Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Jerry Johnson
Blue Valley High School, Overland Park, Kansas, the school attended by 14-year-old shooting victim Reat Griffin Underwood.

The Missouri-born suspect charged in a pre-Passover shooting spree that left three dead outside two Kansas Jewish centers is a known white supremacist, media report.

Frazier Glenn Cross (aka Frazier Glenn Miller), 73, was charged with one count of first degree premeditated murder and one count of capital murder in connection with the shootings that took place on Sunday near Kansas City, Kansas.  He had three weapons in his possession when he was taken into custody on Sunday, according to police, after shooting at five people, none of whom he knew.

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Of those, 14-year-old Reat Griffin Underwood and his grandfather, family practitioner Dr. William Lewis Corporon, 69, were both Methodists. Reat was heading for an audition for a play to be held at the Jewish community center. Occupational therapist Terri LaManno, 53, a Roman Catholic, was on the way to visit her mother at the assisted living center.

Police investigators say the shooter’s actions were “unquestionably determined” to be a hate crime,” Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass told reporters. While sitting in the back of a police vehicle after his arrest, Cross was seen in a video filmed by CNN affiliate KMBC shouting, “Heil Hitler!”

Those who know Cross told CNN that he has ‘made no secret of his racist views, writing letters to newspapers and inviting people to white supremacist meetings at his home.’

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) watchdog organization reported that Cross was the founder and former ‘Grand Dragon’ of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and the paramilitary White Patriot Party.

Also according to the Center, Cross is a “raging anti-Semite” who has called Jews “swarthy, hairy, bow-legged, beady-eyed parasitic midgets” in posts on online forums advocating the extermination of Jews.

But although he was convicted on weapons charges and for plotting to murder SPLC founder Morris Dees, Cross spent only three years in prison. And he’s been publishing ‘The Aryan Alternative’ tabloid regularly, without interference, since 2005.

(Note the difference in how American ‘justice for all’ is meted out to a convicted would-be assassin such as Cross, and a Jewish spy for the allied nation of Israel, the man named Pollard.)

The abbreviated prison term for Cross came as the result of a plea bargain arranged with federal prosecutors in exchange for testimony against 14 white supremacists in Arkansas at a sedition trial in 1988.

(The plea bargain arranged with federal prosecutors for Pollard was suddenly abrogated at the bench during sentencing without warning, with no explanation and after Pollard had already fulfilled his part of the deal. He was instead sentenced to life in prison on a one charge of passing classified information to a friendly allied nation. The crime carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison – Pollard is now entering his 29th year.)

Cross appeared in court on Tuesday in a wheelchair wearing an anti-suicide garment to face the charges of murder: the first, for killing a boy and his grandfather outside the Jewish community center. Neither victim was Jewish. As he heard the other accusation for killing a woman visiting her mother at the nearby Jewish assisted living facility, he learned that in this case he had also failed: nor was his third victim a Jew.

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Hana Levi Julian is a Middle East news analyst with a degree in Mass Communication and Journalism from Southern Connecticut State University. A past columnist with The Jewish Press and senior editor at Arutz 7, Ms. Julian has written for Babble.com, Chabad.org and other media outlets, in addition to her years working in broadcast journalism.