http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64315-2005Mar24.html

Minnesota Killer Chafed at Life On Reservation
Teen Faced Cultural Obstacles And Troubled Family History

By Blaine Harden and Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 25, 2005; Page A01

RED LAKE, Minn., March 24 -- In the months before he killed his
grandfather, his classmates and himself, Jeff Weise painted an utterly
nihilistic -- and often eloquent -- word portrait of life here on the Red
Lake Indian Reservation.

He described the reservation in Internet postings as a place where people
"choose alcohol over friendship," where women neglect "their own flesh and
blood" for relationships with men, where he could not escape "the grave I'm
continually digging for myself."

In his dark and self-pitying depictions of life on the reservation, Weise
appears to have drawn from his troubled personal history: When he was 8,
his father committed suicide on the reservation after a standoff with
police. About four months later, his mother suffered severe brain damage in
an alcohol-related car accident.

Before that accident, while Weise was living with her in the suburbs of
Minneapolis, his alcoholic mother often locked him out of her house and her
boyfriend locked him in a closet and made him kneel for hours in a corner,
said his grandmother, Shelda Lussier, 54, in whose home on the reservation
the boy had lived since age 9.

In an interview outside her home, Lussier said that Weise, a hulking boy
who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and was almost always dressed in black,
tried to hurt himself 14 months ago by jabbing his arms with a pen.

With his self-professed loathing of reservation life and burdened by the
psychopathologies of his parents, Weise on Monday joined the ranks of
America's schoolhouse mass murderers. The 16-year-old killed nine people --
his grandfather, his grandfather's female companion, a school guard, a
teacher and five schoolmates -- before killing himself.

Still, Weise was not all wrong in his assessment of Red Lake. Like many
Indian reservations, especially the poor and isolated ones in and around
the Great Plains, this can be a dangerous, soul-crushing place to grow up.

Compared with the tidy Denver suburb where two teenage boys went on a
well-armed rampage at Columbine High School, killing 13 people and then
themselves in 1999, Red Lake exists in a distant and exponentially more
dismal dimension of the American experience.

"I'm living every mans nightmare," Weise wrote online in January. "This
place never changes, it never will."

If that sounds like teenage overreaching, Sister Sharon Sheridan, 73,
principal at St. Mary's Mission School on the reservation, said this of the
shootings: "You can't condone what happened here, but you sure can
understand it."

Warning Signs

In Washington this week, the director of behavioral health for the Indian
Health Service, which provides health care here and for hundreds of other
reservations, said the complex behavioral problems that have scarred
several generations of Weise's family are all too common.

"This is a tragedy that I have seen the potential for in so many other
places in Indian country," said Jon Perez, who is also a psychologist for
adolescents. "I am worried about making sure that this doesn't have to
happen again."

As the months, weeks and days ticked by before Monday's shooting, Weise was
sending clear signals -- what Joe Conner, a clinical psychologist and
expert on mental health care for Native Americans, described as "huge red
flags and baggage everywhere" -- of serious adolescent mental illness.

Twice in the past school year, he stopped attending Red Lake High School --
and received home tutoring -- because he became severely depressed and was
unable to handle teasing from his classmates, his grandmother said. She
said the last time he had been at school -- before he stormed in with guns
blazing on Monday -- was about five weeks ago.

The last time he saw a mental health professional at the Red Lake hospital
was on Feb. 21, she said. She remembers the date because it was the same
day he refilled his prescription for 60 milligrams a day of Prozac, which
he had been taking since last summer.

Online, he seemed to be reaching out in strange directions, especially for
a Native American kid. He wrote sympathetically about Hitler and grumbled
about racial interbreeding among tribal members.

But there appears to have been no one in the school or on the reservation
who saw the red flags.

Ethnic Hardships

A bleak mountain of federal research suggests the extraordinary risks and
hardships of growing up Indian, compared with growing up as a member of any
other ethnic group in the United States.

The annual average violent crime rate among Indians is twice as high as
that of blacks and 2 1/2 times as high as that for whites, according to a
survey last year by the Justice Department.

Indian youths commit suicide at twice the rate of other young people,
according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The overall death rate of
Indians younger than 25 is three times that of the total population in that
age group.

Compared with other groups, the commission found, Indians of all ages are
670 percent more likely to die from alcoholism, 650 percent more likely to
die from tuberculosis, 318 percent more likely to die from diabetes and 204
percent more likely to suffer accidental death.

And despite considerable income gains in the past 15 years, some of it
because of Indian gambling operations, Native Americans remain the poorest
ethnic group in the country, with about half the average income of other
Americans.

When it comes to young Indians, the statistical picture here on the Red
Lake reservation, home to about 5,000 tribal members, is even bleaker than
the national average. A third of teenagers on this reservation are not in
school, not working and not looking for work (compared with 20 percent on
all reservations), according to census figures.

A survey last year by the Minnesota departments of health and education
found that young people here are far more likely to think about suicide, be
depressed, worry about drugs and be violent with one another than children
across the state. At St. Mary's Mission School, an elementary school
student recently painted a poster for her father: "Dad, don't do cocaine
any more."

The state survey of ninth-graders found that at Red Lake High, 43 percent
of boys and 82 percent of girls had thoughts about suicide, with 20 percent
of boys and 48 percent of girls saying that they tried it at least once.

Three months ago, Weise wrote online about suicide: "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?"

The Region's History

Compared with other reservations in Minnesota and across the country, Red
Lake appears to have had an especially toxic history of violence, drug
problems and gang activity. The curriculum now includes courses in
anti-gang training, anti-bullying training, drug and alcohol abuse
prevention, and instruction in fetal alcohol syndrome.

School Superintendent Stuart Desjarlait said a gang shooting at the high
school in 1996 prompted federal funding for metal detectors, security
cameras and security guards. The security system, however, proved all but
useless when Weise showed up at the high school on Monday, driving a police
cruiser he had stolen from his slain grandfather, wearing a bulletproof
vest and armed with three weapons. Police responded quickly, but it took
only about 10 minutes for Weise to kill seven people and himself.

Across the reservation in the past 30 years, there have been periodic
outbreaks of violence that caused fatalities. During a riot over tribal
leadership in 1979, two teenagers were killed and several buildings were
burned as scores of tribe members, many drunk and carrying rifles, took
over the tribal police station.

The tribe's geographic isolation here in the northwest corner of Minnesota
has been exacerbated by a long tradition of self-enforced isolation. For
more than a century, the tribe has resisted federal programs that would
open up the reservation to private land ownership. "We have just not ever
been too crazy about white people coming around the reservation," said Lee
Cook, a former member of the tribal council.

Portrait of a Boy

Weise was born in Minneapolis but spent most of his first three years with
his father on the reservation, his grandmother said. His parents never
married, she said, and his mother took the boy back to Minneapolis when he
was 3. This shuffling from reservation to city is common among Native
Americans, as two-thirds of them now live in and around cities.

The boy was often unhappy with his mother. According to Gayle Downwind, a
teacher on the reservation who knew Weise and whose son, Sky Grant, was one
of his best friends, he was often tormented by his mother's problems with
alcohol.

"When he was younger, he said he would run out of the house because there
would be yelling and alcohol," she said. "He wasn't sure where he would be
going. He ended up at a police station."

He did not like being on the reservation, said his friend Grant, who had
Weise at his home for sleepovers nearly once a week for seven years. He
refused to participate in powwows and avoided all traditional Indian
activities, Grant said.

At school, he was an indifferent student. Peers teased him about his black
outfits and his ungainly bulk (well over 200 pounds), and he often became
agitated in class. He failed eighth grade and was required to take a
nonacademic class, making wigwams, growing wild rice and doing other
traditional activities. His friend's mother, Downwind, was his teacher. "He
wasn't doing any work," she said. "He didn't function academically. He just
sat there and drew pictures."

Grant called all of Weise's drawings "dark," saying, "He drew pictures of
war, people getting shot."

Seventeen days before the shooting, Weise brought a videotape of the movie
"Elephant," based on the killings at Columbine High, to Grant's house and
insisted that they fast-forward to the shooting scenes. "He liked the
gore," Grant said.

When the gory part was over, Grant said, Weise got up and went to his
grandmother's house. He said he was going home to get his medication and
gave the impression that he would be right back. He never came back, and
that was the last time Grant saw him.

Whatever the trigger might have been for Weise to turn fantasy in action,
it was not apparent to the people he lived with -- his grandmother, an aunt
and a 15-year-old cousin.

At noon on the day of the shootings, his grandmother returned home for
lunch and found Weise sitting on the couch in the living room, eating a
turkey sandwich and drawing. When she came home again at 3 that afternoon,
he was gone. He did not leave a note.

Staff writers Ceci Connolly in Minneapolis and Sylvia Moreno in Red Lake
and special correspondent Dalton Walker in Red Lake contributed to this
report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company