School Shooting-MN

[dilloduck]

Last sentence of Leonard Pitt's article: "Weise wanted so badly to belong to something. Obviously, he never did." The age-old story of high school life for the non-affluent, underprivileged, different. How many other teenagers are in that same situation today? Teased, made fun of by their peers for one reason or another, picked on day in and day out simply for the amusement of others. Unable to make friends and evidently having no support system in place, how many will end up a suicide like Jeff Weise and possibly take others with them in the commission of the act?

This incident emphasizes the importance of parents more than anything I can think of.

 

[Adam's Apple]

I agree that parents have major responsibility for bringing up kids to be good, contributing citizens of society. But Weise did not have parents available to him, so what is the answer in his case? This kid was lost, and no one seemed to recognize it or care. If you don't have parents or friends or anyone who seems to care about you, where does a kid like Weise find the support system each person needs to make it in this life?

 

[Adam's Apple]

Here's another article that sheds some more light on the plight of native American teens.

The Two Worlds of Native American Teens
By Todd Wilkinson, The Christian Science Monitor
March 29, 2005

LAME DEER, MONT. – In a seminar on "contemporary world events" at Lame Deer High School, Cinnamon Spear, a senior honors student, joins her fellow Cheyenne Indian classmates in dissecting the question: "Why did this happen?"

Why did an apparently troubled Ojibwe teenager last week go on a shooting rampage on the Red Lake Indian Reservation 800 miles away from this land of windswept prairie and ragged coulees?

Cinnamon, who like many young people living on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, has survived her own share of personal challenges and tragedy. She lives with extended family. Her father is dead and her mother battles with alcoholism.

Initially, she was in disbelief when she heard that an Indian student, 16-year-old Jeff Weise, had shot and killed 10 people in a community not so different from her own. Similarly, Weise had lost his father to suicide and an alcohol-related auto wreck left his mother seriously debilitated.

"After Columbine, I remember my friends and I saying, 'Well, there goes some more crazy white kids with guns killing each other.' But the shooting in Red Lake brings it closer to home because it happened in a place we understand," Cinnamon says.

While the events at Red Lake are being discussed on reservation communities across American Indian country, tribal leaders warn that drawing general conclusions about what happened there is both unwise and potentially misleading.

On both the Northern Cheyenne and nearby Crow reservations in south-central Montana, however, it is how young people have learned to persevere through difficult teenage years that provides another window for understanding the sense of shock gripping the Ojibwe.

For full story
The url for this story is no longer working. If you are interested, do a search for The Christian Science Monitor March 29, 2005. When that comes up, do a search for Todd Wilkinson. Should be second article listed.

 

[Annie]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05092/481706.stm

Wider plot suspected in Red Lake shooting
Saturday, April 02, 2005

By Dana Hedgpeth and Dan Eggen, The Washington Post



RED LAKE, Minn. -- As many as 20 teenagers may have known ahead of time about plans for the shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of 10 people on the Red Lake Indian reservation March 21, tribal and federal officials said yesterday.

Capt. Dewayne Dow of the tribal police told a group of parents, teachers and staff at a three-hour school board meeting that authorities believe that as many as 20 students were involved.

One law enforcement official said the FBI believes that as many as four students -- including gunman Jeff Weise and Louis Jourdain, a classmate arrested Sunday -- were directly involved in planning an attack on Red Lake High School, while well over a dozen others may have heard about the plot.

"There may have been as many as four of these kids who were active participants in the plot," said the official, who declined to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation. "The question is, how many other kids had some knowledge of this or had heard about it somehow? We think there were quite a few."

FBI agents seized 30 to 40 computers from the high school computer laboratory yesterday to perform forensic analyses on the machines, FBI and school officials said. Investigators hope to learn more from the school computers, since much of the alleged discussion and planning among Weise and his friends occurred through e-mails and instant messages, the law enforcement official said.

Those developments capped a week in which daily funerals or wakes kept many members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in a state of stunned disbelief. As the week passed in this isolated community, the ongoing FBI investigation was compounding the residents' ingrained distrust of outside authorities.

"It still feels like it's a bad dream," tribal council member Donald May said at midweek. "We're in shock."

The last of the 10 fatalities was to be buried today.

 

[Adam's Apple]

It's beginning to sound like the initial news reports on this incident had it a bit wrong, don't you think?

 

[Annie]

It's beginning to sound like the initial news reports on this incident had it a bit wrong, don't you think?

Yep, for days now this has been coming out.