OAK CREEK, Wis., (Reuters) – The gunman who killed six people at a Wisconsin Sikh temple was a 40-year-old U.S. Army veteran and authorities said they were investigating possible links to white supremacist groups, including his membership in a skinhead rock band.
The assailant, shot dead by police at the scene on Sunday, was identified as Wade Michael Page. He served as an Army soldier from 1992 to 1998, said police chief John Edwards in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek where the 400-member temple is located.
Page killed six people and seriously wounded three, including a police officer, at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin as worshippers prepared for religious services. There was a fourth person wounded less seriously who was already released from the hospital.
The dead were five men and one woman, aged between 39 and 84. Members of the Sikh community said the president of the congregation and a priest were among the victims.
Authorities said they were treating the attack as a possible act of domestic terrorism. American Sikhs said they have often been singled out for harassment, and occasionally violent assault, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because they are mistaken as Muslims due to their colorful turbans and beards.
“The definition of domestic terrorism is the use of force or violence for social or political gain, so that’s obviously what we’re looking at,” FBI special agent Teresa Carlson said at a news conference on Monday.
She said authorities were looking at Page’s ties to white supremacists and agents were interviewing his family and associates.
U.S. military sources said Page had been discharged from the Army in 1998 for “patterns of misconduct” and had been cited for being drunk on duty.
Page had served in the military for six years but was never posted overseas. He was a psychological operations specialist and missile repairman who was last stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the sources said.
In June 1998 he was disciplined for being drunk on duty and had his rank reduced to specialist from sergeant. He was not eligible to re-enlist.
“SELF DESTRUCT”
Page had been a member of the skinhead band End Apathy, based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 2010, said Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Alabama.
He also tried to buy goods from the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group, in 2000, she said. The SPLC describes the National Alliance on its website as “perhaps the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America.”
In a 2010 online interview with End Apathy’s record label Label56, Page said he had founded the band in 2005 because “I realized … that if we could figure out how to end people’s apathetic ways, it would be the start towards moving forward.”
Asked in the interview what kind of topics he wrote about in his lyrics, Page said: “The topics vary from sociological issues, religion, and how the value of human life has been degraded by being submissive to tyranny and hypocrisy that we are subjugated to.”
A MySpace page for a band called End Apathy includes songs with titles such as “Self Destruct,” “Submission” and “Insignificant,” as well as pictures of three heavily tattooed band members. The singer/guitarist of the band is identified as Wade on the page.
Describing how the events unfolded, Chief Edwards told reporters the first officer on the scene found a victim in the temple parking lot and went to render assistance. The officer was then shot eight or nine times at very close range with a handgun, Edwards said.
The gunman then fired on a police car, ignoring officers’ commands to drop his weapon, and was shot and killed by police.
The wounded officer, identified as Brian Murphy, 51, was being treated in a hospital, Edwards said.
After the shooting, police searched an apartment at a duplex in the Cudahy neighborhood near Milwaukee, presumed to be the residence of the gunman. Generators and floodlights were set up along the street and a bomb squad was on the scene.
Edwards said they were confident Page was a “lone gunman,” but police were looking for a “person of interest” — an individual who showed up on the scene after the shooting and left before police could ascertain what he was doing there. Police issued a photograph of the person of interest showing a white male in shorts and a black and red T-shirt.
