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July 4th, 1999 Midwest Shooting Spree
July 5, 1999 SALEM, Illinois (CNN) -- A man thought to be the gunman who targeted minorities in a deadly drive-by shooting spree that started in the Chicago area and spread to other Illinois towns and Bloomington, Indiana, died after a high-speed chase Sunday night in Salem, Illinois, FBI sources said. Word of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith's death came from FBI sources in Chicago. Other FBI sources said he killed himself during a high-speed chase in the south-central Illinois town parallel to St. Louis. Smith, 21, described as a white supremacist, apparently was driving a van that had been carjacked after ditching his light blue 1994 Ford Taurus. It was the Taurus that investigators believe was used in a shooting spree that began Friday night and ended Sunday morning, killing two men and wounding eight others -- blacks, Orthodox Jews, a Korean and other Asians. The dead men were Ricky Byrdsong, black former basketball coach of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Won-Joon Yoon, a Korean graduate student at Indiana University in Bloomington. The chase by Salem police ended when the driver of the van pulled out a gun and shot himself below the chin, FBI sources said. The van then crashed and the driver was taken to a hospital where he died. According to these FBI sources, a preliminary physical description of the driver matches that of Benjamin Smith, 21, a 6-footer weighing 135 pounds with a tattoo on his chest saying "Sabbath Breaker." One FBI source told CNN that "the blue Ford Taurus registered to Benjamin Smith was discovered in the vicinity of the high-speed chase." There were no reported injuries in connection with the carjacking. Manhunt focused on interstate highwaysA multi-state manhunt had been launched after the most recent shooting, outside a Korean church in Bloomington, Indiana on Sunday. The manhunt focused on interstate highways, utilizing state police helicopters and teams of FBI agents. The blue Taurus had been spotted shortly after that shooting on Indiana state road 46 headed east and later going south on Interstate 65. A warrant for Smith's arrest was issued in Monroe County, Indiana, of which Bloomington is a part, charging him with murder. The other shootings all occurred in Illinois and the Chicago-area task force coordinating that investigation had stopped short of naming him as a suspect. Espoused right-wing ideasSmith had attended Indiana University in Bloomington, where the most recent victim, Yoon, 26, was set to begin his doctoral studies in computer science this fall. His parents were headed to Bloomington from Korea and planned to take his body back to Seoul Wednesday. The university's Internet Web page listed a Benjamin Nathaniel Smith who was a junior majoring in criminal justice. Richard McKaig, the Indiana University dean of students who met with Smith last year, said Smith wrote articles in the student newspaper "talking about the separation of races." "There's no question you would call him a supremacist," he said. Observed in car near Bloomington churchEarlier, in an interview with CNN, Bloomington Police Chief Jim Kennedy said Smith had been observed sitting in a light blue Ford Taurus outside the church on Sunday shortly before Yoon was shot. He fired four times, hitting the victim twice. Authorities in Indiana and Illinois said the same car, a 1994 light blue Ford Taurus with a broken side window, was used in all the shootings they believe are linked. The license number is 53J 919 and registered in Bloomington to Smith. But authorities said he may have changed plates at some point Sunday to Illinois tags. "Our investigation is centering on Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, who played a role in the Chicago shootings," said Kennedy. "The car described there is the same one used here." Kennedy, who called Smith a right-wing extremist, said he was once a member of a white-supremacist group called the World Church of the Creator. Kennedy said he had confronted Smith when he was distributing anti-minority literature for a group about a year ago. "He was involved in the distribution of anti-minority and anti-Semitic literature in Bloomington last year and he was a student at Indiana University last year," said Kennedy. Kennedy said spent bullets recovered from the shooting scene in Bloomington would undergo ballistics tests for a comparison with spent bullets recovered in all the Chicago shootings, which came from .22-caliber and a .380 semi-automatic. Hayes said the only shootings linked by forensic evidence based on shell casings so far were two in Chicago Friday night and the one in suburban Skokie, Illinois. The rest of the cases are linked by the car and witness descriptions of the gunman. A small caliber handgun was found in Springfield, Hayes said. Attacks began Friday in ChicagoFriday, July 2
(AP) -- Pyung Ho Kim and his friend and neighbor Won-Joon Yoon spent Sunday morning watching tennis together before heading to the Korean United Methodist Church in this college town. As they walked side-by-side up to the church door, Kim was startled by what he thought were firecrackers. Suddenly, Yoon collapsed onto Kim, and both fell to the sidewalk. "He fell on me and I reached around and there was blood on the back of his T-shirt," Kim said. "I still didn't realize it was a bullet hole." Yoon died from two shots in the back. Police believe the 26-year-old doctoral student at Indiana University was the latest victim in a weekend shooting spree targeting minorities in Illinois and Indiana.A man believed to have committed the shootings, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, killed himself late Sunday. "How can you possibly imagine that kind of thing happening at the church?" Kim said. "If the church is not safe, what is? I still don't believe that I'm alive. It could've been me." In Chicago on Friday night, a black man was killed, six Orthodox Jews were wounded and shots also were fired at an Asian-American couple. Police believe the same gunman fired at blacks and Asians in Springfield, Illinois, and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, on Saturday. One of the Jewish victims of Friday's shootings said he's used to being stared at by people unfamiliar with his faith, but he saw something more unnerving in the eyes of the gunman. "I got the sense he was enjoying himself," the man told the Chicago Sun-Times from his hospital bed. "He had this predator look to him. The 34-year-old man asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution. Another hospitalized victim, Gideon Sapir, 34, said he was a former captain in the Israeli army and found it ironic that he was shot while walking home from a synagogue in Chicago. "He (the gunman) didn't say anything, and I had no opportunity to see him," Sapir told Israeli Army radio. "I wasn't trying to see who it was, I was trying to get out of the line of fire and protect my children." He said the shots were fired from inside a light blue Ford Taurus that stopped in front of him. "I pushed down my son who was near me, I turned around and lay down on top of him," Sapir said. "Apparently as I was turning around, I was hit by a bullet." With the suspect at large Sunday night, many minority students in Bloomington were too afraid to give their names when they discussed the attacks with a reporter. One black student, Joel Ligue, 22, who is from the Ivory Coast, was sitting on a lawn in front of his dorm waiting for the fireworks display to begin at the football stadium several blocks away. "I'm a scared person," he said. "I'm too scared to go to the fireworks." Suspect in racial shooting spree was well known in college town July 5, 1999 BLOOMINGTON, Indiana (AP) -- The man suspected in a deadly shooting spree targeting blacks, Jews and Asians told a student newspaper last year that the American government favors minorities at the expense of whites. "I think it is pretty clear that our government has turned against white people," Benjamin Nathaniel Smith told Indiana University's student newspaper in an article that appeared July 4, 1998. Smith -- a wiry criminal justice major -- apparently shot himself to death late Sunday night as he fled police in southern Illinois after carjacking a van. He spoke to the newspaper after he tucked leaflets touting his white supremacist beliefs beneath the windshield wipers of about 1,000 cars at the Bloomington campus, 60 miles south of Indianapolis. Those fliers bore the mark of the Illinois-based white supremacist group World Church of the Creator and contained a rambling history of the United States, which it said was formed by heroic white people. It concluded that "Our people, the Great White Race, are slaves to a deceitful, alien government, a controlled media, and a suicidal religion." One of Smith's ex-girlfriends didn't think the timing of the shootings was a coincidence. "This is his Independence Day from the government, from everything," Elizabeth Sahr told the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois. "He is not going to stop until he's shot dead. He's not going to surrender," she said Sunday. "He's not going to give up until he leaves this world." She said Smith, now 21, was emotionally and physically abusive but kept his racist and anti-Semitic views to himself throughout much of their one-year relationship. "I only found out towards the end. He was completely anti-Semitic, completely racist -- especially towards Asians, Jews and African Americans," Ms. Sahr told the Daily Illini. When he wasn't distributing white supremacist leaflets in liberal Bloomington, Smith was a regular contributor to the opinion pages of the Indiana Daily Student, penning letters under the nickname "August Smith". In a June 11, 1998, letter to the editor, he defended his latest batch of leaflets. "It is true that the fliers were racially oriented, but to label them racist, bigoted or prejudiced demonstrates bias," he wrote. Smith also lashed out at affirmative action policies and said that while minority students on campus had university-endorsed groups they could join, white students had nowhere to turn. The Daily Illini reported that Smith was a student at the University of Illinois from September 1996 to February 1998, when he was expelled. Urbana police said he had several run-ins with campus police, including for drug possession. Smith attended IU from the summer of 1998 through the spring of 1999. He left Bloomington in mid-May for Illinois, where he was born and raised, Richard McKaig, IU's dean of students, told the Herald-Times of Bloomington. Enrollment records showed Smith was from Northfield, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Anti-Defamation League said Smith was arrested in late April in connection with distributing racist and anti-Semitic literature in Wilmette, another Chicago suburb. Village Trustee Frank Whitehand said he believes the Wilmette case is pending in court. Harlan Loeb, Midwest counsel for the ADL, said that the organization has been tracking Smith's activities for years. "Benjamin Smith has been on our radar screen for quite some time, which is particularly tragic for someone so young," Loeb said. "He is representative of the aimless, directionless young adult that is searching desperately for affiliation and tragically has found that kinship with organized hatred and bigotry." |
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