White Supremacist Gets Death for Kansas City JCC Rampage
The white supremacist who killed three people at two suburban Kansas City Jewish institutions has been sentenced to death.
F. Glenn Miller Jr. (also known as F. Glenn Cross), 74, was sentenced Tuesday by Johnson County District Judge Kelly Ryan, the Kansas City Star reported. Miller is only the second person sentenced to the death penalty since Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994, according to the Star.
In September a jury found Miller guilty of capital murder and recommended the death penalty.
Miller was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Reat Underwood, 14, and his grandfather, William Corporon, 69, outside the Jewish Community Center of Kansas City in Overland Park, as well as Terri LaManno, 53, outside the Village Shalom assisted-living facility in April 2014. None of the victims was Jewish, but Miller assumed they were Jewish when he shot them.
He also was found guilty of aggravated assault for pointing a shotgun at a woman and asking if she was Jewish, and of firing into the JCC.
A former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon, Miller has been unapologetic about the shooting, in which he said he was trying to kill as many Jews as possible. During his trial, he waived the right to an attorney and argued the jury should find him not guilty because his shooting spree was a “patriotic attempt” to “defend my people against genocide.”
Miller told the Kansas City Star in an interview last November that he began planning the attacks when he became so sick with emphysema that he thought he would die soon and that he conducted reconnaissance missions of the JCC and Village Shalom in the days before the shootings.
“I wanted to make damned sure I killed some Jews or attacked the Jews before I died,” he told the newspaper.Soon after his arrest, Miller told officers that he was an anti-Semite and asked them, “How many did I get?”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO