Jeff Weise - Regret

People in Red Lake who knew him described him as a loner. A goth. A kid with "a little problem". Investigators say that, after reviewing his life in a nutshell, he was a perfect fit to the profile of a "Columbine shooter". They've even compared his shoes to the ones the shooters at Columbine wore. He liked movies such as 'Elephant' and 'Zero Day' and he posted things to the internet that were disturbing, often posting under names like 'Regret' and 'Todesengel' (Angel of Death, in German). He was fascinated with zombie movies, Nazi society and wore a big black trenchcoat.

The pictures the news stations are running at the time of this writing (March 24 2005, 3 days after the school shooting that left 10 people including the killer dead) are mostly of a nine year old boy. Jeff was 16 when he went over the edge and took nine others with him. The picture to the left is probably closer to what people saw him like, as it's from earlier this year.

Jeff made two Flash movies, and his first ("Target Practice", 10-2-04) is a disturbing harbinger of things to come. It shows a guy running around shooting people and then at the end he blows his own head off, not unlike what happened in reality.

The description itself says it has no plot other than 'people getting blown away'. Other online evidence of an unhappy life surfaces in his LiveJournal account, in chat rooms and through forum postings. Things were not good in Jeff's life and he tried to tell lots of people.

Despite what parallels there may be to Columbine shooter Eric Harris, I can't help but see a situation more reminiscent of Kip Kinkel's. Like Kip, Jeff killed his family - what was left of it. His father (Daryl Lussier Jr., "Baby Dash") committed suicide in July, 1997 following a police standoff. Jeff's grandfather was a reservation officer at the time and was there when it happened. Jeff's mother was in a drinking-related car crash in 1999 and suffered debilitating brain damage that put her in a nursing home. No

one really who knew him really knew where Jeff was living, that he seemed to 'float' from place to place. A teen with no real attachments to society, despite having a grandfather who still lived in the area.

Jeff shot his grandfather and grandfather's girlfriend first and - again like Kinkel - his reign of terror came public at his high school.. and that's where it ended (though he hadn't been in school for several months because he'd been expelled for violating school rules). He drove to the school in his grandfather's police car, crashed it into the school building and proceeded to kill seven more people inside, including a security guard manning the metal detector, a teacher and five students in a classroom where kids knew him by name. Kip, however, didn't shoot himself though for a while he behaved like he was going to. Jeff shot himself, right in the head; just like his Flash movie depicted his drawings doing.

I just watched the re-make of Dawn of the Dead recently, a rental of bizarre coincidence considering that the film was one of Jeff's favorites, something I couldn't have known when I rented it Saturday 19th. In the film the only way to stop the twitching and murder of the zombies is to shoot them in the head. He liked to write fan fiction about surviving in the world of zombies from that movie. I wonder if, in the end, he felt a bit like a zombie in himself - something that would keep killing, keep twitching, till a bullet to the head took him down. More likely he felt that way before he got a hold of the gun.