Thoughts by Mike Masterson, Columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Furor over fervor

A column by Mike Masterson of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

How about that overzealous Minnesota couple whose school assembly set the pot to boiling with their controversial program for Eureka Springs’ public school students?

This husband-and-wife team’s nonprofit organization, called You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, was billed as an alcohol/drug awareness assembly for 300 teen-agers. However, the recent three-hour session devolved into much more.

In their fervor to use fear and admonishment as tools to further a deeply personal agenda, the couple soon separated the male and female students for "virtue lessons." Then they proceeded to lecture the girls about how they can expect to get "black spots on their wedding dresses" someday should they even hold hands with a boy.

Bradlee Dean and his wife, Stephanie Joy, apparently warned the seventh- through twelfth-graders about any number of other societal "dangers," including rock ’n’ roll and gun control. They also sermonized to the female students that having any form of physical contact with a male would transform them into little more than "leftovers" for potential husbands.

One particularly offended 16-year-old was quoted afterward as saying that it felt to her and others that the program’s messages seemed more cultish in nature than any state-funded presentation intended to enhance awareness of alcohol and drug abuse.

Exercising admirable wisdom, school Superintendent Reck Wallis canceled the program that the couple had planned for the community’s elementary-aged students that same afternoon. Who knows what the little tots would have heard? School Board President Rusty Windle told our reporter Melinda Rogers that several parents later expressed their displeasure with the program’s content.

Whom do you think Bradlee, whose organization is said to receive $2,000-$2,500 per program, blamed for his group’s message that day? Why, "the liberals" in the Eureka Springs schools, who he suggested intentionally bent his and his wife’s words.

Bradlee did concede that the female students had been told that they could become "leftovers." But he contends the couple’s strident messages on a range of issues amounted to one big miscommunication (from which this organization could neither run nor hide). Obviously, the widespread dissatisfaction among students, parents and officials was fostered by those with minds far too open to march in lockstep with the couple’s messages.

"You’ve got a bunch of liberal kids listening to what they want to hear and that’s the bottom line," Bradlee rationalized to our reporter. Imagine that in a free America! A school crawling with "liberal" 13- to 18-year-olds with minds of their own! Yeetheegads, absolutely shocking! Prepare the public stocks and branding irons! Anyone seen that gallon of Old Weddingveil Black Spot Remover?

Whenever I hear tell of such inappropriate goings-on, for which public schools shell out thousands of dollars—the district wasn’t certain early this week exactly how much it had paid the couple—I begin to worry that our increasingly self-righteous society has dived willingly into the bottomless pit of utter madness.



This story was published Thursday, March 31, 2005

Shaken Tribe Deals with Shootings - NY Times

March 30, 2005

Tribe Is Shaken by Arrest of Leader's Son in Shootings

By MONICA DAVEY and KIRK JOHNSON





ED LAKE, Minn., March 29 - Among the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, the Jourdain family name resonates like few others.

From Roger Jourdain, who ruled the tribe for 31 years beginning in the late 1950's, to Floyd Jourdain Jr., who was elected tribal chairman last year, the name carries influence and meaning here and among Indians across the country, tribe members and outsiders say.

So the arrest over the weekend of Floyd Jourdain's 16-year-old son, Louis, in connection with the shootings last week at and near Red Lake High School that left 10 people dead, is not just another blow to a wounded community, tribe members said.

What had been a path of loss and grief over the actions of one troubled young man has become more complex with the suggestion that a member of a family that has been central to the community might have shared the same violent thoughts.

"It seems like this has gone from bad to worse," said Eileen Sumner, 46, who works at Red Lake Hospital, as she stood beside a memorial to those killed. Her daughter Katie, 20, said that what had stunned everyone was that Louis Jourdain seemed to have such a positive family.

"If this kid could be in this kind of trouble," she said, "anybody's kid could be in trouble."

Floyd Jourdain, who as tribal leader led the mourning last week, was compelled as a father on Tuesday to defend his son, who government officials say was intimately involved in planning the attack, although the police say it was also clear that the gunman, Jeff Weise, acted alone.

The link between Mr. Weise, who killed himself in the attack, and Louis Jourdain has been established by numerous e-mail messages, said an official who has been briefed on the case and asked not to be identified in discussing a case involving a minor.

The official said the messages indicated that Mr. Weise and Mr. Jourdain planned an attack, with graphic discussions about logistics and targets. The two even conducted a walk-through of the building, deciding how to carry out the assault. The official said it was not clear why Mr. Jourdain did not participate.

The official said Louis Jourdain had told investigators that he never had any intention of going through with the plan and that he did not believe Mr. Weise did, either.

Two students who said they were in the school library with Louis said that when the shooting began, he yelled that the gunman was Mr. Weise before anyone could see him, The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported. One of the students said Louis then ran toward the gunfire, saying he had to talk to Mr. Weise.

Floyd Jourdain, 40, said in an emotional statement that Louis was innocent and that Mr. Weise acted alone.

"He is a good boy with a good heart who never harmed anyone in his entire life," Mr. Jourdain said of Louis. "I know my son, and he is incapable of committing such an act."

One question for prosecutors as a result of Louis Jourdain's arrest is whether to pursue an adult or a juvenile prosecution, a question that seemed moot last week when the sole suspect, Mr. Weise, died. In a juvenile prosecution, the proceeding is largely closed to the public. An adult prosecution would be in public view.

Louis Jourdain appeared in Federal District Court in Duluth on Tuesday, and his father watched the hearing, which was closed to the public.

A Wonderful and Inspirational E-Mail Message--

Below is a great message I got recently. I got her permission to post and she is more than willing to work with anyone who needs to hear from someone who really has walked the walk and made it in this somewhat cruel world...



Hi Steve,


I really applaud you on your efforts to expose the gritty not so glamorous side of gang-bangin. I recently viewed the HBO Documentary on Gang War: Bangin in Little Rock. I grew up in not so favorable places in Chicago, one of my most memorable addresses being that of 601 W. Evergreen St. in the notorious Cabrini Green Projects and also at the Abla Homes located on Chicago's westside.

Although I was a product of the ghetto and lived there throughout my youth years I am not of the ghetto. One of the main problems within our communities is the absence of success stories. Those who have made it, turned their lives around or just made the choice to live a different lifestyle more than likely never return. Kids need to see success in their own backyards.

I was raised in a single family home and my mother never worked. It was other women in the neighborhood that inspired me. I would see them come and go from work in their business suits and thought to myself I want to be like that. My teachers where inspirational, they encouraged me to dream. It's also important to see role models you can relate to. This is why it is important for more people to return to their communities and inspire others. Whether you donate time, money or just by simply living in the community.

I would also like to know how can I help Mr. Leifel Jackson and the work that he is doing at the Our Club after school program. Please feel free to contact me at the number below.

Sincerely,

Coco Collins


Urban Style Magazine
500 N. Michigan Ave. Suite 300
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312-321-4761
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Did the Bible Backfire? Separation of Church and State is Important and Just--

March 29, 2005

Colorado Court Bars Execution Because Jurors Consulted Bible

By KIRK JOHNSON

ENVER, March 28 - In a sharply divided ruling, Colorado's highest court on Monday upheld a lower court's decision throwing out the sentence of a man who was given the death penalty after jurors consulted the Bible in reaching a verdict. The Bible, the court said, constituted an improper outside influence and a reliance on what the court called a "higher authority."

"The judicial system works very hard to emphasize the rarified, solemn and sequestered nature of jury deliberations," the majority said in a 3-to-2 decision by a panel of the Colorado Supreme Court. "Jurors must deliberate in that atmosphere without the aid or distraction of extraneous texts."

The ruling involved the conviction of Robert Harlan, who was found guilty in 1995 of raping and murdering a cocktail waitress near Denver. After Mr. Harlan's conviction, the judge in the case - as Colorado law requires - sent the jury off to deliberate about the death penalty with an instruction to think beyond the narrow confines of the law. Each juror, the judge told the panel, must make an "individual moral assessment," in deciding whether Mr. Harlan should live.

The jurors voted unanimously for death. The State Supreme Court's decision changes that sentence to life in prison without parole.

In the decision on Monday, the dissenting judges said the majority had confused the internal codes of right and wrong that juries are expected to possess in such weighty moral matters with the outside influences that are always to be avoided, like newspaper articles or television programs about the case. The jurors consulted Bibles, the minority said, not to look for facts or alternative legal interpretations, but for wisdom.

"The biblical passages the jurors discussed constituted either a part of the jurors' moral and religious precepts or their general knowledge, and thus were relevant to their court-sanctioned moral assessment," the minority wrote.

Legal experts said that Colorado was unusual in its language requiring jurors in capital felony cases to explicitly consult a moral compass. Most states that have restored the death penalty weave in a discussion of moral factors, lawyers said, along with the burden that jurors must decide whether aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors in voting on execution.

"In Colorado it's a more distinct instruction," said Bob Grant, who was the prosecutor in the Harlan case. Mr. Grant said no decision had been made yet on whether to appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

Legal scholars say the connection between hard legal logic and the softer, deeper world of values is always present in jury rooms, whether acknowledged or not.

"The court says we're asking you to be moral men and women, to make a moral judgment of the right thing to do," said Thane Rosenbaum, a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law in New York City, and author of the book "The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right" (HarperCollins, 2004). "But then we say the juror cheated because he brought in a book that forms the basis of his moral universe," Professor Rosenbaum said. "The thing is, he would have done it anyway, in his head."

Other legal experts say the Colorado decision touches on an issue that courts do not like to talk about: that jurors, under traditions dating to the days of English common law, can consider higher authority all they want, and can convict or acquit using whatever internal thoughts and discussions they consider appropriate.

In this instance, lawyers said, there was simply a clearer trail of evidence, with admissions by the jurors during Mr. Harlan's appeal that Bibles had been used in their discussion. One juror testified she studied Romans and Leviticus, including Leviticus 24, which includes the famous articulation of Old Testament justice: "eye for eye, tooth for tooth."

Professor Howard J. Vogel, who teaches ethics at Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul and has a master's degree in theology as well as a law degree, said, "I don't think it's a religious text that's the problem here, but rather whether something is being used that trumps the law of the state."

The Bible is hardly monolithic about what constitutes justice. Some legal experts say the jurors might just as easily have found guidance that led them to vote to spare Mr. Harlan's life. Lawyers for Mr. Harlan also specifically urged the jurors to consider biblical wisdom, according to the Supreme Court's decision, with a request that they find mercy in their hearts "as God ultimately took mercy on Abraham."

The lawyers also made several references to Mr. Harlan's soul and his habit of reading the Bible with his father, the court said.

Kathleen Lord, a lawyer for Mr. Harlan, did not return repeated calls.

Mr. Harlan was convicted of kidnapping a waitress, Rhonda Maloney, and raping her. She escaped and flagged down a motorist, Jaquie Creazzo. Mr. Harlan caught up with the two women, shot Ms. Creazzo, leaving her paralyzed, then beat and killed Ms. Maloney.

These School Kids Understand Separation of Church and State-- Wish Adults Could Get It Too--

Content of school seminar criticized
Some say workshop evolved into sermon

BY MELINDA ROGERS ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Eureka Springs School District patrons are buzzing over an alcohol-awareness seminar that turned into a morality lesson at the city’s high school.

More than 300 students in seventh through 12th grades attended a presentation by a Minnesota-based organization called You Can Run But You Cannot Hide before the district dismissed for spring break March 16.

Some students who attended the assembly said that what began as a message to stay away from alcohol turned into rants from lecturers on topics including abortion, gun control, the sanctity of marriage and "the dangers of rock ’n’ roll."

District administrators contracted with the group to perform an anti-drug-and-alcohol skit through funds allotted from the state for "safe and drug-free" school programs. The three-hour presentation included a period when boys and girls were split into two groups for "virtue lessons" by presenters Bradlee Dean and his wife, Stephanie, said Amy Deitcher, a 16-year-old high school junior.

The group’s Web site states that Dean’s wife’s name is Stephanie Joy.

During the girls’ session, Joy reportedly told teenagers they "would get black spots" on their wedding dress if they held hands with a boy. Later, the girls’ group was presented with a "treasure chest" theory in which they were told that any sort of physical contact with a man before marriage would result in a woman becoming "leftovers" for her husband, Deitcher said.

Deitcher said she walked out with friends when Joy presented a list of "characteristics a good husband would have," which included the suggestion a prospect be a "God-fearing man." Boys were warned of the dangers of rock ’n’ roll and promiscuity, she said.

"It seemed like total propaganda. It was like a cult. They were trying to get kids who can’t think for themselves to think like them," Deitcher said in a telephone interview.

You Can Run But You Cannot Hide performers were scheduled to present to the district’s elementary school children, but Superintendent Reck Wallis canceled the performance after hearing reports about the high school presentation, Eureka Springs School Board President Rusty Windle said.

Windle said he’d fielded several phone calls from parents upset about the assembly and encouraged them to address the school board at a monthly meeting scheduled for tonight. He said many parents are concerned the content of the presentation wasn’t appropriate for a public school.

Wallis and high school Principal Charles "David" Childers could not be reached for comment.

Windle said administrators from the 667-student school district researched the group before allowing it to visit the school by calling other school districts out of state for references.

"I don’t know it was exactly what it was billed out to be. [Administrators ] thought it was all pretty much a drug awareness thing and there was a lot more to it than that," Windle said. "Maybe some more homework could have been done."

The district might investigate creating a more stringent policy for approving school assemblies presented by outside groups, Windle said.

Dean, founder of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, said the message in the group’s performance has been altered by liberals in the school who are "bending" what was said. He acknowledged the "leftovers" comment but said it was meant to encourage teenagers to make the right decisions.

"Do you think that was the heart of her intent, to tell kids they’d be a bunch of leftovers? You’ve got a bunch of liberal kids listening to what they want to hear and that’s the bottom line," he said.

There were no direct references made to the Bible or Christianity during the skit, he said, although he added he identifies himself as a Christian and supports religious principles. The group’s Web site, www.youcanrunbutyoucannothide.com, states that the organization is a non-profit "charitable church ministry."

Dean said he’d received two phone calls from Eureka Springs residents complaining about the presentation’s content. The group generally makes $2,000 to $2,500 for performances outside a five-state radius surrounding Minnesota, he said.

He said the group receives financial backing from major retailers and businesses, which allows it to perform at schools that can’t afford to make a "donation."

"We got our poop in a group up here," Dean said of support for the organization.

Windle wasn’t sure what the district paid for the performance.

This story was published Monday, March 28, 2005


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Copyright © 2005, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc.

Saying Good-Bye NY Times

March 27, 2005

Tribe Buries 3 on a Long Road to Healing

By MONICA DAVEY

ED LAKE, Minn., March 26 - Hundreds of cars - police squad cars from cities miles away, dark sedans carrying political leaders, and the ordinary, older cars of those who live here - wound their way on Saturday through the isolated Red Lake Indian Reservation, past the high school, past the makeshift memorial for those who died here, and on to the first funeral.

Three of those killed Monday in a teenager's shooting spree that ended at Red Lake High School were buried by Saturday evening, after a day of somber services that mixed Christian traditions with Indian drums, rituals and honor songs. At one point, an eagle flew overhead, circling around a memorial service, a sign some mourners said was hopeful.

But seven more funerals lie ahead in the coming days, including one for the gunman, and residents of this stark reservation of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians said that many months of struggle were certain to follow.

"This is a time for healing," said Fred Auginash, whose teenage nephew was among the wounded, as he stood outside the funeral for Daryl Lussier, in a biting wind. "This is hard on everybody, and it's going to take a long time. We're taking it pretty hard as a family, but Red Lake is taking it pretty hard as a family, too."

Among those remembered on Saturday: Sergeant Lussier, a 30-year veteran of the reservation police department known for his habit of waving to every car he passed and for his nickname, Dash; his companion, Michelle Sigana, 31, a quiet woman who friends said fell in love with Sergeant Lussier when she was 14; and a student, Chase Lussier, a 15-year-old who played basketball on the high school team and himself had a young child at home.

It was Sergeant Lussier's 16-year-old grandson, Jeff Weise, who shot his grandfather and Ms. Sigana, then took his grandfather's police-issued weapons to the high school, where he killed a security guard, a teacher and five students before killing himself. Mr. Weise drove to the school, the police say, in Sergeant Lussier's squad car. On Saturday, the squad car was parked outside Sergeant Lussier's memorial service, a bouquet of flowers tucked in the windshield.

Sergeant Lussier, 58, whom residents described as a kind-hearted officer, the type who might let someone off with just a warning, had experienced violence in his family before. Eight years ago, friends said, he was among the police officers gathered at the Red Lake home of his son, Daryl Jr., during a days-long standoff with the police. Sergeant Lussier tried to talk his son into giving up his weapon, recalled Lorene Gurneau, a family friend. In the end, the younger Mr. Lussier, Mr. Weise's father, committed suicide.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Senators Norm Coleman and Mark Dayton attended the memorials for Sergeant Lussier and Ms. Sigana, as did a representative from the White House.

In his weekly radio address, President Bush said Saturday that he was praying for the families of those killed, and praised one victim of the shooting, Derrick Brun, the unarmed security guard who was posted just inside the entryway to the school beside a metal detector and near a security camera. President Bush said Mr. Brun, 28, had tried to confront Mr. Weise, buying "vital time" for another security guard to lead some students to safety.

"Derrick's bravery cost him his life, and all Americans honor him," Mr. Bush said. Mr. Brun, who graduated from Red Lake High School and became a security guard at the school last October, will be buried on Monday.

The president, who had been criticized by some Indian leaders for not contacting tribal officials at Red Lake or commenting publicly immediately after Monday's shooting, spoke with Floyd Jourdain, the tribal council chairman, on Friday, offering condolences and federal help.

Governor Pawlenty has declared Monday a day of remembrance for the dead. Flags at schools and on state land will fly at half-staff. The governor has also called for a moment of silence in honor of Red Lake at 2 p.m. Monday.

On Saturday morning, two more of the seven people wounded in the shooting were released from a hospital in Bemidji, 30 miles south of the reservation.

By Saturday evening, only two boys - the most seriously wounded - were still hospitalized. Steven Cobenais, 15, who was shot in the forehead and lost his left eye, was listed in critical condition at a hospital in Fargo, N.D. Jeffrey May, 15, who was shot in the right cheek, was in serious condition.

At Chase Lussier's funeral, some of his classmates arrived wearing T-shirts bearing his baby-faced image, and his number on the Red Lake basketball squad, 21. Many were tearful. Some said they feared ever returning to the school that had left them, now, with images of bullets and screaming and death. Red Lake High is not expected to reopen for several weeks; school officials say they have extensive repairs to make to the bullet-ridden interior.

But Rodney Defoe, a pallbearer for Chase and a teammate, said quietly that he wanted to go back, as soon as possible. "I just want to, I want to get through this, to overcome this," he said.

As tribal elders spoke at one ceremony and two drums played on, Leigh Spears said that the residents of Red Lake were resilient and were starting to show it as they came together on Saturday.

"We are a strong people, and just talking to each other brings some help," she said. "Still," she added, "it's going to be a while, a long while."

Outside the school, a memorial has emerged along a fence in the past few days. Posters, poems and song lyrics cover the fence, and every so often, a student steps up to put up a new one. One reads, in part: "He stares down at a shattered youth, a shattered mirror shows the shattered truth."

Among the posters is one for Mr. Weise. But while posters for the other nine dead are surrounded now by teddy bears, roses, balloons, cigarettes and other offerings, Mr. Weise's has only his name and photograph.

Drug Induced Rampage? NY Times

March 26, 2005

Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School Shootings

By MONICA DAVEY and GARDINER HARRIS

ED LAKE, Minn., March 25 - In their sleepless search for answers, the family of Jeff Weise, the teenager who killed nine people and then himself, says it is left wondering about the drugs he was prescribed for his waves of depression.

On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that Ms. Lussier described as a "cry for help."

"They kept upping the dose for him," she said, "and by the end, he was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can't help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off."

Lee Cook, another relative of Mr. Weise, said his medication had increased a few weeks before the shootings on Monday.

"I do wonder," Mr. Cook said, "whether on top of everything else he had going on in his life, on top of all the other problems, whether the drugs could have been the final straw."

The effects of antidepressants on young people remain a topic of fierce debate among scientists and doctors.

Last year, a federal panel of drug experts said antidepressants could cause children and teenagers to become suicidal. The Food and Drug Administration has since required the makers of antidepressants to warn of that danger on their labels for the medications.

The suicide risk is particularly acute when therapy starts or a dosage changes, the drug agency has warned.

Although some studies link the drugs to an increased suicide risk, the research does not suggest such a connection to violence like Mr. Weise's rampage through Red Lake High School.

Without knowing Mr. Weise's medical history or precise diagnosis, it is virtually impossible to speculate on what factors may have affected him - the drugs, his underlying depression, a gloomy childhood wrapped in tragedy or something else entirely.

"What I can say is that his physician, I'm sure, made the appropriate recommendations based on whatever the dosages were," said Morry Smulevitz, a spokesman for Eli Lilly, which makes Prozac.

The dosage range, Mr. Smulevitz said, runs from 20 milligrams to 80 milligrams a day, so Mr. Weise's 60 milligram dose fell in that bracket. Mr. Weise, though just 16, was taller than 6 feet and weighed 250 pounds.

Ms. Lussier, who lived with Mr. Weise in her mother's house on the Red Lake Indian reservation in far northern Minnesota, said she could not understand what else, aside from drugs, had changed to explain his sudden violence.

Since his suicide attempt and 72-hour hospitalization a year ago, Mr. Weise had seemed to be improving, she said, and he was receiving mental health counseling and a doctor's care at the medical center on the reservation.

Others in Red Lake said, however, that they had seen few signs of improvement in the dour, solitary boy.

The driver of a school bus, Lorene Gurneau, said she often saw Mr. Weise standing outside the middle school, wearing his long black clothes and strange hairdos, staring off into nothing, in a daze, even as children raced by or teachers passed him.

Still, in at least one Internet posting last fall, Mr. Weise sounded determined to improve his life after his suicide attempt, and he noted that he was taking antidepressants.

"I had went through a lot of things in my life that had driven me to a darker path than most choose to take," the posting said. "I split the flesh on my wrist with a box opener, 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."

"It was my dicision," he went on, "to seek medical treatment, as on the other hand I could've chose to sit there until enough blood drained from my downward lacerations on my wrists to die."

On Monday, in the hours before the shooting, Mr. Weise had seemed cheerful and normal, Ms. Lussier said. His teacher, who was spending an hour a day at his house as part of a "homebound" study program that the school system had created because of his troubles, arrived to give him his homework assignments, as usual. At 12:30 p.m., less than three hours before the shootings, another aunt, Shauna, stopped in.

"He was watching a movie on TV," Ms. Lussier said. "There was nothing out of the ordinary. People keep saying he was depressed, but if you saw him, he was getting better. All we can think of is, what about the drugs?"

Though research has not linked antidepressants to acts of violence on others, several incidents have gained wide publicity.

In 1989, Joseph Wesbecker walked into a printing plant in Louisville, Ky., with a bag of guns and killed eight co-workers and himself. He was taking Prozac, which had recently been approved.

In 1999, a student involved in the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado had reportedly taken Luvox, an antidepressant similar to Prozac.

In 2001, Christopher Pittman killed his grandparents while taking Zoloft, another antidepressant similar to Prozac. His lawyers faulted the drug, but a jury in Charleston, S.C., convicted him of murder in February.

Still, Katherine S. Newman, a professor at Princeton University who has studied school killings, said just a small percentage appeared to have possibly involved psychiatric drugs. Of 27 such killings from 1974 to 2001, fewer than one-fifth of the suspects had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder before the shootings, Professor Newman said. Dr. Frank Ochberg, a former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said he once dismissed any links between antidepressants and suicides or homicidal acts. The recent research, however, has changed his mind, Dr. Ochberg said.

"If your intention is shooting the place up and dying as you do it, you can put the fantasy together," he said. "Suicidal and homicidal intentions together could theoretically follow the same path."

N.R.A. Aide Urges Armed Teachers

PHOENIX, March 25 (AP) - All options should be considered to prevent rampages like the Minnesota shooting, including making guns available to teachers, Sandra S. Froman, first vice president of the National Rifle Association, said Friday.


Monica Davey reported from Red Lake for this article, and Gardiner Harris from Washington. Jodi Wilgoren contributed reporting from New York

A Great Newsweek Report on MS-13

The Most Dangerous Gang in America
They're a violent force in 33 states and counting. Inside the battle to police Mara Salvatrucha.

By Arian Campo-Flores

Newsweek

March 28 issue - The signs of a new threat in northern Virginia emerged ominously in blood-spattered urban streets and rural scrub. Two summers ago the body of a young woman who had informed against her former gang associates was found on the banks of the Shenandoah River, repeatedly stabbed and her head nearly severed. Last May in Alexandria, gang members armed with machetes hacked away at a member of the South Side Locos, slicing off some of his fingers and leaving others dangling by a shred of skin. Only a week later in Herndon, a member of the 18th Street gang was pumped full of .38-caliber bullets, while his female companion, who tried to flee, was shot in the back. The assailant, according to a witness, had a large tattoo emblazoned on his forehead. It read MS, for Mara Salvatrucha, the gang allegedly responsible for all these attacks.

At the nearby headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents—many of whom live in these communities—fielded the reports with mounting alarm. But Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, wasn't terrifying just northern Virginia. "They were popping up everywhere," says Chris Swecker, assistant director of the FBI's criminal investigative division. "It seemed like we were hearing more and more about MS-13." Then one day last fall, FBI Director Robert Mueller called Swecker into his office. "You have a mandate to go out and address this gang," Mueller told him. Mueller declared MS-13 the top priority of the bureau's criminal-enterprise branch—which targets organized crime—and authorized the creation of a new national task force to combat it. The task force, which includes agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), aims to take on MS-13 much as the FBI once tackled the Mafia.

Composed of mostly Salvadorans and other Central Americans—many of them undocumented—the gang has a uniquely international profile, with an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members in 33 states in the United States (out of more than 700,000 gang members overall), and tens of thousands more in Central America. It's considered the fastest-growing, most violent and least understood of the nation's street gangs—in part because U.S. law enforcement has not been watching as closely as it might have. As authorities have focused their attention on the war against terrorism, MS-13 has proliferated. In the FBI's D.C. field office, the number of agents dedicated to gang investigations declined by 50 percent. "There was a definite shift in resources post-9/11 toward terrorism," says Michael Mason, assistant director in charge of that office. "As a result, we had fewer resources to focus on gangs," though he adds that the bureau made up for any shortfall by leveraging resources from other agencies. In recent weeks, authorities have made strides against MS-13: a gang leader accused of orchestrating a December bus bombing in Honduras that killed 28 people was arrested in Texas in February, and a recent seven-city sweep by ICE netted more than 100 reputed MS-13 members. But Robert Clifford, head of the new national task force, says "no single law-enforcement action is really going to deal the type of blow" necessary to dismantle the gang. No one is more interested in busting up MS-13 than leaders of the Latino community, who live with the fear and fallout of the gang's savage actions.

MS-13 got started in Los Angeles in the 1980s by Salvadorans fleeing a civil war. Many of the kids grew up surrounded by violence. Del Hendrixson of Bajito Onda, a gang-outreach program, remembers an MS-13 member who recounted one of his earliest memories: guarding the family's crops at the age of 4, armed with a machete, alone at night. When he and others reached the mean streets of the L.A. ghetto, Mexican gangs preyed on them. The newcomers' response: to band together in a mara, or "posse," composed of salvatruchas, or "street-tough Salvadorans" (the "13" is a gang number associated with southern California). Over time, the gang's ranks grew, adding former paramilitaries with weapons training and a taste for atrocity. MS-13 eventually adopted a variety of rackets, from extortion to drug trafficking. When law enforcement cracked down and deported planeloads of members, the deportees quickly created MS-13 outposts in El Salvador and neighboring countries like Honduras and Guatemala.

Flush with new recruits from Central America, whether fleeing the law or accompanying parents seeking work along the immigrant trail, MS-13 members have set up cliques—geographically defined subgroups—in such remote redoubts as Boise, Idaho, and Omaha, Neb. In these new settings, gang culture often morphs. "Everything gets bastardized as it leaves the center," says Wes McBride, president of the California Gang Investigators Association. While machete attacks might occur on the East Coast, they're rare on the West Coast. While car thefts and drug trafficking might be big in North Carolina, gang-on-gang violence predominates in Virginia. It's that decentralized nature of MS-13—with no clear hierarchy or structure—that makes it so vexing to authorities. "Taking out the heart of the leadership is very hard if there is no definitive leadership," says one federal law-enforcement official.

But that could be changing. According to a 2004 report by the National Drug Intelligence Center, the gang "may be increasing its coordination with MS-13 chapters in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia, and New York City, possibly signaling an attempt to build a national command structure." One potential illustration of such an effort: on New York's Long Island last year, an MS-13 honcho arrived from the West Coast "to try to organize these various cliques or sets into a more formal structure," says Robert Hart, supervisory special agent with the FBI. "That's a significant step in the development of MS-13." And in northern Virginia, U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty observes that "in some of the violent crimes, there seems to be a kind of approval process in some kind of hierarchy beyond the clique."

If MS-13 is seeking to create a national command in the United States, it would be emulating its model in El Salvador. There, says Oscar Bonilla, director of the National Council for Public Security, the gang is "highly organized and disciplined ... with semi-clandestine structures and vertical commands." As a result, its criminal operations are all the more efficient and pervasive. The administration of President Tony Saca has responded with a super mano dura ("super hard hand") policy, reforming the penal code to facilitate gang prosecutions. "We're not dealing with Boy Scouts or bums," Saca told NEWSWEEK. "We're dealing with true assassins, rapists."

In the United States, Clifford's new national task force, which will be housed at FBI headquarters, is preparing a hard hand of its own. Serving as a national repository for MS-13 intelligence, it will help discern trends, prioritize targets and diagram whatever leadership structure might exist. There's an international dimension, too: U.S. investigators will be exchanging information—such as a gang member's movements and associates—with their counterparts in Central America. FBI agents sitting in regional U.S. embassies will serve as liaisons with local authorities, and Salvadoran advisers will come to the United States to share their MS-13 expertise. All of which amounts to "a comprehensive international attack against MS-13," says Clifford.

But some kinks remain. In the recent sweep conducted by ICE, the agency nabbed a gang member whom the FBI was intensely interested in. "This was not somebody we were ready to scoop up," says a federal law-enforcement official, who complains that ICE didn't alert other agencies of its impending raid. (An ICE spokeswoman insists that all targets were cleared with other agencies. Another ICE official grumbles that "the bureau thinks it has jurisdiction over everything.") Meanwhile, down in El Salvador, officials fear the repercussions of another batch of MS-13 deportees heading their way. "Those deportations are a time bomb," says Bonilla. "When a gang member is deported from the United States, it destroys in one month what we've achieved in a year of [gang-prevention work]." For authorities to succeed in this war, they'll need to cooperate at least as well as the gang they're trying to wipe out.

With Daren Briscoe, Daniel Klaidman and Michael Isikoff in Washington, Jennifer Ordonez in Los Angeles, Joseph Contreras in Miami and Alvaro Cruz in San Salvador
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

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Now They Cope and Recover- NY Times

March 25, 2005

Survivors of High School Rampage Left With Injuries and Questions

By KIRK JOHNSON

EMIDJI, Minn., March 24 - Many students at Red Lake High School ignored Jeff Weise, with his weird hairstyles and his talk about guns. Cody Thunder, who is 15, was one of the few who reached out and tried to make a connection. Just ordinary conversation, he said, nothing too deep.

But on Monday afternoon, as Cody sat in biology class - the usual spot at the front row, he said, near the door for a quick exit when the bell rang - there was Jeff outside in the hallway, visible through a glass partition, armed with a pistol.

"He was aiming at me," Cody said. An instant later, a bullet crashed through the glass into Cody's hip.

The violence that ripped through Red Lake High, on the reservation of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, will probably always be on some level inexplicable.

Eight people died at the school, including Mr. Weise, 16, who killed himself. He also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion a few minutes earlier.

Cody, who spoke to reporters on Thursday from the hospital where he is being treated, said Mr. Weise liked to talk about "shooting people and stuff." But Cody said he never worried that anything would come of it.

Other students have spoken of Mr. Weise's fascination with violence, and even Mr. Weise himself said on a neo-Nazi Web site last year that he had been suspected of threatening to shoot people at school last April 20, Hitler's birthday. He wrote that he had been cleared.

In a report posted last April on the Red Lake School District's Web site, the school superintendent noted that on April 19, the middle and high school received threats of a drive-by shooting the next day. The schools canceled after-school activities and notified the police, the superintendent wrote. School officials have declined to say whether Mr. Weise was suspected of making the threat.

Mr. Weise had been receiving mental health counseling and drugs for depression in recent months, said his grandmother, Shelda Lussier, with whom he lived for the past seven years. "Was it enough?" she said. "Apparently not."

For the survivors like Cody, there is an added question: Why them? Cody said it seemed clear that the gun was not pointed randomly, but specifically at him, a person who had offered friendship.

"That school is always going to be a fear for me now," he said.

The first wakes were held on the reservation on Thursday, with most funerals still to come. Counselors and therapists continued working to help people regroup. A woman who survived the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 came to Bemidji, about 30 miles from the reservation, to offer a message of hope to the three wounded students here and to two others still hospitalized in Fargo, N.D.

Many spoke about the pieces of a shattered day that stuck in their minds, like Cody's deeply imprinted vision of the gun in the hallway.

Lance Crowe, who is also 15 - and Cody Thunder's cousin - was wounded in the arm and the chest. His uncle, Dan Crowe, told reporters on Thursday how Lance had "played dead," lying among those killed as the havoc ensued. Mr. Crowe said Lance watched, "with one eye open," as Mr. Weise came back into the classroom and killed himself just a few feet away as the police closed in.

Mr. Crowe said that Lance, who had planned to speak for himself but was overwhelmed by the banks of television cameras in the hospital meeting room, is talking to his family, sleeping well and looking forward to playing basketball again for the Red Lake High junior varsity team.

Other family members of the dead and wounded have retreated or declined to speak. Some, like the family of Dwayne Lewis, a 15-year-old student who died, could not be reached. Another relative said that Dwayne's home did not have a telephone. A person who answered at the home of Chase Lussier, 15, who also died, said the family would have nothing to say.

Some tales are just emerging.

The family of Jeffrey May, 15, who was in serious condition at the hospital in Fargo, told The Forum newspaper of Fargo and Moorhead, Minn., that Jeffrey had fought back and tried to stab Mr. Weise with a pencil.

The family of Steven Cobenais, 15, who was in critical condition in the Fargo hospital, could not be reached. The family of Neva Rogers, 62, an English teacher who was killed, declined to comment. Her obituary on the Web site of Education Minnesota, a teachers' organization, said she was an avid gardener who often took flowers to school.

Chanelle Rosebear, 15, another student killed, loved rap music and rhythm and blues, said her cousin Ran Rosebear.

"She was beautiful and always made everybody laugh," Ms. Rosebear said. "She wasn't thinking about the future; she was just living in the present."

Thurlene Stillday, another 15-year-old who was killed, loved water parks and visiting family in Fargo, said her sister, Tyann Stillday.

Derrick Brun, 28, who was one of the first killed at the school as he manned his post as a security guard, struggled in his life, said his father, Francis Brun. But despite a back injury, a divorce and the death of his daughter, Derrick remained optimistic, his father said.

"Even though he was raised under real sometimes adverse and troubling times, he managed to become adjusted so he was not hateful or resentful," Mr. Brun said.

The family of Alicia Spike, 14, who died, could not be reached.

The criminal investigation continues. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Paul McCabe, said Thursday that agents had issued subpoenas to Internet service providers and analyzed computers they had seized - trying to follow the trail of cyberspace influences on the gunman - and are now trying to reconstruct what happened inside the high school with the help of ballistics experts.

Evidence is mounting that Mr. Weise was an avid participant in Internet discussion groups for more than a year, with postings under his name that mention weapons and violence amid broader conversations about politics, the paranormal, time travel, reincarnation and Big Foot.

In a posting on Jan. 23, 2004, for example, he wrote that he believed he had lived a past life as a German soldier in World War II.

"I've always felt a certain affinity with conflict," he wrote.

The Red Lake superintendent of schools, Stuart Desjarlait, said students did not notify school officials of Mr. Weise's talk of guns and violence, and he thought that would probably have been the case in most schools. "Kids have their own little networks with each other," Mr. Desjarlait said.

Other people spoke of healing on Thursday. Lauren Bohn, who was a student at Columbine High School when the shootings occurred there and now lives in Minnesota, met the hospitalized boys in Bemidji and said they felt like family to her.

"I was there to tell them: this is not the end," she said. "They can be strong."


Monica Davey contributed reporting from Bemidji for this article, Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago and Jodi Wilgoren from New York.

Aren't Danger Signs Nearly always Missed?- NY Times

March 24, 2005

Signs of Danger Were Missed in a Troubled Teenager's Life

By MONICA DAVEY and JODI WILGOREN

EMIDJI, Minn., March 23 - Looking back at all the pieces, some who knew Jeff Weise say they wonder why someone did not see his eruption coming months, or even years, ago.

There was the threat Mr. Weise, 16, once made on his own life, sending him away from his home on the Red Lake Indian Reservation for psychiatric treatment. There were the pictures of bloodied bodies and guns he drew and shared freely with classmates. There was the story he apparently wrote about a shooting spree at a school in a small town.

"The clues were all there," said Kim DesJarlait, Mr. Weise's stepaunt, who lives in Minneapolis. "Everything was laid out, right there, for the school or the authorities in Red Lake to see it coming. I don't want to blame Red Lake, but did they not put two and two together? This kid was crying out, and those guys chose to ignore it. They need to start focusing on their kids."

Others, including the principal of the high school where, on Monday, Mr. Weise killed five students, a security guard, a teacher and then himself, defended their handling of the teenager, saying that the authorities had seen all there was - at the time - to see, and had actually been struggling madly to help a boy through his difficult youth.

"We may need people to be more aware," the principal of Red Lake High School, Chris Dunshee, acknowledged on Wednesday, after teachers and school board officials met privately for the first time for counseling. "But I think most of us felt like this was a troubled young man, and someone whose problems we felt like we were addressing."

Beyond the outward signs of stress, however, there was another indication, far darker and more explicit, that people on the reservation said they had never seen or heard of: Mr. Weise's vast Internet life.

Though many here said Mr. Weise spent a lot of time on his computer, many said they themselves did not have access to a computer, and all said they had never seen the alarming postings submitted under Mr. Weise's name.

A loner in real life, Mr. Weise, who also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion and wounded seven people on Monday, found a community of sorts in cyberspace, confiding his problems with depression, loneliness and abuse to people who cheered his macabre short stories and drawings and sympathized with his racial ideologies.

On Wednesday, some of his Internet pen pals lamented that there had been warning signs they missed, including a gory zombie tale Mr. Weise apparently wrote about a school shooting that mentioned Columbine, an animated film he posted in which a killer committed suicide, and an eerie message that, in retrospect, seems to foreshadow his fate.

Things are "kind of rocky right now so I might disappear unexpectedly," Mr. Weise wrote Feb. 6 on a Web forum where members collaborate to write fiction.

Last October, he posted an animated film on newgrounds.com. In it, a man shoots people with a rifle, unleashing flashes of red blood across a simple black and white drawing, then tosses a hand grenade into a police car, puts a pistol in his mouth and commits suicide.

When another member of the site wrote, "Was that like a warning message? Hmm dude you need help badly," Mr. Weise, posting under the name Regret, responded: "You obviously can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality," adding, "Don't try judging my mental health based upon a simple animation, capisce?"

In a Yahoo profile last updated in June 2004, Mr. Weise used the moniker verlassen4_20, combining Hitler's birthday (April 20) with a German word meaning "forsaken" or "abandoned," said his nickname was Totenkopf, German for "death's head" or "skull," and included a doctored picture of himself with a monster's teeth and empty eyes. Under "latest news" he said he was on antidepressants, seeing a therapist and had "a brand new pair of cuts on my wrists"; his favorite quote, which he attributed to Hitler, was "The law of existence requires uninterrupted killing ... So that the better may live."

On one Web site, Mr. Weise said last year that he had been accused of threatening to "shoot up" the school last April 20, the fifth anniversary of the Columbine shootings in Colorado, but that he had been cleared. On Wednesday, Mr. Dunshee declined to say whether Mr. Weise was suspected of such a threat. "That will come out in the investigation," he said.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to verify Mr. Weise's authorship of these Internet postings without reviewing his computer; the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it would investigate them. The postings are linked to a profile on www.nazi.org in which he introduced himself by name and said he was a high school student on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. Several people who communicated with him on the sites confirmed that the posts were made long before Monday's massacre.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the company's privacy policy prevented her from discussing the account; operators of the other sites either refused to authenticate the postings or did not respond to inquiries.

The administrator of one forum, who asked that it not be named for fear the site would be crashed by overwhelming traffic, shared several private messages Mr. Weise sent in which he said his mother drank excessively and abused him before the car accident that rendered her brain-damaged and confined to a nursing home.

"I have friends, but I'm basically a loner inside a group of loners," Mr. Weise wrote, according to the administrator. "I'm excluded from anything and everything they do. I'm never invited. I don't even know why they consider me a friend or I them."

In another message, Mr. Weise wrote that his mother "would hit me with anything she could get her hands on," and "would tell me I was a mistake, and she would say so many things that its hard to deal with them or think of them without crying."

Most troubling, perhaps, was the story of a shooting spree he posted on a site called Writer's Coven in December 2003. In it, he wrote of a character dressed all in black, a teacher with a Hitleresque moustache, and complaints about how the shooting at Columbine High had led to increased security on campus.

As in Monday's rampage, one of the victims at his fictional school was the security guard - "or what was left of him," the story said, his throat having "been ripped out, replaced by a bloody mass of torn tissue."

It went on: "In the distance, somewhere else in the school, the sound of a blood curdling scream echoed through the hallways."

But in Mr. Weise's real school, Red Lake High, and among those who knew his family, the only true danger people said they had sensed was for Mr. Weise's future and his happiness. The high school students, who will not be allowed to return to the bullet-ridden school for at least a few more days, were expected to gather for counseling on Thursday for the first time since Monday's deaths.

"There were a lot of signs of real trouble," said T'Anna Hanson, 21, who knew Mr. Weise and was the cousin of one victim. "He was confined to a computer all the time, and he had said last year that he was going to kill himself. But somehow I was never scared of him. I don't know why not. He never really showed that it could be directed this way."

Some students said Mr. Weise had shown them elaborate, disturbing drawings he made in his notebook, some of them depicting people with bullet holes in their heads, of half-living people with blank stares, of skeletons. None of the students interviewed said they reported the drawings to school officials. They said they had viewed them as the odd but harmless doodlings of a strange boy.

"He was different, you could say, out of place around here," said Patrick Tahahwah, 23, who knew Mr. Weise.

Katherine S. Newman, a professor at Princeton University, who edited the book "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings" in 2004, said Mr. Weise showed indications nearly identical to earlier gunmen: his comments, his drawings, his social life. "They were classic signs of a pathway leading to a shooting - the kid was literally giving off warnings," Professor Newman said.

But she cautioned against blaming school officials or others for not recognizing that, saying, "It is exceedingly difficult to see these kids coming, to put it together and see the pattern."

Mr. Weise, who wore eye makeup and a black trench coat that fell to the ground over his 6-foot, 250-pound frame, had been told recently not to study at school, but to study privately with a teacher at home. The reason, the principal said, was to offer Mr. Weise the extra help he needed, given what the principal described only as his "issues."

Mr. Weise, who had been held back in school, was teased because he was larger than most of the other sophomores, because he dressed in Goth style and wandered around by himself, and, Mr. Tahahwah said, because of his parents' fates. Everyone at Red Lake knew about that.

In July 1997, Mr. Weise's father, Daryl Lussier Jr., killed himself in a standoff with the police on the Red Lake reservation, the tribe's home in far northern Minnesota, about 30 miles from Bemidji, the nearest city.

In March 1999, his mother, Joanne, suffered a brain injury when the car she was riding in struck a tractor-trailer on a highway in Minneapolis, Ms. DesJarlait said. The driver, a cousin of his mother, had been drinking and was killed.

After the accident, Ms. DesJarlait said, Mr. Weise, who had lived most of his life in Minneapolis with his mother, was sent back to Red Lake to live with his grandparents. He did not want to go, family members said.

Though she knew Mr. Weise had had a difficult adolescence, Ms. DesJarlait said she still finds it hard to reconcile Monday's shootings with the stepnephew she remembered from his younger years. While he was growing up in Minneapolis, she said, Mr. Weise was a sweet boy who liked to go to movies, play outside, go to restaurants, and have friends over for sleepovers.

Now, Ms. DesJarlait said, the family is left to explain what happened - something she said she has no answers to - to Mr. Weise's half brother, 7, and half sister, 8.

"They know that he killed himself, but they don't understand about the others - about the size of it," she said. "I guess I don't either. I don't how know it came to this."

But in a blog Mr. Weise apparently kept on livejournal.com, he seemed to explain his swirl downward.

"Right about now I feel as low as I ever have," the January posting said. "I'm starting to regret sticking around. I should've taken the razor blade express last time around. Well, whatever, man. Maybe they've got another shuttle comin' around sometime soon."


Monica Davey reported from Bemidji, and Jodi Wilgoren from Chicago. Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting from Chicago.

Copy Cat or Media Hype? Either way- here it comes--

Gun-threat suspect at school surrenders

ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

A Texarkana high school student suspected of threatening and pointing a handgun at another student Tuesday turned himself in Wednesday.

According to police, students told officials at Arkansas High School about 9 a.m. Tuesday that two students were arguing in the parking lot. One of the two students was sitting in a vehicle and pointed a gun at the other student. Someone else in that vehicle then forced the gun down, and the threatener left the vehicle and ran away.

According to police, the 16-yearold student had been suspended earlier that day.

After police issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of aggravated assault and possession of a weapon on school grounds, the boy turned himself in about 5 p.m. Wednesday.

The encounter happened just one day after a 16-year-old Red Lake, Minn., high school student shot and killed nine people and wounded seven, including several classmates, before killing himself.

Texarkana police released no further information on the suspect.

This story was published Thursday, March 24, 2005


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2005, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Shooter a Nazi? NY Times

March 23, 2005

Behind the Why of a Rampage, Loner With a Taste for Nazism

By MONICA DAVEY

ED LAKE, Minn., March 22 - Before Monday, before his storm of bullets that left 10 people on this Indian reservation dead, Jeff Weise was rarely noticed here. But when he was, people saw a confused, brooding teenager with few friends, a peculiar attraction to Nazism and a lifetime, already, of family troubles.

He was a loner, in part, by happenstance, his parents having vanished from his life because of quieter tragedies. Emily Parkhurst, who like many other residents of the Red Lake Indian Reservation knew nearly everyone killed or hurt in the shootings, said Mr. Weise's father shot himself to death four years ago. Not long after that, Mr. Weise's mother was in a serious car accident that left her using a wheelchair and living in a nursing home.

"It was a lot to handle for a kid with no one to guide him or help him," Ms. Parkhurst said. "Nobody took the time to get to know him either."

Investigators say they are now trying to learn all they can about Mr. Weise, 16, to figure out why he killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion, then drove to Red Lake High School and killed a security guard, a teacher and five students before killing himself. Seven students were wounded, some of them shot in the head or the chest.

Among the areas of inquiry the Federal Bureau of Investigation is likely to pursue is a neo-Nazi Web forum on which someone identifying himself as Jeff Weise left messages, including one saying he was being accused of threatening to "shoot up" the school on Hitler's birthday, April 20, in 2004.

The school, which serves about 300 students, was closed on Tuesday and surrounded by law enforcement officials and evidence vans. Inside, the brick and glass building was riddled with so many bullets that F.B.I. officials said they could not keep count.

From a parking lot in the snow-covered, pine-speckled reservation, 120 miles south of the Canadian border, Floyd Jourdain, chairman of the tribal council of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, said somberly that the tribe, which has wrestled with troubles over poverty and education through the years, had never experienced such a horror.

"Without a doubt, this is the darkest days in the history of our people," Mr. Jourdain said.

The shootings on Monday afternoon, the deadliest school rampage since 15 people died at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., in 1999, were over in just 10 minutes, federal agents said, though some students who were there said they felt as though it had taken far longer.

Alicia Neadeau, 17, recalled standing in a hallway when the sounds of gunfire suddenly filled the school, and rushing with other stunned students into a classroom, where a teacher locked the door while all waited. Ms. Neadeau was still shaking on Tuesday, as she held her mother, Angela Ishan.

For parents, the long wait felt endless too: their unharmed children were not sent home for hours after the 3 p.m. shooting. "I was very, very afraid," Ms. Ishan said. "Parents didn't know whose kids were hurt or whose kids were safe."

A. J. Thunder, 16, whose brother, Cody, was one of the students wounded, said he wondered if he would ever be ready to go back to the school. "I just don't feel safe," he said. "You never know if it could happen again."

As federal agents, tribal police officers and officials from a number of other agencies, including the United States attorney's office and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, interviewed students and teachers and surveyed the school, they said they believed that Mr. Weise had acted alone but that they had no clear explanations about what prompted the killings.

Residents here said they were stunned by Mr. Weise's actions, though they said they had seen signs of trouble. Some said he favored Goth culture and clothing and Nazi philosophy, and had seen him drawing graphic, violent pictures.

Several residents said they believed Mr. Weise had received medication for emotional problems. T-Anna Hanson, 21, a cousin of one of his victims, said Mr. Weise had been admitted to a hospital last year for psychiatric help.

Some neighbors said Mr. Weise had recently been ordered to study temporarily at home, not school, because of a disciplinary problem.

Shauna Lussier, an aunt of Mr. Weise, said she was unable to talk about him. "We just can't understand anything right now," she said. "Keep us in your prayers."

Although the F.B.I. said it could not confirm the authenticity of the Web postings, someone who identified himself as Jeff Weise, a high school student living on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, posted 34 messages on a neo-Nazi Web forum last year, expressing admiration for Hitler and frustration at the lack of racial purity and authentic racial pride in his community. He used the handles Todesengel, meaning "angel of death" in German, and NativeNazi on the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party's Web forum. The forum has a swastika on a green flag on its homepage and promotes itself as an alternative to white-supremacist sites, a place where people of all races are welcome as long as they oppose racial mixing.

"I guess I've always had a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideas, and his courage to take on larger nations," Mr. Weise wrote in a posting last March. "I also have a natural dislike for communism."

He added, "It kind of angers me how people pass prejudgment on someone" who expresses support for Hitler.

A month later, Mr. Weise wrote that he was "being blamed for a threat on the school I attend because someone said they were going to shoot up the school on 4/20, Hitler's birthday." But by the end of May 2004, he wrote that he had been "cleared as a suspect."

"I'm glad for that," he said. "I don't much care for jail. I've never been there and I don't plan on it."

Michael Tabman, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Minneapolis office, said the authorities would be studying the Internet postings as part of their investigation. So far, Mr. Tabman said, they had pieced together the events of Monday afternoon.

Before 3 p.m., Mr. Weise, who lived with his grandmother, went to his grandfather's house, which sits on the reservation away from other homes, off an icy road in the woods. There, Mr. Weise pulled a .22-caliber handgun and shot and killed his grandfather, Daryl Lussier, 58, and his grandfather's companion, Michelle Sigana, 32, Mr. Tabman said. The authorities said they did not know who owned the handgun.

Mr. Lussier had been a sergeant in the reservation police for 30 years and was, residents said, one of its most beloved officers. Where others stuck hard to the books, they said, Sergeant Lussier sometimes let a person off with a warning, and once even eased a man out of an armed standoff by putting down his service revolver and going to talk to him.

"He had a kind heart, and we should know; we've all known him all our lives," Pam Needham, a neighbor, said of Mr. Lussier.

From the house, the F.B.I. said, Mr. Weise took his grandfather's police-issued weapons - a .40-caliber handgun and a 12-gauge shotgun - and his utility belt and bulletproof vest before driving off in Mr. Lussier's marked squad car.

He drove less than five minutes to the high school, where he stepped into the front lobby and shot and killed the unarmed security guard on duty, Derrick Brun, 28. The lobby has a metal detector and a video camera, which was apparently rolling.

From there, Mr. Tabman said, Mr. Weise began firing at students and a teacher in a hallway. The group fled into a classroom. Mr. Weise followed, killing the teacher, Neva Rogers, 62, and several students.

Mr. Weise then ran back into the hallway and began shooting, apparently at random. Students scrambled for hiding places, barricading classroom doors with anything they could find. Some fell, wounded. Some said they saw Mr. Weise laughing, mumbling, taunting them.

Four police officers ran into the school, and Mr. Weise began shooting at them, Mr. Tabman said. At least one officer fired back at the boy, who was wearing his grandfather's bulletproof vest. The authorities are not sure whether any of the shots hit him, but he ran back into the classroom where most of the dead lay, and shot himself once in the head, Mr. Tabman said.

The notion of a Nazi sympathizer on an Indian reservation particularly offended some here. "You have to be white to be a Nazi, don't you?" said one resident, who would give only his first name, George, and said he had known most of the victims all of their lives. "Believe me, there are no other Nazis here."

The reservation, with 880 acres, has a population of 5,118, about 40 percent of them living in poverty, according to the 2000 Census. The tribe also includes about 5,000 members living elsewhere.

On Tuesday, Orville White, whose niece, Thurlene Marie Stillday, 15, was among the dead, stood along a reservation street, his eyes on the ground and his fingers clutching a photograph of her. She had bangs and a hopeful smile.

Gangs, drugs, alcohol: those, Mr. White said, had plagued the reservation before.

But this, he said, was incomprehensible.


Reporting for this article was contributed by Kirk Johnson from Red Lake; Mikkel Pates from Fargo, N.D.; Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago; Mindy Sink from Denver; and Jodi Wilgoren from Chicago.

Sniff Sniff- Ahhhhhh

Reports Say Inhalants More Popular with Kids than Parents Know
3/21/2005

At some age levels, more kids use inhalants than marijuana, but parents are often unaware of the risks posed by inhalant use, the Associated Press reported March 18.

Among 12- to-13-year-olds, about one in 12 has used inhalants to get high, making the substances more popular than marijuana among young adolescents, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Commonly abused inhalants include glue, shoe polish, gasoline, and spray paint.

Youths who used inhalants were five times more likely than their peers to have used illicit drugs, the survey also found.

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America released a report concluding that while 22 percent of kids ages 12 to 14 had tried inhalants, only 4 percent of parents of kids in grades six to eight believed their children used inhalants. "Inhalant abuse remains a dangerous and potentially deadly behavior that parents need to be aware of," said U.S. drug czar John Walters.

Minnesota School Shooting- New York Times

March 22, 2005

Shooting Rampage by Student Leaves 10 Dead on Reservation

By JODI WILGOREN

CHICAGO, March 21 - A high school student went on a shooting rampage on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota on Monday, killing his grandparents, five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard, as well as himself, the authorities said.

A dozen others were injured in the barrage, which erupted at the 300-student Red Lake High School about 3 p.m., officials said. The grandparents were apparently killed at their home earlier in the day, and the authorities were investigating whether guns used in the shooting were taken from the grandfather, a veteran officer on the tribal police force.

"It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together," Paul McCabe, an F.B.I. spokesman in Minneapolis, said at a briefing. "It's still a very fluid investigation. Right now there's still a lot of work to do."

Mr. McCabe did say that "we do have evidence that we believe that the shooter is dead," and that "we believe he was acting alone."

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

The shooting was the worst at a school since 15 people were killed at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., in 1999, and came just 18 months after two students were fatally shot at Rocori High School in the central Minnesota town of Cold Spring, 200 miles away.

Roman Stately, director of the Red Lake Fire Department, told The A.P. and local television stations that the police found the grandparents' bodies an hour after the school shooting and that the young man used his grandfather's shotgun and two pistols in the rampage.

"Apparently, he walked out in the hallway shooting and then he entered a classroom," Mr. Stately told KARE-TV, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul. "Shot several students and a teacher." He added, "And then himself."

Witnesses told The Pioneer, a newspaper in Bemidji, the nearest town, an hour's drive away, that the gunman was "grinning and waving" as he fired his weapon and that students pleaded with him to stop, according to The A.P.

"You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff, quit, quit, leave me alone, what are you doing?' " The A.P. quoted Sondra Hegstrom, a student, as telling The Pioneer. "I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that's when I hid."

A teacher, Diane Schwanz, told The Pioneer that she herded students under benches as she dialed 911 on her cellphone. "I just got on the floor and called the cops," she said.

Mr. McCabe said the victims at the high school were all found in one room. The dead teacher was a woman, he said, the security guard a man; four students, including the gunman, died at the scene and two more later at a hospital.

The Red Lake reservation, about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities and about 120 miles south of Canada, is home to about 5,000 Ojibwa Indians, commonly called Chippewa. The tribe operates three casinos and other tourist attractions on some half-million acres.

Clyde Bellecourt, founder of the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement, said he could not "remember anything as tragic as this happening" on a reservation.

"Everyone in the Indian community is feeling really bad right now, whether they're a member of the Red Lake or not, we're all an extended family, we're all related," he said. "Usually this happens in places like Columbine, white schools, always somewhere else. We never hear that in our community."

Mr. Bellecourt and his brother Vernon, another longtime American Indian leader, said that the gunman's grandfather had been on the local police force for perhaps 35 years, and belonged to one of the tribe's most prominent and respected families.

"No one would ever think that that type of violence would visit itself in our communities, it's not part of our culture and our traditions, so we're kind of puzzled by it all," Vernon Bellecourt said.

"But our young people are not exempt from the same problems young people have across the country," he added, "so our communities are now being victimized by this same kind of violence."

Sherri Birkeland, a spokeswoman for North Country Regional Hospital in Bemidji, said six of the injured were treated at her emergency room, two of them later airlifted to MeritCare Healthcare Systems in Fargo, N.D.

One of the remaining four died, Ms. Birkeland said, declining to release information about the conditions of the others or describe any injuries. The hospital was shut for several hours afterward, she said.

In Fargo, Carrie Johnson, a spokeswoman for MeritCare, said the first victim arrived by helicopter at 5:55 p.m.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota issued a statement Monday evening expressing "profound sorrow" and extending "heartfelt prayers and condolences to the families who lost loved ones in this senseless tragedy."


Reporting for this article was contributed by Mikkel Patesfrom Fargo; Kermit Pattison from Minneapolis; and Gretchen Reuthling from Chicago.

NY Using Terrorism Law to go after Gangs- Washington Post

N.Y. Using Terrorism Law To Prosecute Street Gang
Critics Say Post-9/11 Legislation Is Being Applied Too Broadly
By Michelle Garcia



NEW YORK

The newest face of an alleged terrorist wears a goatee, stands about five feet tall, dresses in baggy clothes and resides in the Bronx. Gang member Edgar Morales, aka "Puebla," has the distinction of becoming one of the first people ever charged under New York's state terrorism laws.

The Bronx district attorney has accused members of the St. James Boys street gang of shootings "committed with the intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." The other charges include murder, attempted murder, various weapons charges and assault. But prosecutors have not alleged that the gang is connected to any terrorist network.

"The terror perpetrated by gangs, which all too often occurs on the streets of New York, also fits squarely within the scope of this statute," said District Attorney Robert T. Johnson.

When members were arrested, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the gang "terrorized" the community surrounding St. James Park, the neighborhood park from which the gang takes its name.

But civil libertarians and some terrorism experts say the case -- now underway in New York State Supreme Court -- is a misuse of state laws and should raise concern about what they consider is an ever-expanding definition of the term "terrorism."

Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said that prosecuting the St. James Boys was not what most Americans envisioned when state legislators passed anti-terrorism bills.

"They didn't think of gang members in inner cities, drug crimes, non-security" crimes, Jaffer said. "It's not what people had in mind."

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 36 states added terrorism-related laws to their criminal codes, using them to enhance sentences that, in some cases, will now include the death penalty, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Most of the new laws focus on heinous crimes such as murder and kidnapping.

"Probably most of the crimes could have been prosecuted before," said Blake Harrison, a lawyer with the legislatures group. "Enacting these laws makes it a little easier to effect the same goal."

But the new laws also provide prosecutors with new opportunities. Once on the books, the laws can be applied to various crimes if prosecutors believe they can make them stick. It has happened before.

Anti-racketeering laws, for example, were created to combat mobsters but are now frequently used in drug and corporate-corruption cases.

"Language is plastic," said Gregory Mark, a former prosecutor who is now a legal historian at Rutgers University. "As new situations arise and the imagination of prosecutors is stimulated, the statutes which were clearly intended for one purpose are expanded."

In Virginia, state prosecutors brought terrorism charges against the now-convicted Washington area snipers Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, in part because investigators could not pinpoint which man pulled the trigger. Virginia's Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on the constitutionality of the state's terrorism laws.

The case against the St. James Boys began in 2002 with the shooting of 10-year-old Malenny Mendez. Shortly after midnight, Malenny and family friends left a christening party. A street fight broke out between the St. James Boys and another group of men. Shots rang out; the men ran. Malenny fell to the ground, a bullet lodged in her brain. She died several hours later.

At the time, police said the alleged shooter had fled to Mexico. Prosecutors accused Morales of hiding the gun. But he was convicted only of criminal trespass and was sentenced to time served and probation.

Bronx prosecutors have relaunched the murder case as part of a broader 70-count indictment against the gang that was unsealed last May. It named 19 defendants, charging all of them with terrorism for gang-related activity.

Earlier this month, Morales's attorney, Lewis Alperin, argued in a Bronx courtroom that the definition of terrorism was too expansive. "You put the key in the door and you know what happens: Any protester who takes a position [against the government] will be prosecuted under the terrorism law."

The judge is scheduled to listen to further arguments March 9 before deciding whether to permit the terrorism charges in the case.

New York's anti-terrorism law was born as a response to the 2001 attacks and a public clamor for action. Within a week of the attacks, the state legislature and Gov. George E. Pataki (R) approved terrorism legislation that they hailed as the toughest in the country. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) characterized the bill as "overkill," even as he voted for it.

Silver predicted at the time that the law would be a purely symbolic gesture. "Will there be a prosecution under the state terrorist act?" he asked. "I don't think so."

But terrorism expert Jessica Stern said New York and other states adopted terrorism laws that contained vague and open-ended language that allows the term to easily slip from its original meaning.

"Now we are seeing the possibility that it can be used by the government to go after people we wouldn't think of as terrorists," said Stern, a lecturer at Harvard University. "It's so often an epithet for the person we want to incarcerate [or] extradite."

Outside the Bronx courtroom, Morales's parents said prosecutors overreached with the terrorism charges in a desperate attempt to win a conviction in the little girl's shooting.

The couple says that if prosecutors simply brought criminal charges against Edgar they would accept the fate, but the terrorism label horrifies them. They worry about the stigma the family might suffer if Edgar is convicted for terrorism, and the effect on their jobs and future.

"Sometimes I wonder when people see us walking down the street," said Morales's stepfather, Inocencio Hernandez. "Do they say, ' There goes the parents of Edgar' or 'the parents of a terrorist' ?"

A Message from the Streets

Here is a message I received and thought it was very thought-provoking and insightful-- I wish all young people could understand this young person's feelings:

I'M FROM LITTLE ROCK AND EVERYDAY I WAS FACED WITH GANGS AND GANG WARS IN MY NEIGHBOR HOOD, I WENT TO 17 GANG RELAITED FUNERALS IN THE LAST THREE YEARS AND I LOST MY BIG BROTHER TO A GANG SHOOTING. I'M ONLY 17 YEARS OLD AND HAVE SEEN IT ALL. I WANNA KNOW WHAT I CAN DO TO CHANGE IT. I AM NOW IN MISSISSIPPI, AND LIVING IN A GANG FREE AREA (BESIDES THE LOCAL WANNABES) HAPPY, YEAH, SAD ALWAYS. I'M SORRY FOR ALL THE GRIEF MY COMMUNITY HAS BROUGHT UPON US. I LOVE MY HOMEBOYS AND WOULD DIE FOR THEM BUT WE HAVE TO CHANGE. I AM NOT ON MY COMPUTER SO DON'T SEND ME ANY THING BACK, BUT MAYBE YOU CAN PUT MY MESSAGE OUT AND LET EVERYBODY KNOW THAT THERE IS A BETTER WAY.


SINCERELY,

A WORRIED CHILD- LIL. CILOC

First Lady vs Crips and Bloods?

Bush Takes Back Seat, Laura Touts Anti-Gang Plan
Mon Mar 7, 2005 05:25 PM ET

By Patricia Wilson

PITTSBURGH (Reuters) - In a role reversal, President Bush introduced his wife Laura on Monday and then listened as the first lady announced a White House summit to help stamp out gangs and drugs among America's youth.

"She and I share a passion," Bush said. "We're worried. We're worried about gangs. We're worried about drugs. We're worried about bad choices."

Dubbing himself "the introducer," Bush spoke for about five minutes and went to the back of the stage.

"I've listened to millions of his speeches," Laura Bush said. "Now he's going to listen to one of mine."

The president has launched a $150 million project over the next three years to combat gangs and put his wife in charge of it. The money will go to community and religious groups that mentor children, provide youth activities and work with former prisoners and drug addicts.

"Boys are having an especially tough time growing up," Mrs. Bush told students and guests at the Allegheny Community College in Pittsburgh. "They are falling behind girls in schools ... and boys on average are more likely to join gangs, commit crimes and end up in prison."

The Justice Department estimates gang membership nationwide at around 750,000. Although crime rates have been falling for more than 10 years, gang violence is increasing as a proportion of overall violent crime.

Some are skeptical that the White House initiative can have much impact and critics have ridiculed the idea of the first lady as "government gang czar."

"The prospect of Laura Bush, the soft-spoken librarian from Crawford, Texas, lecturing Crips and Bloods about the evils of gangs is a 'Saturday Night Live' skit waiting to happen," the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote in an editorial last month.

Mrs. Bush, the mother of twin daughters, said taking on gang life would be part of a broader outreach to at-risk youth and that a White House conference in the fall would involve parents, pastors, sports coaches and community leaders.

Laura Bush has begun touring the country to highlight her second-term initiative. In addition to Pittsburgh, she has visited Baltimore, Detroit and Philadelphia.



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The Kind of Youth we have In North Little Rock--

Youths’ project helps family recover from fire

North Little Rock Times 3.3.05

Marcus Howard



Every year, when Valentine’s Day rolls around, children usually spend their after-school time giving second reads to the red-and-pink cards they’ve collected from their friends and sweethearts. Afternoon candy feasts are also standard.

But this year, six-year-old Keyaira Johnson watched her family’s home at 400 Beech St. destroyed by fire after a Valentine’s Day party at the Sherman Park Our Club; her usual after-school haunt a half-block away.

The North Little Rock Mayor’s Youth Council had thrown the party for the club, and found themselves throwing another bash a week later to present a donation of household items they collected for Keyaira’s family, with the help of Butterfly Community Ministries.

Jan Scholl, director of the teen group, said that having seen the fire from a window while wrapping up the party was what made the Youth Council want to pitch in.

“We have a way of personalizing everything we witness,” she said, “and my first thought was ‘How do you live through losing everything?’”

Scholl added that house fires have also personally affected other Youth Council members, three of whom had previously lost their homes to fire.

“It was such a sad thing to see [Keyaira’s grandmother] going back into the house alone [after the fire],” she said. “It was certainly a downer to be there to have a nice party for the children, and then have this happen.”

Scholl said that she sent out an e-mail message to the members of Youth Council, informing them of the fire and asking for help with donations. And the group’s members took it from there, she said, heading up a drive to help replace the Berry family’s material losses.

“They just poured out all their hearts to those people,” she said, adding that the Youth Council’s 75 members logged more than 10,000 hours of community service last year. “Kids have the biggest hearts, but they get a bad rap because people don’t realize this. If you need something done, kids will do it and do it with heart.”

Natalie Stagg, a senior at North Little Rock High School who has been a member of the Youth Council for three years, said that when she got the message from her group’s director, she “kind of took over from there” and spearheaded the donation drive.

“I really like volunteering and organizing stuff,” she said. “By volunteering, it’s helped me realize and see we take a lot of stuff for granted. It’s just nice knowing you’ve made a difference in someone’s life.”

The Youth Council and the nonprofit Butterfly Ministries teamed up to collect furniture, food, clothing, electronics and appliances for the family. They were even able to supply Keyaira with some toys.

“[Keyaira] was excited and was loving the idea of having a desk in her room, because she is a good little student,” Scholl said. “We felt really good that we could make a difference for that child and her family.

“Everything matched and it was amazing how it all came together. All they have to do is move in, and they’re all set.”

Rose Berry, Keyaira’s grandmother, said that she and the girl were at home and watching television in different rooms when the fire erupted. Keyaira called to her from a room in the back of the house, saying that she’s seen the fire, Berry said.

Veronica Berry, Keyaira’s aunt, said that she was at work at the time.

“I was hurt,” she said recalling her initial reactions. “I felt a lot of hurt.”

The tragedy was amplified by the fact that her mother had lost her husband a few weeks earlier, Veronica Berry said.

She said they’ve been living with her older sister since the fire, and they’re still looking for a new home, but the donations the received at the “welcome home shower” will go a long way toward starting over.

“The donations helped out a lot,” she said. “I was very surprised. It just feels really good.”

She said that the help they received also touched Keyaira.

“[Keyaira] was happy, and when she saw me, she told me all about it,” she said, adding that her niece went on at length about the toys, clothes and candy that were collected for her.

Gangs Staking Out Turf on the Web- From Mercury News

By Crystal Carreon, Mercury News

Sal Rojas was working on his computer science degree when he created BrownPride.com to celebrate Latino culture. His site quickly evolved into a popular forum for urban expression, showcasing mural art, music and fashion.

But it has also become the target of ``high-tech taggers'' and ``cyberbangers.''

As authorities crack down on gang activity on the streets, self-proclaimed gangsters are going online, turning portions of Web sites -- such as BrownPride.com -- into virtual turfs where rivals exchange threats and ``throw up'' their numbers and neighborhood names under the anonymity of the Internet.

``You create something for good, but people twist it,'' said Rojas, 32, whose site's message board has been overrun by suspected Norteños and Sureños.

Law enforcement officials across the country have noticed the surge in suspected gang members using the Internet to glorify the lifestyle and, in some instances, recruit. Just as some gangsters tag buildings with spray paint, these online taggers leave their mark in cyberspace. But, given the anonymous nature of the Web, authorities admit it is nearly impossible to gauge whether a posting, blog or Instant Message comes from actual gang members or wannabes.

Los Angeles police detective Chuck Zeglin first noticed the phenomenon four years ago, and estimated then that about a third of the thousands of gang-related Web sites were operated by the Crips, Bloods, Norteños and Sureños, and members of various Asian and other gangs. He now believes that number is growing as Internet access becomes ubiquitous and increasingly mobile.

``Gangs are definitely keeping up with the technology of the times,'' said Jared Lewis, director of Know Gangs, a Wisconsin-based firm that offers training and resources on gangs to police agencies. ``This is a new generation of gangsters.''

Bowing to pressure from police, Internet providers have shut down several of the more notorious gang sites in recent years, Lewis said. So ``cyberbanging'' has moved to other sites such as BrownPride.com; vidaenelvalle.com, which bills itself as the ``Latino Voice of the San Joaquin Valley'' offering sports highlights, news and feature stories, among other content; and Northern-Ridaz.com, which features new releases from Bay Area rap artists.

But law enforcement officials acknowledge that much of the cyber-traffic remains under the radar of police, including gang detectives in the tech-savvy Bay Area.

Lt. Phan S. Ngo, of San Jose's gang investigations unit, said his officers are aware of purported gang activity online but do not regularly monitor the Internet for clues. It's not a priority, because officers have not come across any instances of gang-related violence in San Jose that stemmed from a Web site, he said.

Traditional gang investigations usually involve tapping phone lines or surveillance of certain neighborhoods. Seizing computers is seen more often in cases of Internet fraud (news - web sites) or sex-related crimes against children -- not gangs.

But Lewis believes that by not looking online officers could miss spotting clues to gang violence.

Lewis, a former Modesto police officer, said he read message boards on a rapper's Web site to help solve a gang homicide in 2001. The site piqued his interest after he spotted familiar city street names and monikers that were later linked to murder suspects.

Last May, vitriol exchanged between members of two rival gangs in an Internet chat room led to a street brawl in a Dallas suburb.

Gabe Morales, author of ``Varrio Warfare: Violence in the Latino Community,'' said his Web page, www.angelfire.com/biz4/stopvarriowar/gps.html, doesn't have a chat room or guest book because he doesn't want to be tagged by gang members. He suspects the majority of cyberbanging is done by unsupervised teenagers at home or school. Parents, he said, are often computer illiterate and are largely unaware of what their children are doing online.

``These kids are computer-savvy,'' he said. ``They may be better equipped with a keyboard than with an aerosol can. It's a freedom of speech thing, but it's not positive.''

``Clowner,'' whose e-mail address includes the number 13 -- for Sureños -- rec