Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

[MUSIC PLAYING] CATHY WURZER: This is What happened at Red Lake, a Minnesota Public Radio Special Report from American Public Media. I'm Cathy Wurzer.

JODY MAY: My son was coming out of his class. And one of his friends walked in front of him and actually got the shot that we thought was meant for my son.

MICHAEL DAHL: I heard gunshots, screaming.

SPEAKER: Mr. Weise proceeded down the hall of the school. And down the hall, he saw a teacher and some students. He fired some shots in their direction. Understandably, they fled and ran into a classroom. Mr. Weise continued to pursue them into the classroom.

SPEAKER: I've been up here many, many times. I've never seen it as quiet. There isn't a person in Red Lake who hasn't lost at least a cousin.

SPEAKER: It is devastating for the reservation and thousands of people off the reservation. People have been calling and people have been calling from everywhere.

SPEAKER: This school had a perimeter fencing, had surveillance cameras, had metal detectors, had security guards. You just had a very disturbed individual who was intent on wreaking havoc. It's very difficult to stop somebody like that.

SPEAKER: I know there was some discussion of media portraying that the kids are picking on this young guy. I mean, high school you always have jabs at each other. You look at more further back and what the history of this young man was, that there was devastation and loss.

TAMMY LUSSIER: He never showed us a violent side of him. That's why it's so hard for us to understand this.

CODY THUNDER: He didn't really have any buddies. That's why I went to talk to him because he seemed like a loner. And I just felt like it would be good to go talk to him.

ASHLEY MORRISON: He was a Goth. He wore black a lot.

CODY THUNDER: He talked about nothing but guns and shooting people.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: I personally can say the whole reservation and our families are going to ask why. And to me, that's going to be the hardest because we're never going to know.

SPEAKER: My grandpa's were my mentors. They told me that sometimes, my grandson, times are going to be very hard where you're not going to understand. And this is one of these days that I cannot understand.

SPEAKER: A place like Red Lake has the best and the worst that Indian country has to offer. And we need to take the best parts and focus on those as Native people.

CATHY WURZER: Red Lake Minnesota doesn't usually make national headlines. That changed on March 21. A 16-year-old boy shot his way into the high school in Red Lake. He eventually turned a gun on himself. But first, he killed nine other people. It was the worst mass shooting at a school in the United States since the Columbine massacre in 1999.

The high school is on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, home of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe. The reservation is in the Northwest corner of Minnesota and it's covered with lakes and pine trees. 5,000 people live there, spread over an area about the size of the state of Rhode Island. The isolation has helped the people of Red Lake preserve their culture. Some of the world's last native speakers of Ojibwe live there. But the isolation also contributes to the deep poverty of many families on the reservation. About 40% of them live below the poverty line.

During the next hour, we'll explain as much as is known about what happened at Red Lake. We'll tell you about Jeff Weise, the boy who killed 10 people. We'll talk about what the future holds for the people of Red Lake. And we'll talk about whether schools can do more to prevent murders in their hallways. Chris Julin has a report.

CHRIS JULIN: The story starts down the road from Red Lake High School at the House of Jeff Weise's grandfather. Here's what reporters from dozens of newspapers and television and radio stations have pieced together from FBI reports and interviews with eyewitnesses.

Jeff Weise went into his grandfather's house and shot him. He also shot the woman who his grandfather was with. His grandfather was a Red Lake police officer. Jeff Weise took his grandfather's pistol and shotgun and put on his bulletproof vest. He climbed into his grandfather's police car and drove to the high school.

The high school had a metal detector at the front door. Two unarmed security guards watched over the entrance too. The guards saw Weise get out of the police car in a black trench coat. They saw him fire the shotgun into the air and start toward the front door of the school.

One of the guards radioed in, a boy with guns was coming toward the school. The guards started off down the Hall away from the doors. The other guard was Derrick Brun. He got up from his desk and met Jeff Weise at the door. Weise shot and killed him.

The first guard sprinted down the hall, yelling at students to run. Teachers locked their classroom doors. Weise shot at the students running down the hall. He chased a teacher and some students into a classroom and started shooting. That's where most of the killing happened. Weise shot the teacher, Neva Rodgers, and he shot four students. Then he went back into the hallway.

MICHAEL DAHL: I heard gunshots, screaming.

CHRIS JULIN: Michael Dahl volunteers at the school. He teaches Ojibwe traditions. He was in the school's culture room with 15 students and 2 other adults.

MICHAEL DAHL: We took care of the kids in that classroom. And I want it to be known that I firmly believe that boy looked in our classroom and it looked as if he couldn't even see us. What I'm pointing out is the room we were in had the school's eagle staff, the school's drum, and the school's pipe was in that room.

And I believe with all of my heart that because I was using tobacco and talking with those kids and I was talking to them about our way and about these things, that, that staff, that drum, and those pipes didn't let that boy see us. I believe that with all of my heart that those things is what saved those kids in my classroom. None of this is even about me. And my fear and my tears aren't about me. It's about those kids, my kids. Every last one of them, my kids.

I saw fear. I saw panic. I saw, I want my mommy. I want my daddy. I saw those kids pull together that whether or not those kids got along, those kids all sat together and they held each other. That's what I saw. I saw those kids react and look out for each other.

ASHLEY MORRISON: I was in that class and we heard these two gunshots. But we didn't know if it was gunshots. We just thought it was just like banging.

CHRIS JULIN: Ashley Morrison is a tenth grader at Red Lake High school. She was in the culture room with Michael Dahl when Jeff Weise came past.

ASHLEY MORRISON: Then we could just see them walk by our classroom. And we were like, that's Jeff Weise. That's who that is. And we ran behind the desk and I said get behind the desk. He has a gun. And we just could hear numerous shots and people-- like kids screaming.

And I could hear my friends screaming. And she was just screaming and he like just-- he shot her and there was no more screaming. And we just knew she died. And there was so many gunshots. We didn't know who he shot. We didn't know why he did it. We were just scared.

And I called my mom on a cell phone and I told her that this guy was shooting up our school and he was trying to get in our classroom at the time. And after he shot the students, he came back to our classroom. And he was just really forcefully trying to get in our classroom. He was trying to open a door. And he was banging on the door, and he started shooting. And I just didn't know what to think if I was going to be shot.

CHRIS JULIN: Students and teachers say Weise tried to get into several rooms. He shot at some doors. Cody Thunder was in biology class sitting in the front row closest to the door. He's 15 years old. He says he heard noises in the hall and he thought they were gunshots. He glanced toward the door of the classroom and he saw Jeff Weise in the hall looking into the classroom through a window next to the door.

Cody Thunder saw something in Jeff Weise's hand, but he thought it might be a paintball gun. At first, he thought Weise was messing around. Weise said nothing, and he took aim with the gun. Cody Thunder says Weise wasn't smiling. He says Weise had a mean face.

CODY THUNDER: I was like, what is he doing? And then he ended up shooting. I just-- the glass shattered. And I don't know. I was just in shock. And then he shooters. He shot a couple of times, I got up and ran. I didn't know I was hit until I looked. I didn't feel anything.

CHRIS JULIN: Cody Thunder had a bullet in his right hip. No one else in his classroom was hit. He says the biology teacher yelled for the kids to go to her office. Cody Thunder ran to the office with the other students and Jeff Weise kept moving down the hall.

Minutes after the shooting started, four police officers came through the front door at the school. Weise shot at them and one of the officers shot back. Weise ran back to the classroom where he'd shot Neva Rodgers and four students, and that's where he shot himself. The entire episode inside the school lasted about 10 minutes.

Word of the shooting spread quickly among families on the reservation. Some kids like Ashley Morrison called home on their cell phones while Jeff Weise was still stalking the halls. Parents and other relatives tried to call the school. Jody May was driving her bus route on the Red Lake Reservation when she heard someone had been shot at the high school. Her son is a ninth grader at the school.

JODY MAY: All the thoughts are going through my head. And I got on my cell phone and try to call him, my son. I tried to send him text messages and he wouldn't answer. He usually answers my calls or texts me back. And when I didn't hear from him, I started panicking.

My son from home calls me and tells me he was shot. And I immediately pulled my bus over because I couldn't drive anymore. I just lost it. I don't remember anything after that. But that day was like hell.

CHRIS JULIN: Jody May told her story to reporters at a hospital in Fargo. Her son, Jeff, was shot in the head in the classroom with Neva Rodgers. Now his jaw is wired shut and he's paralyzed on his right side. He communicates by writing on a notepad.

JODY MAY: He's writing us little messages and telling us bits and pieces of what happened and how he's hurting and asking him about all his friends. And he said, did he kill my favorite teacher? And I had to tell him everything because I didn't want to hold it back from him and let him hear later, let him think that I lied to him. I just had to tell him all.

SHANE MAY: Exciting to him to hear about his teacher.

CHRIS JULIN: Jody May's older son, Shane, was with her at the hospital. Shane May says his brother decided to stand up to Jeff Weise.

SHANE MAY: He said he had attempted to stop this kid. He wanted to get up and help. He had friends in there. He wanted to help all of them. He wanted to help them.

JODY MAY: The way I understood it was he tried to prevent a couple of females from getting shot. And he tried to wrestle around there a little bit with the guy. But there's not a whole lot you could do against a gun. But he said he tried. He said he was a hero.

CHRIS JULIN: Jeff May told his family that he stabbed at Weise with a pencil and struggled with him. Weise's gun went off. That bullet missed Jeff May. The second one hit him in the face.

Jeff May plays football and basketball. His family says he was looking forward to being a lineman on the Red Lake High School football team next year when he'll be a sophomore. He's a big boy, 6 feet 4 inches and about 300 pounds. His mom says he's in a lot of pain but he has an amazingly positive attitude. He tries to cheer up his family with his notes.

JODY MAY: He's doing good. It's just that he can't move his left side. And I don't know if he's going to come out of that or if he is paralyzed for the rest of his life. I had a lot of things going on in my mind about the shooter. But that was when I first happened.

I can't really say for anybody else, but it happened. We can't take it back. If he was a loner, as to my knowledge, he would-- my boys were his friend. I don't know. I don't have no grudge against nobody. I just want my son to get better.

CHRIS JULIN: Some of the wounded students are starting to come home from the hospital. Jeff May will be in the hospital for many more weeks.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CATHY WURZER: You're listening to What happened at Red Lake, a Minnesota Public Radio Special Report from American Public Media. I'm Cathy Wurzer. The hardest questions to answer are, who was Jeff Weise, and why did he do what he did?

DAVID WALSH: If you look at the things that he wrote, if you look at the blogs that he wrote, it's clear he was practically predicting what he was going to do. So there were all kinds of warning signs.

TAMMY LUSSIER: He never acted out. Never--

SHAUNA LUSSIER: Got in a fistfight.

TAMMY LUSSIER: --got in a fistfight with anybody. There's nothing that would lead us to understand why he would do this.

CATHY WURZER: Coming up, we'll hear contrasting views of the kind of kid Jeff Weise was.

SPEAKER: And just a listening note, we are going to rebroadcast this program tomorrow morning at 10:00 here on Minnesota Public Radio. If you missed the beginning or if you'd like to tell someone to hear it, you can hear it again at 10:00 tomorrow morning. Also, if you're looking for any of our midday programs and much more information about this story, go to our website at minnesotapublicradio.org. You can follow the links to midday and find all of our midday programs. minnesotapublicradio.org

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CATHY WURZER: You're listening to What happened at Red Lake, a Minnesota Public Radio Special Report from American Public Media. I'm Cathy Wurzer. After Monday's shooting on the Red Lake Indian reservation, everyone wondered why. What would make a 16-year-old boy kill his family, his classmates, and two staff members at his school. But Jeff Weise's life was so private and isolated that the shooting, only a few details have emerged about him. Chris Julin continues our Special Report.

CHRIS JULIN: The Red Lake Reservation is like a small town. Only more so, everyone knows everyone else and everyone's related to someone else. So it's telling that when the media began asking about Jeff Weise, it seemed like nobody really knew him. Nobody talked with him much. Nobody hung out with him. Ashley Morrison's 15, a year younger than Jeff Weise. She says she and her friends thought he was weird.

ASHLEY MORRISON: Every time I see him in school, he wore this big trench coat. It was like he was a scary-- he didn't say much and people picked on him, but he didn't say anything.

CHRIS JULIN: Some students say they were afraid of Weise, but a few other students say he was friendly. Everyone says he was quiet. That's how Wanda Baxter remembers him. She teaches traditional culture at Red Lake. Jeff Weise was in her class two years ago. She says he never gave her trouble in class.

WANDA BAXTER: Yeah, he was a good listener when we talked to him about culture and things that we say in our way. No, he was just like any ordinary student from what I see.

CHRIS JULIN: Some kids say Jeff Weise got teased at school, but other kids say they tried to talk with him. In fact, one of the boys we shot says he tried to be friendly to him. Cody Thunder felt sorry for Weise.

CODY THUNDER: He didn't really have any buddies that's why I went to talk to him because he seemed like a loner. And I just felt like it would be good to go talk to him.

SPEAKER: And what was he like in your class when you got there?

CODY THUNDER: I don't know. He looked like a cool guy. And then I went talk to him a few times and he talked about nothing but guns and shooting people.

CHRIS JULIN: Cody Thunder says Weise came to school every day with a different hairstyle. Sometimes flat, sometimes spiky, even twisted his hair into a pair of devil horns. But Jeff Weise hadn't been seen at Red Lake High School for some time. He was in a program that allowed students to do schoolwork from home. His grandmother was his legal guardian, according to his family. He'd been living with two of his aunts for several years.

Weise's father committed suicide in 1997 after a standoff with Red Lake tribal police. His mother was in a car accident in 1999 and she's been in a nursing home ever since. His relatives say Jeff Weise took his father's death hard. Another one of Weise's aunts is Kim DesJarlait. She lives in Minneapolis. And she saw her nephew more often when he lived in Minneapolis too back when he was little. Kim DesJarlait spoke with NBC's Today Show.

KIM DESJARLAIT: Eight years ago, his dad committed suicide. At the time of his dad-- or his mom's car accident, his cousin was also killed at that accident which left his mom paralyzed and with brain damage. You're dealing with three deaths within eight years. And I think for a kid at-- starting at 10 years old, that's a lot to take.

CHRIS JULIN: DesJarlait says the Jeff she knew was a good kid.

KIM DESJARLAIT: Jeff, when he lived here in Minneapolis was never in trouble. He was a good kid. The Jeff that I know was into drawing, into video games, into watching movies. He played a lot with his sister and his nephew. He just was not a bad kid.

CHRIS JULIN: But Jeff Weise had another life. His classmates and other people on the reservation say they never knew about his grim postings on the internet and the friends he found online. On the web, Weise had buddies to talk with about his admiration for Adolf Hitler. Through the internet, he could tell people he was miserable and he wanted to cut his wrists. He also wrote gory short stories and posted them online. And he produced an animated video that splashed with images of blood and death.

The FBI says it will take some time to verify whether Jeff Weise really wrote all the internet postings that people are attributing to him. But several of the websites include personal information, his name, his picture, his age, and where he lived. Taken all together, the postings on the internet create a picture of a young man sinking in misery and violent fantasies.

In many of the postings, Jeff Weise talks about being depressed. He had an online journal called Thoughts of a Dreamer. Here's a quote. "I'm starting to regret sticking around. I should have taken the razor blade express last time around." On the same website, Jeff Weise wrote about taking antidepressants and seeing a therapist.

The New York Times talked with the administrator of an internet forum that Jeff Weise sent private messages to. The Times reported that we said his mother drank excessively and abused him before the car accident that rendered her brain damaged and confined to a nursing home. The paper says Weise wrote that his mother, quote, "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 it's hard to deal with them or think of them without crying."

Here's another example of Jeff Weise's secret life on the internet. There's a profile attributed to Weise on the MSN website. The author gives his age as 16, his occupation as doormat, and one of his favorite things is, quote, "times when maddened psychopaths briefly open the gates of hell and let chaos flood through." On the same site, he lists his hobbies as planning, waiting, and hating.

It also appears that Jeff Weise posted comments on a neo-Nazi website. He used the moniker totenkopf, German for death's head or skull. Other times, he went by the name todesengel. That's German for angel of death. On the neo-Nazi site, Weise wrote this, I've always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals and his courage to take on larger nations.

Jeff Weise's internet postings often had a theme of shootings. He posted a short story about a school shooting. Under the name regret, he posted a flash animation with crude line drawings and sound effects.

[GUN SHOT]

The animation shows a man shooting several people. The victims heads burst into red blotches. Then the shooter throws a grenade into a police car. Finally, he sticks the barrel of the gun into his mouth and blows his own head off. Dr. David Walsh is the president of the National Institute on Media and Family. He's seen many of the internet postings that are attributed to Jeff Weise and he's watched the animated video.

DAVID WALSH: If you look at the things that he wrote, if you look at the blogs that he wrote, it's clear he was practically predicting what he was going to do. So there were all kinds of warning signs.

CHRIS JULIN: But those signs were mostly hidden in Weise internet world and the adults in his life didn't see them. Weise had friends in cyberspace. But David Walsh says it's not likely that they would have worried much about his web postings.

DAVID WALSH: People were reading these things on the internet sites, but they were-- people were going to those particular sites where people who are angry themselves.

CHRIS JULIN: Some people think those angry websites might encourage antisocial behavior. Dr. Frederic Goodwin teaches psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the George Washington University Medical Center. He's the former director of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

FREDERICK GOODWIN: It's troubling because kids can isolate themselves on the internet. And there's a number of sites that are rather sick if you look at them. And it's a way for kids to get in contact with other rather sick minds, often adult minds, and get kind of encouragement for their own sick thinking.

Taboos are very important. It's very important for-- kids as they're growing up can be troubled and have all sorts of bizarre thoughts. But if everything around them is kind of discouraging that or not being-- not showing any encouragement of it, that's one thing. But if on the other hand you find a website in which in effect people are saying, yeah, we think that way too and sort of reinforce you and sort of encourage you, and some of these games that are played where killing the other person is the nature of the game, I think that can be dangerous, not for the average kid but for a troubled kid.

CHRIS JULIN: Violent websites are easy to find. Even when parents try to control their kids internet use, a determined child won't have much trouble surfing to a violent website. Goodwin says internet filters don't screen out violence.

FREDERICK GOODWIN: All these parental controls are focused on pornography, and that's fine. Sexual stimulation in kids too young is not good for them. But perhaps more of the issues relating to encouragement for violence that is also out there. It's a different kind of pornography, but it's damaging nevertheless.

CHRIS JULIN: Goodwin says writing and reading about violence is one thing. Carrying it out is another. Countless other people went to the same sites and wrote similar angry or suicidal messages. But most of them didn't commit suicide or murder anyone. Rampages like Columbine and Red Lake grabbed people's attention. But one reason they're newsworthy is they're uncommon.

FREDERICK GOODWIN: These kinds of mass murderer situations and murder suicide situations are thankfully very, very rare. Obviously, anytime they happen, they're an individual tragedy but they are not, statistically speaking, a very widespread problem.

CHRIS JULIN: Attacks at schools are rare and they're unpredictable. After the Columbine shooting, many schools put in new security measures. But the lesson from Red Lake might be that a determined attacker can overcome the best security plan. In fact, Red Lake had more security measures than most rural schools.

Stuart Desjarlait is the Superintendent of Schools at Red Lake. He spoke at a news conference a few days after the shooting.

STUART DESJARLAIT: Every superintendent, every principal throughout the United States thinks about something like this, what never happened in their building. I, myself, I've thought about this. Also after from Combine, I did some deep thinking in there.

In the 1997, '96, we started security guards and cameras throughout the buildings. And as each year went by, we updated our cameras to the newest technology available. And we added more cameras in and out of the buildings. We just moved into our recently our new addition at the high school where we completed the updating of the security system in there and the hiring of more security guards.

We did everything we could. We had a crisis management plan in place. The teachers were do. They were aware. They practiced the crisis management plan. But a year and a half ago, we had a disaster drill throughout the middle school and high school.

And in some cases, we were criticized for doing that. But this disaster drill that we held contributed a lot to the safety and to the plant to what happened inside the building and handling our students and staff. It goes to show that if something's going to happen, it's going to happen. No matter what you do, no matter where you are, no matter what precautions you take, something like this can happen.

CHRIS JULIN: Some other Minnesota school officials agree that it's almost impossible to stop a single-minded attacker. Charles Kight is the Executive Director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators.

CHARLES KIGHT: I have a hard time seeing how we can prevent this type of a situation shy of turning our schools into almost prison-like fortresses. And we have this tradition of open schools of people coming and going. Red Lake for a greater Minnesota School actually sounds to me like it had a greater level of security than most schools. And yet, somebody determined comes in and simply goes right through that security system.

CHRIS JULIN: Kight says he doesn't think schools should start arming their security guards.

CHARLES KIGHT: I hope not. I think in some cases, the people that are at that front desk in some schools may well be a police officer, a police liaison officer than they are armed. Again, a student coming into a school and not giving any indication of what is happening and starting shooting is probably going to shoot an armed security guard as well as an unarmed one.

CHRIS JULIN: Members of Jeff Weise's family on the reservation didn't talk to reporters for several days after the shooting. Late in the week, two of his aunts and his uncle gave an interview to Fred de Sam Lazaro for PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Twin Cities Public Television. Jeff Weise's aunts are Shauna and Tammy Lussier. They say their nephew had been living with them for seven or eight years. Their brother was Jeff Weise's father. Shauna Lussier says her nephew liked to paint and draw.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: Jeff wore black. That was his favorite color. He never had any piercings. He was even scared to get blood drawn. He just didn't like needles. Never dyed his hair. Maybe wore a spike here or there. Didn't listen to heavy metal music. He liked soft rock mixed John Lennon, Beatles, Johnny Cash.

TAMMY LUSSIER: He never showed us the violent side of him. That's why it's so hard for us to understand this. He never acted out. Never--

SHAUNA LUSSIER: Got in a fistfight.

TAMMY LUSSIER: Never in a fistfight with anybody. Nothing there's nothing that would lead us to understand why he would do this.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: We've been hearing these reports about his getting on this Nazi website. What do you know about that? Does that sound like something that he might have been doing without your knowledge?

TAMMY LUSSIER: We didn't know he was on the website. He would just make little comments about the Nazis in general.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: He had-- he knew a lot about them. I mean, he was very informative if something came up on TV. he was very intellectual.

CHRIS JULIN: Jeff Weise's aunts say they knew their nephew was troubled and they were trying to get him help. He was taking Prozac and his doctor had just increased his dose.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: He talked to social workers, social services, the police. At one time, we had him up at the hospital for an incident that happened in school and social services and the police escort with my mom, his guardian, because he was cutting himself in front of a teacher. And we went to the emergency room with all the right people to try to get him some help. And the doctor there told us that that was a fad. He's seen a lot of that.

TAMMY LUSSIER: And sent them home.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: He sent them home. It wasn't like he was a troubled child and we didn't get him the help he needed.

TAMMY LUSSIER: We tried.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: We tried every avenue.

CHRIS JULIN: Weise's aunts say their nephew had access to the services he needed. It's not that the system failed him. And they want to clear up what they say are some misconceptions. They say Jeff Weise did not want to move back to the Twin Cities and he wasn't expelled from school.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: He didn't get kicked out. It was just the choice that my mom and Jeffrey--

TAMMY LUSSIER: And his doctors made.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: --and the doctors made just for him because he was having problems at school.

CHRIS JULIN: Weise's relatives say a teacher came by the house each day to work with him while he was on the homebound program. The teacher even came by on the day of the shooting.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: The day it all happened, there was nothing out of the ordinary, not even the mood he was in. Everything was just like every day. Just nothing, no red flags. No comments to make anybody think that--

TAMMY LUSSIER: That he was feeling anything that day.

CHRIS JULIN: But Shauna and Tammy Lussier say it's true that their nephew didn't fit in at school. They say other kids were put off by his big vocabulary.

TAMMY LUSSIER: Jeffrey always stood out. He had a select few friends because he told us that he was picky about who he hung around with.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: How many friends would you say?

SHAUNA LUSSIER: About five good friends.

TAMMY LUSSIER: About five real good close friends.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Was he teased by kids at the school?

TAMMY LUSSIER: Well, they made comments, yeah.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That's what you mean by stood out?

TAMMY LUSSIER: Mhm.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: But you-- but he never really gave you a sense that he was really troubled by that?

SHAUNA LUSSIER: No, just like he'd call and say, come pick me up. I'm having a bad day. I'd go give him a ride home and just try to say, well, what's going on? Nothing, just couldn't be there today. I mean, he kept a lot to himself. The way he would get his emotions out, like I said, is on paper, through his writing and his drawings.

CHRIS JULIN: But the Lussiers say they don't have any of those writings or drawings anymore because they let the FBI take them. They say they're cooperating with the investigation. They hope to get some answers themselves. Jeff Weise's aunts say they're grieving not just for their nephew but for their father, who was Jeff Weise's grandfather.

Daryl Lussier was one of Jeff Weise's victims. Shauna Lussier says her father was popular on the reservation.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: He was known for his sense of humor.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: And for my dad, I'd like to say, it wasn't how he died. It was how he lived because he had so many people who respected him, who loved him, who were friends. And he's going to miss-- be missed terribly.

CHRIS JULIN: The Lussiers say their father helped raise another of his grandsons. They say he was always willing to help a family member. Shauna Lussier says she's now lost three members of her family to violence, her nephew, his father, and his grandfather.

SHAUNA LUSSIER: I personally can say the whole reservation and our families are going to ask why. And to me, that's going to be the hardest because we're never going to know.

CATHY WURZER: You're listening to What happened at Red Lake, a Minnesota Public Radio Special Report from American Public Media. I'm Cathy Wurzer. In many ways, Jeff Weise was not a typical reservation kid. On the close knit reservation, he was a loner. His act was a bizarre anomaly. But elders on the reservation say they need to provide a better life for their kids. Coming up, life in the sovereign nation of Red Lake.

SPEAKER: Again, if you missed part of this broadcast, we will repeat it tomorrow morning at 10:00 here on Minnesota Public Radio. And for complete coverage of this story throughout the weekend, listen to Minnesota Public Radio. And go to our website at minnesotapublicradio.org. You can also follow the links to the midday program and find all of our previous mid-days at minnesotapublicradio.org

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CATHY WURZER: This is, What happened at Red Lake, a Minnesota Public Radio Special Report from American Public Media. I'm Cathy Wurzer. The kind of carnage that came to Red Lake is a shock anywhere. But somehow, it seems especially bizarre on the remote, wooded Red Lake Reservation with its quiet rural roads and tiny towns.

The Red Lake Indian Reservation is an unusual place even for reservations. Unlike some of Minnesota's other reservations, it's too remote to have a casino that brings in a lot of visitors and a lot of money. Reservations nationwide are often poor. But even compared to other reservations, Red Lake is a poor place with a poverty rate of 40%.

Even compared to other reservations, its schools are struggling. Last year, only 22% of Red Lake eighth graders passed the state reading exam compared to 81% statewide. Statewide, 71% of eighth graders passed the math test. At Red Lake, less than 8% passed.

But Red Lake also has a lot to offer its young people. It has preserved traditions and Native language in a way most other Indian bands have not been able to do. And elders on the reservation say those traditional ways are what will get them through this crisis and keep their children strong. Chris Julin continues our report.

CHRIS JULIN: The Red Lake Indian Reservation is in Minnesota's far North, almost all the way to Canada. Pine and spruce forests surround Red Lake, an enormous body of water where tribal members gather wild rice and fish for walleyes. Only about 5,000 people live on the reservation. The few towns range from small to tiny. There's no fast food. There's no movie theater.

Brenda Child grew up at Red Lake. Now, she's a history professor at the University of Minnesota. She says Red Lake has been described as the most traditional Indian community in the Great Lakes.

BRENDA CHILD: And it's often regarded as being a conservative, a community that does uphold its traditions and believe very strongly in its tradition of sovereignty and political leadership and independence. And sometimes that has meant independence from the United States government, from the State of Minnesota, and even to a certain extent, from the other Indian tribes in Minnesota.

CHRIS JULIN: Red Lake has always been a bit isolated from the outside world, both by geography and by choice. People at Red Lake are often wary of outsiders. The reservation is usually a quiet place. So the media frenzy following the shooting was a shock. By law, Red Lake is a closed reservation. That means the tribal government can choose who to allow onto the reservation.

After the shooting, the Red Lake tribal government banned reporters from traveling around the reservation to do interviews. Tribal officials threatened to expel reporters who disobeyed the ban. That's one reason so little information was immediately available about Jeff Weise. The FBI came in to investigate because state law doesn't apply in Red Lake. That's different from all the other reservations in Minnesota.

Red Lake's legal status is unique according to Brenda Child, the historian. She says Red Lake never traded away its land. It's always been under Indian control. Even today, parcels can't be sold to outsiders. The land is still held in common, owned by the whole tribe.

BRENDA CHILD: We didn't lose our land as so many tribal people and communities did in the Great Lakes and of course, beyond the Great Lakes across the United States. So as a consequence, the reservation is today as large as it was in the 19th century. And when you think about issues like cultural survival, language preservation, passing on traditions and spiritual beliefs, of course, you can do that more readily if your land is intact. You can pass that on to the next generation more readily if you have your community and your land base intact.

CHRIS JULIN: Child says people from the reservation are not entirely isolated. In fact, only about half the enrolled members of the band live on the reservation at any one time. Many families live part of their lives in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, like Jeff Weise did. Brenda child says the isolation has helped keep traditions strong at Red Lake and it's kept the native language alive.

BRENDA CHILD: You know, my mother and her siblings, their first language is-- was Ojibwe. And so that's a very, unfortunately, sort of distinctive thing, unusual and distinctive thing, these days where even nearby reservations like Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, White Earth. And I know in the Wisconsin communities, people are very despairing right now because as a lot of our elders pass on, they feel like the language is going with them.

At Red Lake, we do have some younger people who speak the tribal language in addition to just the elders. And so that's very important for passing on culture, passing on worldview, philosophies, spiritual, traditions. It's all centered around the language.

CHRIS JULIN: Some elders on the reservation say they need to remain isolated to keep those traditions strong. And they say without those traditions, the tribe is lost. Anton Treuer teaches Ojibwe language at Bemidji State University, about an hour drive from the town of Red Lake.

ANTON TREUER: What amazes me is not how much we've lost but how much we still have of our language, of our culture, and so forth. And to really successfully heal ourselves, we need to revitalize those things. We need to reconnect our people to those things.

CHRIS JULIN: Treuer says it's especially important to keep the culture alive for kids. He says kids on the reservation need to feel they belong to something.

ANTON TREUER: We can see gangbanger wannabe kids on the reservations creating problems, beating up elders, and all kinds of violence that's been reported on at times before. But really, these kids are looking for something. And they probably don't even know what it is themselves and couldn't put a label on it themselves.

CHRIS JULIN: But Treuer says it's hard for kids to find a place to belong in public schools that teach a standard curriculum.

ANTON TREUER: We've heard the catchphrase, my heroes are not your heroes. And that's definitely true for Native people who are taught, among other things, to worship money when every face that graces $1 bill in the United States is someone who's killed an Indian. We're taught to worship founding fathers and giving examples of successful human beings that really don't have native faces at all.

And for us to be successful at reaching our own Native youth, we have to provide examples of those things with a Native face. A place like Red Lake, which has 100% Native kids going to school and 100% Natives on the school board but has 1% of the administration and teaching staff Native has to find ways to provide role models and opportunities for Native kids to find out who they are.

CHRIS JULIN: As it is now, many kids in the Red Lake School District aren't successful in school. It's not just that the kids have low test scores. They also have low attendance rates. Last year, nearly a third of Red Lake middle school students were truant. School administrators said on some days, as many as half the high school students were absent.

There may be historic reasons for skepticism about the school system. Historian Brenda Child says it may be related to boarding schools. Until a few decades ago, some Indian children were forced to leave home to attend boarding schools.

BRENDA CHILD: Red Lake like a lot of other tribal communities in the United States as well as here in Minnesota have had a long and complicated history with education. If I think of my grandmother's generation and even my great grandfather's generation, they were both educated in off reservation government boarding schools that took them away from their homes and families.

And the idea of education at that time was to detribalize Indians, have them not speak their tribal languages, have them practice Christianity and become like white people. And that was what the goal of educating Indians was for many years, for many decades, for half a century, actually, in the United States.

CHRIS JULIN: Members of most minority groups had to fight to get into schools in the United States. Education became a prize to be won. For Indian people, schools were a weapon of cultural assimilation. Brenda Child says that's one reason for the ambivalence many Indian people feel towards school.

But that's not what sent Jeff Weise on a shooting spree according to Anton Treuer, the Ojibwe language teacher. He says the shooting was a tragedy that transcends race.

ANTON TREUER: This isn't something that only happens in Indian country. In fact, it's the first time that I'm aware of in the United States where there was a major school shooting in a community of color. They've all been in white suburbia. But this is something that can happen anywhere. We don't know a lot about the assailant. It seems that he was a kid with issues. And there are kids with issues everywhere.

CHRIS JULIN: There are certainly kids with problems everywhere. But kids on the reservation face extra challenges.

MICHAEL DAHL: Our kids are some of the most ignored, unrespected, forgotten about people that I've ever seen.

CHRIS JULIN: Michael Dahl used to be a teacher on a different reservation but now he deals cards at the casino. He volunteers as a teacher of traditional ways and Native spirituality at the Red Lake High School.

MICHAEL DAHL: If our kids don't learn and catch our way, then we as a people will die.

CHRIS JULIN: Tribal leaders say that's an urgent task, teaching the children the Ojibwe way. Buck Jourdain is the Chairman of the Tribal Council. He says the shooting has shown that adults at Red Lake must look harder at what kids on the reservation need and what the tribe can do to help them.

BUCK JOURDAIN: We definitely will reevaluate how we're approaching dealing with our young people. And anything that we can do, we're going to reevaluate and find a better way or maybe fix the ways we have and doing things or reaching out for help and assistance and recommendations from people who can give us guidance on how we might be able to better serve our young people in our community.

SPEAKER: How big a role does traditional culture play in that? Some people have said these kids need more of a connection to their cultures to have a better identity. Is there a role-- more of a role for that traditional culture?

BUCK JOURDAIN: Yes, there is. It's one of the things that our young people are hungry for. We need to have our roots. Our efforts have been focused on trying to bring the culture back and implement it in into our programs and into our schools. And there's a process that the spiritual people could tell you that takes place there. At one time, as Indian people, we were under 200,000. At one time, we were millions.

And our languages and our cultural beliefs and our ways of life were basically almost nonexistent at one point. And we're just starting that slow road back. And it's not happening fast enough for a lot of people. But under the guidance of our traditional elders, our teachers and our counselors and the people who help to heal our communities, we intend to continue on that direction.

CHRIS JULIN: Tribal leaders say they need to stop other children from falling away from their roots to keep them from falling into despair as Jeff Weise did. The leaders on Red Lake have long been determined to solve their own problems. But they now say they're welcoming the help and support coming from outside. Red Lake High School principal, Chris Dunshee, spoke with National Public Radio two days after the shooting.

CHRIS DUNSHEE: This is a new experience, one that I hope I never have to come close to repeating. As I told our staff today, we've joined a tragic fraternity now of the Paducah, Kentuckys, and the Columbines and Rocori High School in Minnesota. And we find ourselves working through it as best we can but also calling upon those people who have been generous enough to offer their support, especially the people from the other schools that have gone through this.

And I've talked to Bill Bond who's the principal at Paducah, Kentucky. Bill's been very, very helpful. I had a conference call with him yesterday with some of my teachers. And they had questions that they asked. And he tried to steer them through some of that conversation with them.

CHRIS JULIN: Bill Bond is the former principal of Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, where a student shot eight people in 1997. Three of those students died. Bond says his main piece of advice is to get the Red Lake School open again.

BILL BOND: I'm a strong believer in that students need to get back into the school environment as soon as possible because they do need to grieve with each other. They do need to share with each other. They haven't experienced anything like this before. And they need to be with other students to share that experience because they can see other students are having similar difficulty in dealing with it.

CHRIS JULIN: Bond says it will take tremendous courage for the Red Lake students to walk back into their school.

BILL BOND: But the kids will be able to muster the courage easier than their parents will. It will be harder for the parents to let the kids go back to school than it actually is for the kids themselves to come back in that building.

CHRIS JULIN: Bond has some other advice, too.

BILL BOND: The first thing that I always want to tell a principal is, there's going to be some empty desks. And if you leave that desk empty, no one's going to sit in it. And as the students look at that empty desk, their mind is going to drift back due the day of the shooting because they know that student that occupied-- normally occupies that desk is not there. I suggest rearranging the order of the desk in the classroom to help with the situation of coming back and not having to look at that empty desk. Looking at those empty desks is crushing. It is emotionally crushing.

CHRIS JULIN: Red Lake High School principal, Chris Dunshee, is grateful for the advice and the support from Bond and other people. He says his work is much clearer now. Other problems that used to seem so big look small now.

CHRIS DUNSHEE: Of course, you're familiar with No Child Left Behind. And we come from an area that is high unemployment and poverty is a problem and extended families and things like that. And so I think trying to meet the guidelines set forth in No Child Left Behind, trying to get our test scores higher and that type thing. And as I mentioned to the staff today, those are really-- the things that I thought were important last Friday and even last Monday morning of putting to-- have been put into perspective now. And test scores aren't going to be the most important thing anymore. It's getting these kids healed.

CHRIS JULIN: Chris Dunshee and other members of the Red Lake Band seem to be walking a fine line. On one side is a very private culture. A culture that prizes isolation and self-reliance. On the other side is a public tragedy. The press and the nation have turned their attention to Red Lake.

The tension will continue as the Red Lake Community begins to hold funerals for the people who died in the shooting. Tradition calls for a year of mourning and at the end of the year, a feast. At the feast, the families of the dead give gifts to thank the people who stood by them in their grief. I'm Chris Julin.

CATHY WURZER: You've been listening to a Minnesota Public Radio Special Report from American Public Media. What happened at Red Lake was produced by Kathryn Winter and Chris Julin with production assistance from Ellen Getler. Special thanks to National Public Radio, Twin Cities Public Television, and NBC affiliate, Kare 11, for providing additional audio. The executive producers of What Happened at Red Lake are Bill Buzenberg and Michael Skoller. This special report and related material are available at minnesotapublicradio.org. I'm Cathy Wurzer.

SPEAKER: American Public Media.