http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/070699ill-shootings.html

July 6, 1999

Midwest Gunman Who Shot 11 Had Engaged in Acts of Racism at 2 Universities

Related Articles Interactive Chronology: Rampage in the Midwest Suspect in Shooting Rampage Killed Himself, F.B.I. Says (July 5) Former Northwestern Coach Shot to Death (July 4)

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By BILL DEDMAN

CHICAGO -- Hate arrived in the neighborhoods of Indiana University, in Bloomington, in the early morning darkness of spring 1998, as a criminal justice major named Benjamin Nathaniel Smith drove his light blue Ford Taurus down residential streets, tossing little plastic bags of pamphlets into yards.

The brochures asserted that the white race was being crowded out by Jews, blacks and the "mud people," his derogatory term for Asians.

Hate apparently arrived again over the Fourth of July weekend, as August Smith -- no longer Benjamin, he told a journalist, because it sounded too Jewish --returned to his old haunts in Indiana and Illinois. According to the police and the F. B. I., Smith, a 21-year-old college student, drove the same light blue Ford slowly, firing one handgun and then another at Jews, blacks and Asians.

The deadly visit to Bloomington on Sunday came near the end of a three-day tear of violence in two states. Before it was over, two men, one black and one Korean, were dead, both shot in the back, and nine other Jews, Asians and blacks had been wounded. It ended with a suicide in rural southern Illinois late Sunday night, when Smith stole a van and during a chase by the police shot himself three times, the last during a struggle with officers after the van crashed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.

Those who encountered Benjamin Smith say they never saw him commit racially motivated violence before last week, but they saw him become more willing to express his racist views. The places where the shootings occurred may not have been random, the police and the F. B. I. say. Smith shot at Orthodox Jews, blacks and Asians on Friday night in the northern suburbs of Chicago, where he grew up. Ricky Byrdsong, 43, a former basketball coach at Northwestern University, was killed.

Then on Saturday he shot at blacks and Asians near the University of Illinois, where he quit in February 1998 before being expelled over domestic violence charges, possessing marijuana and posting racist literature.

On Sunday he returned to Bloomington, where he had just completed his third year of college at Indiana University. There, authorities say, he killed Won Joon Yoon, 26, a Korean-American man, at a church near the university, where his one-man flurry of white power pamphlets had scared the community into marching against hate speech.

Smith grew up in the affluent northern suburbs of Chicago, in Wilmette and Northfield.

Neighbors say his father is a doctor, his mother a real estate agent and former town trustee. He has two younger brothers.

"Where he got his racist ideas, who knows?" said Ruth Hanna, a neighbor of the family for 16 years in Wilmette. "There was no indication it came from the family."

The quotation that Benjamin Smith chose for his senior yearbook in 1996 at New Trier High School was "Sic semper tyrannis," Latin for "thus ever to tyrants," the same slogan spoken by John Wilkes Booth after he shot Lincoln.

Smith went to college that fall at the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana, at first in the school of agriculture, consumer and environmental sciences. He lived in an elite dormitory, Allen Hall, a "living and learning community" known for its progressive program of visiting authors and artists of many cultures and points of view, university officials said.

In an interview last year with an alternative newspaper, Smith said he had no racist views until he entered the university. He said felt uncomfortable around so many foreign students and professors. He started to read neo-Nazi literature and met Matthew F. Hale, of East Peoria, Ill., who was recruiting on campus for his World Church of the Creator, an anti-black, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish organization.

"When he first met me he had mentioned violence," Hale said. "And I said, 'That's not the way to go, brother.' "

Smith came to the attention of the Illinois campus police in the fall of his sophomore year. In a single week in October 1997, he was accused of beating his girlfriend, Elizabeth Ann Sahr, in his dorm room, then of possessing marijuana, then of fighting with other students, university officials said.

"He tried to keep his racism and his anti-Semitism hidden," Ms. Sahr said in a telephone interview. "People really need to pay more attention to domestic violence and racism."

In January 1998, because of the charges, Smith was placed on probation and required to undergo counseling, to take an ethics class and to perform community service, according to university records.

Ten days later, he was confronted about racist literature posted in the dorm. "He vehemently insisted on his First Amendment rights, but didn't admit he had done it," said Bill Murphy, associate chancellor for public affairs.

The next month, there were more complaints against Smith: peeking into dormitory windows, and unconfirmed reports that he had acquired weapons, Murphy said. Then Smith filed his own complaint with the university's office of conflict resolution, saying the dormitory administration was mistreating him.

A week before his disciplinary hearing on the latest charges in February 1998, university officials consulted with his parents, and Smith withdrew from the university, signing a statement promising never to return. "If he had not withdrawn, he would have been dismissed," Murphy said.

That summer of 1998, Smith enrolled at the University of Indiana, in Bloomington, where he became a vocal exponent of racial views. He switched from computer science to criminal justice, joining a department known for its interest in crimes against racial minorities. A recent symposium is an example of the curriculum: "Challenging Stereotypes and Encouraging Empathy in the Criminal Justice Classroom."

Soon Smith was placing leaflets of the White Nationalist Party on cars on campus. After a university official met with him, Smith wrote a long letter as "August Smith" to The Indiana Daily Student in June 1998 criticizing the university's attempt to curb his free speech rights.

"It was true that the fliers were racially oriented," Smith wrote, "but to label them racist, bigoted or prejudiced demonstrates bias."

He opposed the university's policy of affirmative action as "racist" and called attention to clubs for nonwhite students, like the Black Student Union.

"But where do white people go to discuss their issues and concerns?" he wrote. "There is no White Student Union established to help white students organize and react to the problems our people face. This is why the White Nationalist Party was established."

By the Fourth of July weekend last year, Smith was placing 2,000 fliers under windshields in a wide area of Bloomington. The text, from the World Church of the Creator, extolled the "Great White Race" and assailed what it called "a deceitful, alien government, a controlled media, and a suicidal religion."

The Mayor of Bloomington, John Fernandez, met Smith twice, at a rally and on a radio call-in show. "All indications were that he didn't have any history of violence," Fernandez said.

Smith began to give interviews. He offered his views on violence to Lisa Sorg, managing editor of The Bloomington Independent, as they sat in the Encore Cafe in Bloomington last summer.

"We believe we can legally come to power through nonviolence," Smith said, "but Hale says if they try to restrict our legal means then we have no recourse but to resort to terrorism and violence."

Smith said he had received death threats, but was not afraid. "I'm more afraid for my race than myself," he said. "Nature isn't concerned with the individual, but with the species."

He said he still spoke with his parents, but did not have the friends at home that he used to have. He called his former friends "race traitors."

Although some members of the Church of the Creator wanted to partition the nation into areas for different minorities, he told Ms. Sorg that he wanted to expel racial and religious minorities.

"They won't be very happy to leave, but they'll probably end up wanting to leave," he said, Ms. Sorg recalled.

He said his career goal was to be a lawyer. This spring he testified for Hale, the World Church leader, as Hale tried to get a law license in Illinois.

Ms. Sorg said Smith came across as very calm, his voice flat, his eyes dead. He seemed to have an almost reverential devotion to Hale, she said. By November 1998, Bloomington residents had decided to respond.

"This was civic pornography," said Jeffrey Willsey, an organizer of a group called Bloomington United, formed in response to the leafletting. "We felt that because it was in our yards, and there was a clear attempt to psychologically intimidate our community, it was important to respond to it."

Smith wrote again to the student paper in November, saying that the community march did not prove that he was not a minority of one.

"The fact is that there has been no massive rejection of the World Church's materials or ideas," Smith wrote. "The rally was the product of a diverse gang of special interests groups, none of which represents the silent white majority of the student body. Most students do not want a ban of "hate speech.' "

He also said the pamphlets were not hateful. "Being familiar with the literature, I must argue that it is not so much 'hate literature' as much as truth that reflects poorly on nonwhites," Smith wrote. "The World Church stands for free speech and open dialogue and is willing to debate the issues at any time."

His writings and distribution of pamphlets sparked a campus debate on tolerance. The anthropology faculty wrote a letter to the editor to quarrel with some of the racial history in Smith's pamphlets.

"We talked about Benjamin 'August' Smith the person in my Race and Ethnicity class last semester," said Tyrese Alexander, 23, a black student who lived a few doors down from Smith. "But I had no idea I was living next to him."

Smith lived in Touchdown Terrace, a somewhat run-down, 30-unit student apartment complex with many minority residents. His neighbors said he glared at minority resident but did not act violently. But someone kept breaking the windows of his car and his apartment as often as once a week, apparently in retaliation for his writings.

It is not clear what set off last week's violence, but Hale, the World Church leader, thinks that he knows. Hale's latest attempt to become a lawyer in Illinois was rebuffed on Friday by a state panel. Smith had testified for Hale at a hearing in April, praising Hale's legal means.

"He testified that he might be in jail now if it wasn't for me," Hale said. When asked if the adverse decision on Friday might have led to the killings, Hale said: "I do. I very much do."

That Benjamin Smith is dead does not make Bloomington feel safer.

"Ben Smith may have taken his own life, but there's still far too much hatred out there, in the community, in the world," said Rabbi Sue L. Shifron, a founder of Bloomington United.

A Child of Privilege Who Grew Into a Supremacist

By William Claiborne Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 6, 1999; Page A8

WILMETTE, Ill., July 5 – In Indian Hills Estates in this prosperous North Shore Chicago suburb, the kind of neighborhood where block parties are popular and residents pride themselves on being social with one another when they walk their dogs, Benjamin Smith was conspicuous even before he was arrested for distributing antisemitic pamphlets last April.

The 21-year-old white supremacist college junior who authorities say waged a three-day shooting rampage in Illinois and Indiana that targeted blacks, Jews and Asians – leaving two men dead and nine others wounded before he shot himself dead Sunday – stood out in the quiet community. As a freshman in high school, Smith sometimes wielded a menacing-looking crossbow that scared other children and their parents.

He also withdrew into dark, resentful moods and occasionally stared at people in a way that one neighbor said made her think of evil. He was known to neighbors to be an aficionado of Dungeons and Dragons, the Gothic computer game of violence, something that his mother, Beverly Smith confided to others on the street was worrisome to her.

"He was different in a way that made me afraid of him," said one neighbor, asking to speak without being named because she feared Smith might have friends who could harm her. "I was glad when he went off to college and they moved away."

Ed Murray, 47, who lives across the street from the flagstone-faced, four-bedroom house on Pawnee Road where Smith grew up, said even Beverly Smith, 50, a real estate agent and onetime village trustee, and her physician husband, Kenneth, 54, were reclusive by Indian Hills standards.

"We knew there were oddities, but we didn't think there was a social basis to them," Murray said. "They were unusual in the sense that they kept to themselves and the father wouldn't talk to anybody. ... They weren't much interested in socializing."

Benjamin Smith went to the upscale and academically renowned New Trier High School in nearby Winnetka, where he graduated in 1996, writing an entry in his class yearbook, Sic Semper Tyrannis, or "Thus ever to tyrants." The following year his parents sold their house for $555,000 and moved to a more modest frame house on a busy street near a commercial area about three miles north in Northfield, near Interstate 94.

Neighbors said Kenneth Smith, who had been an internist associated with Northwestern University Medical Center, had given up his private practice. The blinds were drawn at the Smiths' home today and nobody answered at the door until a Northfield police officer arrived and was let in after asking a reporter to leave.

But between the time that he, his parents and 12-year-old brother, Jeffrey, moved away from Wilmette and last April, when he returned to his old Indians Hills neighborhood to distribute scores of 32-page white supremacist pamphlets in plastic bags to his former neighbors, Smith appears to have developed stridently racist views at college. At the same time, he appears to have retained ties with New Trier High School friends with the same views.

One of the Smiths' former neighbors here said that when Benjamin Smith, who adopted the name "August" because he regarded "Benjamin" as too Jewish, was arrested by Wilmette police in April for handing out hate literature, he was accompanied by a female friend, Christine Weiss, 19, a former New Trier student. The two were charged with littering for leaving hate literature on front lawns. The outcome of the charges could be not determined.

According to Harlan Loeb, Midwest counsel for the Anti-Defamation League, Weiss is the former girlfriend of Patrick Langball, who was charged in 1997 with painting a swastika on a Northfield synagogue. The same year Langball was arrested in connection with a highly publicized campaign to recruit New Trier students into the white supremacist movement.

"There's been a number of students involved in a nascent neo-Nazi cell at New Trier – a small number," Loeb said. "They harass other students and other students harass them."

After graduating from high school in 1996, Smith enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, first in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and then switching to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

It was in Urbana where a drive-by gunman police believe was Smith opened fire on six men of Asian descent, wounding one in the leg.

Smith attended the Urbana university until last spring, when he withdrew after a series of contacts with law officers, including one for drug possession, authorities said. After one run-in with police, he reportedly demanded that he be called "Erwin Rommel" – the World War II German field marshal.

But it was at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he enrolled as an English major and then switched to criminal justice, where Smith gained notoriety as a white power zealot and follower of the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist group based in East Peoria, Ill.

In frequent letters and opinion contributions to the university newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student, Smith complained bitterly that the U.S. government had turned away from whites in favor of minorities and that with the advent of affirmative action programs, white students had nowhere to turn.

Writing under the name "August Smith," the young sophomore defended the racist literature he had been distributing on campus, declaring, "It is true that the fliers were racially oriented, but to label them racist, bigoted or prejudiced demonstrates bias."

Bearing the letterhead of the World Church of the Creator and recounting a rambling history of the United States, the pamphlets asserted: "Our people, the Great White Race, are slaves to a deceitful, alien government, a controlled media and a suicidal religion." They demanded every race have its own independent nation and that the government ban all immigration and homosexual activity.

In a student newspaper interview, Smith said he came from an average white family and that his beliefs about race did not start until he went to Indiana and observed a "large influx of Asians and Mexicans and blacks."

"There wasn't a single incident that traumatized me. It was just a love for my race, a slow awakening of consciousness," he told the newspaper.

He said that while he tended to leave minorities alone, his goal was to "wake up my race" and achieve a "pure" white America.

Last November, liberal Bloomington finally responded to Smith's one-man hate campaign, as a crowd of 500 students and local residents marched through town in opposition to his leafleting. Openly acknowledging he was responsible, Smith appeared alone to face the demonstrators, carrying a placard declaring, "No hate speech means no free speech."

Richard McKaig, vice chancellor and dean of students at the university, said that he called Smith into his office shortly after he arrived at IU last Spring and told him about complaints that he was distributing hate literature on campus.

"He wasn't confrontational in any way. He just said 'I'm just passing out fliers. This is America,' " McKaig said. He said that after the meeting Smith moved his leaflet campaign downtown.

Last year, on Independence Day, Smith placed hundreds of white supremacist leaflets under windshields around Bloomington. When asked whether the shooting spree last weekend was related to the holiday, Bloomington Police Capt. William Parker said, "It raises questions in our minds."

Smith attended Indiana University through last May, completing his sophomore year, but not re-enrolling for the next academic year. School officials said then, however, that he could re-enroll at any time before next fall.

After leaving Indiana, Smith moved to an apartment in Northbrook, a northwest Chicago suburb.

Special correspondent Kari Lydersen, research editor Margot Williams and researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

© 1999 The Washington Post Company