The suspect in the Passover Eve killings of three people at two Jewish community centers near Kansas City is a former Ku Klux Klan leader with history of spewing vitriol against Jews, law enforcement officials said on Monday, according to the Associated Press.
Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, faces local and federal prosecution on hate crime charges after his arrest on Sunday for a shooting spree that killed a teenager and his grandfather outside a Jewish community center, and a woman visiting her mother at a nearby Jewish retirement home, the AP reported.
The boy and his grandfather were members of an area Methodist church and the woman attended a Catholic church, according to the AP.
Cross is from Aurora, Missouri, and had a prior criminal history and was known by law enforcement and human rights groups as a former senior member of the KKK movement and someone who had long made public comments against Jewish people, according to the FBI, the AP reported.
"Yesterday's attack ... strikes at the core fundamental freedoms ... of how our country was founded and what we live by every single day," said FBI agent Michael Kaste, according to the AP. "We've now determined that the motivation behind this was a hate crime. The acts that this person committed were the result of beliefs ... that he had."
Both the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leading anti-hate group, and the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights have tracked Cross for years, according to the AP. The groups say he was involved in creating an armed paramilitary organization in North Carolina 20 years ago.
The Southern Poverty Law Center said Cross is a "raging anti-Semite" who has posted online rantings that include "No Jews, Just Right" and the IREHR said he idolizes Adolf Hitler, the AP reported.
After the shooting, Cross drove a little more than a mile away to the Village Shalom retirement community and fatally shot 53-year-old Terri LeManno, police said, according to the AP.
LeManno was an occupational therapist and married mother of two children and was making a regular visit to her mother who lived at the retirement facility, police said, the AP reported.
Kaste said the FBI had been aware of Cross and his background but was not monitoring him and had no warnings of the attacks, according to the AP. He said that it did not matter that the victims were not Jewish because hate crime violation are tied to the biases and beliefs of the suspect that motivate the crime, not the identities of the victims.
The Jewish Community Center, known locally as "The J" is a popular recreational and educational spot for many families throughout the area, Jewish or not, the AP reported. It is also the site of Kansas City's only Jewish community day school, the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy.
