The suspect in Wednesday’s fatal shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is James von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist from Maryland, two law enforcement officials told CNN.
Von Brunn served six years in prison on federal attempted kidnapping, assault and firearms charges after what he called a “legal, nonviolent citizens arrest” of members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. On his Web site, “Holy Western Empire,” von Brunn said he was “convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge.” “He is in our files going back way into the 1980s,” said Heidi Beirich, a researcher for the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “He has extremely long history with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He’s written extremely incendiary publications, raging about Jews, blacks and the like.” A museum security guard was killed in Wednesday afternoon’s shooting, sources told CNN. The suspect was wounded and is in critical condition, sources said. Watch more about von Brunn’s history with neo-Nazis »
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Guard killed, gunman wounded in Holocaust Museum shooting
District of Columbia police and the FBI said the shooting appeared to have been the work of a single gunman and there was no prior indication of the attack. Watch witness describe shooting » Von Brunn’s Web site states he served as a Navy officer during World War II. But by the late 1970s, Beirich told CNN, he had become a “hardcore neo-Nazi” and an associate of William Pierce — the white supremacist leader whose 1978 book, “The Turner Diaries,” is credited with inspiring Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The suspect’s site proclaims itself “a new, hard-hitting exposé of the Jew conspiracy to destroy the white gene-pool.” A posting attributed to von Brunn on another Web site, antichrist.net, calls both Christianity and the Holocaust “hoaxes.” “‘Christianity’ destroyed Roman Civilization. The ‘Holocaust’ religion is destroying Western civilization. The Aryan gene-pool dies, ‘unwept, unhonored and unsung,'” the item states.
