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NY Times August 6, 2012
Suspect Said to Be a Veteran With Ties to Racist Groups
By STEVEN YACCINO, JENNIFER PRESTON and MARC SANTORA
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 Michael 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 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 described him as a “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 volent 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.”
Mr. Page was living in a rented apartment in Cudahy, about five miles
from the sprawling temple Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, a
suburb of Milwaukee. He was shot by police after he fired several shots
at a police officer tending to one of the victims, officials said.
Police Chief John Edwards of Oak Creek did not give a motive for the
shooting, which is being treated as an act of “domestic terrorism.”
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 are in critical condition at a
local hospital.
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.
The gunman, carrying a 9 millimeter semiautomatic handgun, entered the
temple about 10:15 a.m., 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.
Mr. Edwards, the police chief, described the first minutes after police
responded to the multiple 911 calls that 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, Brian Murphy, 51, is in critical condition following
surgery at a nearby hospital, Mr. Edwards said. He said Lieutenant
Murphy was a 21-year veteran of the department. He waved on officers
trying to assist him in the parking lot to go first into the temple to
check on victims there, the police chief said.
Mr. 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.
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.
Steven Yaccino reported from Oak Creek, Marc Santora from New York and
Jennifer Preston from Pennsylvania. Dirk Johnson contributed reporting
from Oak Creek. Michael S. Schmidt, Michael Schwirtz, Ray Rivera and
Jack Begg contributed reporting from New York.
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