Jeff Weise: A mystery in a life full of hardship

By Chuck Haga/Howie Padilla/Richard Meryhew

Star Tribune

      RED LAKE, MINN. -- Even as a member of a loose confederacy of loners, Jeff Weise seemed to be an afterthought.

      "He was a goth," said Allan Mosay, 14, who saw Weise occasionally on the Red Lake Reservation but didn't really know the 16-year-old, who affected the black fashion, musical tastes and often dark moods of the outsider subculture.

      "He had no friends," Mosay said. "He didn't communicate."

      On a sparsely populated reservation where everybody knows everybody, few seemed to know Weise and fewer still claimed to know him well.

      "I knew Jeff when he was 4 or 5 years old," said Delan Steven Omen, 42, who said he was the best man at the wedding of Weise's parents. "His family used to live in the neighborhood where I lived. But I haven't really seen him since then."

      Sharon Garrigan, 62, a Head Start teacher on the reservation for 39 years, smiles at adults on the reservation and remembers when they were little. "But I can't remember him," she said of Weise.

       "He was having a little problem, I heard," said Alicia Meadow, a Red Lake High School student who may have avoided being shot Monday by skipping her last-period class. She heard the gunfire grow close as she and other students huddled in a classroom that Weise apparently passed.

       "He seemed like a pretty good guy," she said. "Whenever I talked with him, he seemed all friendly. I never thought that anything like that would come from him."

       FBI officials said Tuesday that they had no information about Weise's motive, but "the nature of the activities would indicate there was some planning," said Michael Tabman, special agent in charge.

Talk of death

       In the hours after the shootings, witnesses told of students pleading with Weise by name -- "No, Jeff, no!"

       Sondra Hegstrom, who said she had had classes with Weise, said he was quiet and "never said anything." He was teased -- "terrorized," she said -- by people who thought he was weird.

       He often wore "a big old black trench coat," she said, and drew pictures of skeletons. "He talked about death all the time."

       A couple of his friends had said he was suicidal, she said. They quoted him as saying once, "That would be cool if I shot up the school."

       The friends dismissed it as talk, Hegstrom said.

       But Willy May, 18, who knew Weise from school, said people shouldn't have been surprised.

       "He fits the profile of a Columbine shooter, man," he said.

       May said Weise always wore combat boots "with red shoelaces," similar to those of the shooters at Columbine High School.

       He said that Weise "always had stacks of drawings, disturbed drawings." Some, he said, would show people with bullets going through their skulls.

       May also said that "a while back," Weise "got blamed" for phoning in bomb threats at the school. "I'm not sure if it was him or not, but he got blamed," May said.

       Joey Johnson, 18, who also knew Weise from school, saw a different side to the teen.

       "He's a pretty bright kid, man," Johnson said. "I thought he was going to make it. He was smart."

       Recently, school officials relegated Weise to a home tutoring program. He was known to post messages on a Nazi website.

       Using the screen name Native Nazi, Weise wrote: "As a result of cultural dominance and interracial mixing there are barely any full blooded Natives left. ... It's hard though, being a Native American National Socialist; people are so misinformed, ignorant, and closed-minded it makes your life a living hell."

       Posting under the name "Blades11," Weise appeared to be a regular contributor to fiction websites. On one, Weise wrote, "I'm a fan of zombie films, have been for years, as well as fan of horror movies in general," he wrote. "I like to write horror stories, read about Nazi Germany and history, and someday plan on moving out of the [United States]."

       Family member Lorene Gurneau said that despite those issues, there were no harbingers of Monday's horror. "I've talked to other relatives, and everyone is just in shock," she said.

Family life

       As she spoke about Weise, she remembered a young boy raised in Minneapolis who played alone. When Gurneau and her children -- who were about six years older than Weise -- would visit the boy and his mother, Joanne, he would close himself in his room.

       It's similar to the teen she saw daily as of late, she said.

       "He would always wear that long dark coat and those baggy pants," she said. "I couldn't even tell you what shoes he ever wore because of those clothes."

       Gurneau attributes some of Weise's troubles to his beleaguered life. His father, Daryl Lussier Jr., known to relatives as "Baby Dash," committed suicide in July 1997 following a police standoff that lasted for more than a day, Gurneau said. Not even Lussier's father, Red Lake officer Daryl Lussier, could negotiate a peaceful ending. The senior Lussier was one of Weise's first victims Monday.

       Years later, Joanne Weise suffered brain damage in a car accident after she and a friend had been drinking, Gurneau said.

       At 6 feet and 250 pounds, Jeff Weise also was the target of constant razzing. "Plus he was held back a couple of grades," Gurneau said.

       Tribal police and the FBI haven't said that Weise was high on their radar prior to Monday.

       Though school officials refused to comment on Weise's student status, he apparently left school last year for unspecified medical reasons. Since his mother's accident, he had lived with his paternal grandmother.

       "This was a young man with a tragic history," said Audrey Thayer, who works on the reservation as part of the Greater Minnesota Racial Justice Project. "There is a lot of that kind of loss and devastation [at Red Lake]."

Staff writer Bob von Sternberg contributed to this report.