Killer’s family life was hit by tragedy

HE created comic books with ghastly drawings of people shooting each other and wrote stories about zombies.

He dressed in black, wore eyeliner, apparently admired Hitler and called himself the "Angel of Death" in German.

His father committed suicide about four years ago, and his mother is reportedly in a nursing home after a car accident.

On Monday, 16-year-old Jeff Weise went on a rampage, shooting dead his grandfather and the grandfather's companion, then invading his school on the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.

Armed with two pistols and a shotgun, he killed nine people and wounded seven before shooting himself in America's bloodiest school shooting since Columbine High in Colorado six years ago.

Investigators are not sure exactly what set Weise off, but fellow students at Red Lake High said they saw what looked, in retrospect, like warning signs.

About a month ago, his sketch of a guitar-strumming skeleton accompanied by a caption that read: "March to the death song 'til your boots fill with blood" was displayed in his English class, said classmate Parston Graves.

Parston said Weise had also shown him comic books he had drawn, filled with well-crafted images of people shooting each other. "It was mental stuff," he said. "It was sick."

Weise, who routinely wore a long black trench coat, eyeliner and combat boots, has been described by several classmates as a quiet teenager. Some of them knew about his troubled childhood relatives told the St Paul Pioneer Press his father had committed suicide and his mother suffered head injuries in a car accident.

Audrey Thayer, a friend of the family who also works for the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union office in Bemidji, about 30 miles from the town where the shooting occurred, said Weise's story was one of "devastation and loss".

Ms Thayer said Weise had been living with his 58-year-old grandfather, Daryl Lussier, and Mr Lussier's 32-year-old companion, Michelle Sigana.

Michael Tabman, the FBI's agent in charge of the Minneapolis office, said yesterday authorities had not established a motive for the shootings.

If Weise was quiet in school, he became an extrovert in cyberspace. He may have posted messages on a neo-Nazi website expressing admiration for Hitler and calling himself "Todesengel", German for "Angel of Death".

Several notes signed by a Jeff Weise, who identified himself as "a Native American from the Red Lake 'Indian' Reservation", were posted beginning last year on a website operated by the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party.

In one posting, he criticised inter-racial mixing on the reservation and slammed fellow Indian teens for listening to rap music. "We have kids my age killing each other over things as simple as a fight, and it's because of the rap influence," he wrote.

While the writing of his postings on the neo-Nazi website may have been sloppy and full of mistakes, Weise was also able to write more polished prose for stories published on the internet about zombies.

Weise's Hotmail address links him to frequent postings on one internet forum called Rise of the Dead.

Weise, posting under the name "Blades11", appeared to be a regular contributor to zombie fan fiction sites.

In a posting from February 6, he agreed to continue contributing to a story line but said things are "kind of rocky right now so I might disappear unexpectedly".