A vigil in downtown Milwaukee for the dead and the wounded. “Everyone here is thinking this is a hate crime for sure,” said Manjit Singh, who goes to a different temple in the region. “People think we are Muslims
By STEVEN YACCINO, JENNIFER PRESTON and SERGE F. KOVALESKI
OAK CREEK, Wis. — The suspect in the shooting rampage that left six people dead and three wounded at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on Sunday has been identified as Wade M. Page, law enforcement officials announced on Monday.
Mr. Page, 40, a United States Army veteran who served from 1992 until 1998, was shot and killed by the police in the parking lot of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee.
Officials at the Southern Poverty Law Center said they had been tracking Mr. Page for about a decade because of his ties to the white supremacist movement and they described him as “a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band.”
They said he played guitar and sang vocals for a band started in 2005 called End Apathy.
“This guy was in the thick of the white supremacist music scene and, in fact, played with some of the best known racist bands in the country,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the center. “The music that comes from these bands is incredibly violent and it talks about murdering Jews, black people, gay people and a whole host of other enemies. It is music that could not be sold over the counter around the country.”
In an interview, Mr. Page’s stepmother, Laura Page, 67, of Denver, expressed shock at the news that the boy she had known since he was 10 years old could be behind such a crime. “I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine what made him do this,” she said.
She said that he grew up with his mother, a dog groomer, in the metropolitan Denver area until she died when he was 12 or 13. Then he went to live with an aunt and a grandmother in Colorado.
After high school, he enlisted in the Army. “I think that he felt that he was misdirected and that the service helped him find a direction in life,” she said, saying that after he joined the Army he did not keep in regular contact.
Chief John Edwards of the Oak Creek police did not give a motive for the shooting, which is being treated as an act of “domestic terrorism.”
He also said that officials were convinced there was only one gunman. Law enforcement officials said earlier on Monday they were looking to speak with a “person of interest” who was at the scene on Sunday. But by late Monday afternoon, they ruled him out as having any connection with the shooting.
Mr. Edwards, speaking at a news conference, also identified the victims, five men and one woman, who ranged in age from 39 to 84. Three others were wounded during the shooting and were in critical condition at a local hospital, including a police officer.
The victims were identified as Sita Singh, 41; Ranjit Singh, 49; Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65; Prakash Singh, 39; Paramjit Kaur, 41; and Suveg Singh, 84.
Among the victims, Mr. Kaleka was the president of the temple, and witnesses told family members that he died while tackling the gunman.
The gunman, carrying a 9 millimeter semiautomatic handgun, entered the temple about 10:15 a.m. Sunday, police officials said, and began firing at priests gathered in the lobby. He then stalked through the temple as congregants, including women preparing a meal for services, ran for shelter and barricaded themselves in bathrooms and prayer halls. They made desperate phone calls and sent anguished texts pleading for help as confusion and fear took hold.
Jatinder Mangat, 40, who was on his way to the temple when he heard reports about the shooting, said he had tried to call his uncle, the temple’s president, but reached the head priest, Gurmail Singh, instead. “He was crying. Everyone was screaming,” Mr. Mangat said. “He said that my uncle was shot and was lying on the floor and asked why you guys are not sending an ambulance and police.”
Mr. Singh, he said, had locked himself in a bathroom with four other people, including two children.
Surjit Singh Toor, 60, said his sister-in-law, Parminder Kaur Toor, 61, was one of the women in the pantry. “She keeps crying and crying. She had to walk over the dead bodies. These were her friends.”
Chief Edwards described the first minutes after the police responded to the 911 calls, which started at 10:25 a.m. He said the first police officer on the scene was tending to a wounded person in the parking lot when the suspect stood over him and fired eight or nine shots at close range, striking him in the neck.
The officer, Lt. Brian Murphy, 51, was in critical condition after surgery, Chief Edwards said. He said that Lieutenant Murphy was a 21-year veteran of the department and that he waved on officers trying to assist him in the parking lot, telling them to go first into the temple to check on victims there.
Chief Edwards said that when the other officers arrived on the scene, they initially did not know that one of their officers had been wounded. They spotted the suspect in the parking lot and ordered him to drop his weapon.
The suspect responded by firing at patrol cars, shattering the windshield of one. Mr. Edwards said the officers “returned fire, putting the individual down.”
The mayor of Oak Creek, Steve Scaffidi, said that Sunday was a “tragic day for our city.”
“My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims,” Mr. Scaffidi said. He added that Oak Creek was an open, diverse community. “The Sikh community is what helps make our city strong,” he said.
The shootings have reverberated from this small community to Washington and beyond, including India, where the Sikh religion was founded and many of the congregants have family ties.
Mr. Page was living in a rented apartment in Cudahy, about five miles from the temple here. According to Wells Fargo officials, the bank completed a foreclosure in January on a home he had owned in Fayetteville, N.C. Bank officials said the house was vacant when foreclosure proceedings began in August 2011.
In Cudahy, neighbors expressed surprise when they learned that Mr. Page was the suspect.
Peter Hoyt, 53, said that he spoke with Mr. Page from time to time while taking his regular walks through the neighborhood and that he had never talked about weapons or guns.
“I was stunned,” Mr. Hoyt said when he heard the news. “I didn’t put two and two together. I didn’t know what to think.”
Mr. Hoyt described Mr. Wade as talkative.
“Basically he was a pretty normal guy,” said Mr. Hoyt, who is retired and lives about a block away. “We talked about football, baseball, basketball. He was in a band.”
Mr. Hoyt said that Mr. Wade had also discussed a recent breakup with his girlfriend in June. “He didn’t seem angry,” Mr. Hoyt said about the breakup. “He seemed more emotionally upset. He wasn’t mad, he was hurt.”
He also described their block as diverse.
“In this neighborhood, you have Arabs, you have Indians, you have black, you have white,” Mr. Hoyt said. “If he was going to do something, you have a whole neighborhood to pick on.”
President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, released statements on Sunday expressing sorrow.
“Michelle and I were deeply saddened to learn of the shooting that tragically took so many lives in Wisconsin,” the president said. “At this difficult time, the people of Oak Creek must know that the American people have them in our thoughts and prayers, and our hearts go out to the families and friends of those who were killed and wounded.”
Mr. Romney called the shootings “a senseless act of violence and a tragedy” that he said should never befall any house of worship.
“Our hearts are with the victims, their families and the entire Oak Creek Sikh community,” Mr. Romney said. “We join Americans everywhere in mourning those who lost their lives and in prayer for healing in the difficult days ahead.”
Many members of the close-knit Sikh community here said the attack had shattered their sense of security.
“Everyone here is thinking this is a hate crime for sure,” said Manjit Singh, who goes to a different temple in the region. “People think we are Muslims.”
Though violence against Sikhs in Wisconsin was unheard of before the shooting, many in this community said they had sensed a rise in antipathy since the attacks on Sept. 11 and suspected it was because people mistake them for Muslims. Followers of Sikhism, or Gurmat, a monotheistic faith founded in the 15th century in South Asia, typically do not cut their hair, and men often wear colorful turbans and refrain from cutting their beards.
“Most people are so ignorant they don’t know the difference between religions,” said Ravi Chawla, 65, a businesswoman who moved to the region from Pakistan in the 1970s. “Just because they see the turban they think you’re Taliban.”
There are around 314,000 Sikhs in the United States, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. The temple in Oak Creek, one of two large congregations in the Milwaukee area, was founded in 1997 and has about 400 worshipers.
Threats against Sikh-Americans have become acute enough that in April, Representative Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York and co-chairman of the Congressional Caucus on Indians and Indian-Americans, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. urging the F.B.I. to collect data on hate crimes committed against them. In the previous year alone, he said in the letter, two Sikh men in Sacramento were slain, a Sikh temple in Michigan was vandalized, and a Sikh man was beaten in New York.
“The more information our law enforcement agencies have on violence against Sikh-Americans, the more they can do to help prevent these crimes and bring those who commit them to justice,” Mr. Crowley said in a statement at the time.
By Sunday evening, the F.B.I. had cordoned off a street in Cudahy, a town about five miles from the temple, where it was executing a search warrant related to the shooting, Ms. Carlson said at a news conference. “It’s going to be a long night,” she said, declining to give further details. A law enforcement official said some residents on the street had been ordered to leave their homes.
Witnesses described a scene of chaos and carnage.
Four bodies were found inside the temple and three outside, including that of the gunman, the police said.
Three men with gunshot wounds were admitted to Froedtert Hospital, the Milwaukee region’s main trauma center, said Nalissa Wienke, a spokeswoman for the hospital. One victim had been shot in the head and extremities and another in the abdomen. The third was described as having neck wounds.
There were initially conflicting reports about whether there was more than one gunman and whether hostages had been taken inside the temple. Local news agencies, citing text messages from people inside, reported that two or more gunmen could have been involved, but the authorities said later that a single gunman was believed responsible.
“The best information is that there was only one gunman,” Chief Edwards said at a news conference.
The shooting came about two weeks after a gunman killed 12 people and wounded nearly 60 in an attack at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.
In response to the shooting on Sunday, the police in New York said security was being increased at Sikh temples in the city. “There is no known threat against Sikh temples in New York City; however, the coverage is being put in place out of an abundance of caution,” the New York police said in a statement.
Outside the temple here, friends and relatives were struggling to understand what had happened. Many in the community had contacted friends and family who were in the temple when the violence broke out.
Harpreet Singh, a nephew of the temple president, said his aunt, the president’s wife, was in the kitchen with other women preparing food for services when they heard gunshots.
“She said they heard a bang, bang, bang,” Mr. Singh, 36, said in a telephone interview from the basement of a bowling alley near across the street from the temple, where the police and F.B.I. agents were interviewing survivors.
Mr. Singh, recounting the shooting as told to him by his aunt Satpal Kaleka, said the women had hidden in a nearby pantry. The women escaped, witnessing the gunman’s carnage along the way, he said.
Mr. Singh was on his way to services with his wife, his two children and his parents when the police stopped them outside the parking lot. “There were police cars running into the complex,” he said. “A couple of weeks ago, some kid had set off a fire alarm, so we thought something like that had happened.”
Survivors and relatives huddled in grief and confusion inside the bowling alley Sunday afternoon, trying to sort out facts as law enforcement officials interviewed them.
People begin gathering at the temple as early as 6:30 a.m. on Sundays, but most arrive around 10:30 or 11 for services, Mr. Singh said. He believed about 30 to 35 people were inside when the shooting began, but had the gunman arrived just 15 minutes later, Mr. Singh said, 100 to 150 people would have been inside. By 1:30 p.m., there would have been more than 300.
“This is a very peaceful neighborhood,” he said. “It’s one of the safest areas of Milwaukee.” He said many of the temple’s members lived within a mile of the complex.
Mr. Singh said his family would have been in the temple earlier, as his children attend Punjabi language classes there in the mornings, but he had trouble getting his 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son out of bed.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment