Overland Park Killer Among Racist Web Site Users Who Kill 100
Image by getty images
A white supremacist charged with killing three people near two Jewish community facilities in suburban Kansas City this week posted more than 12,000 messages on a racist website which carries the slogan “No Jews, Just Right,” according to a leading organization that tracks hate groups.
The online activity by Frazier Glenn Cross follows a trend in which prolific posters on hate online forums are becoming “disproportionately responsible” for racist murders and mass killings, according to a report released on Thursday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights organization.
The report said nearly 100 people in the last five years have been murdered by frequent users of one white supremacist website, Stormfront. The site describes itself as a community of “White Nationalists” and “the voice of the new, embattled White minority.”
“It has been a magnet for the deadly and deranged,” said Heidi Beirich, author of the report.
Don Black, creator of the Stormfront website, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the report, past participants in forums on the website included Wade Michael Page, an Army veteran who opened fire at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012 killing six people before taking his own life.
Another was Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian extremist who massacred 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree in Oslo and at a nearby youth summer camp in 2011.
Frazier Glenn Cross often posted on Stormfront until he was banned from the site in 2005 after testifying in a trial against white supremacists, said Mark Potok, a senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Law enforcement and human rights groups have identified Cross as a former senior member of the Ku Klux Klan and someone who has repeatedly expressed hatred for Jewish people.
Cross, who also goes by the name Glenn Miller, later switched to another white supremacist forum, Vanguard News Network, where the center tracked his postings over the last five years.
“These killers are really hiding in plain sight on these forums,” Beirich said.
Vanguard did not immediately respond to an email to the website seeking comment.
Cross faces one count of capital murder in the fatal shooting of Reat Underwood, 14, and his grandfather, William Corporon, 69, outside a Jewish community center and a charge of first-degree murder in the death of 53-year-old Terri LaManno. Cross is being held on a $10 million bond.
Potok called on law enforcement, particularly the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to increase its focus on racist online forums.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
