The person of interest in custody for the killing of three people at two Jewish centers is a former Ku Klux Klan leader with a history of antisemitism and racism, law enforcement officials said.
Frazier Glenn Cross, Jr., 73, is suspected of fatally shooting a 14-year-old Eagle Scout and his grandfather
in the parking lot at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas
City campus in Overland Park then gunning down a woman at Village
Shalom, a retirement community that is several blocks away from the
center, law enforcement officials said.
KSHB reporter Andres
Gutierrez told MSNBC that the suspect who was taken away in the back of a
police car yelled “Heil Hitler” at onlookers.
A civil rights organization that tracks hate groups said it has long known about Cross, who is from Missouri.
The
Southern Poverty Law Center says Cross is known to them using aliases —
Glenn Miller or Frazier Glenn Miller — and is the former Grand Dragon
of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
The center sued Cross in the 1980s
for intimidating African Americans, and he has had several run-ins with
the law since then, including being accused of violating the terms of a
court order that settled the lawsuit.
A profile assembled by the Southern Poverty Law Center includes several anti-semitic statements attributed to Cross.
Police only described the suspect as an elderly man with a beard in a Sunday afternoon news conference.
According
to the SPLC, Cross quit high school as a senior to join the Army. In a
20-year Army career he had two tours in Vietnam and 13 years as a member
of the elite Green Berets before he was forced to retire because of his
Klan affiliation in 1979.
Later he went on to be active in a
neo-Nazi group called “The Order” that advocated violence against Blacks
and Jews among others, the SPLC said.
He
even unsuccessfully ran in the Democratic primary for North Carolina
governor in 1984 and as a Republican for a state Senate seat in 1987,
the SPLC said.
According to The
Associated Press, Miller was the subject of a nationwide manhunt in 1987
for violating the terms of his bond while appealing a North Carolina
conviction for operating a paramilitary camp.
The search ended after
federal agents found Miller and three other men in an Ozark mobile home,
which was filled with hand grenades, automatic weapons and thousands of
rounds of ammunition.
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