douglass said the gunman also shot at but missed two other people.
The family of the first two victims released a statement identifying them as Dr. William Lewis Corporon, who died at the scene, and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, who died at Overland Park Regional Medical Center.
They were both Christians and members of the United Methodist Church. The family thanked the church and others for their support.
"We take comfort knowing they are together in Heaven," the family said, while asking for privacy to mourn.
Rebecca Sturtevant, a hospital spokeswoman, said family members told her Corporon had taken his grandson to the community center to try out for a high school students' singing competition. Reat was a freshman at Blue Valley High School and an Eagle Scout.
The shootings took place at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park and at the Village Shalom Retirement Community in Leawood. They came the day before the start of Passover, the major Jewish spring festiva, and a week before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20.
Because of those two approaching events, the Anti-Defamation League last week put out a security bulletin to Jewish community institutions across the country warning of the increased potential for violent attacks against community centers.
“ADL is not aware of any additional threat to Jewish institutions at this time,” Karen Aroesty, ADL St. Louis regional director, said in a statement on the group's website. “Nevertheless, it is appropriate for Jewish institutions to make sure that all of their security measures are in place and in good working order.” Aroesty called the shooting “a cowardly, unspeakable and heinous act of violence.”
Politicians across Missouri and the nation, including President Barack Obama, condemned the attack. “Michelle and I offer our thoughts and prayers to the families and friends who lost a loved one and everyone affected by this tragedy,” Obama said in a statement that called the shootings “horrific” and “heartbreaking.”
— The Associated Press contributed to this report.
