I’m going to be on the road for a few days, mostly working with First Nations people in northern Maine about suicide prevention and school shootings, so I wanted to post a timely entry here that looks at the overlap between Bigfoot and a school shooter, the Red Lake, Minnesota killer who caused the second most deadly modern school outrage on our children.

On March 21, 2005, Red Lake, Minnesota high school student Jeffrey James Weise (August 8, 1988 – March 21, 2005) killed a total of ten people. First he killed his grandfather and grandfather’s wife, 32-year old Michelle Sigana, who was his grandfather’s police force partner. Later he shot and killed seven people at Red Lake High School, including a teacher and a security guard. As many as 15 others were wounded in the school shooting. After briefly exchanging fire with police officers following the murders, Weise died by his own hand. As far as I know, everyone he killed was Native.

The incident began at home in the afternoon when Weise apparently shot his grandfather and Sigana. Weise then drove his grandfather’s patrol vehicle to the high school, propelling it into the building at around 3:00 p.m. CST. Wearing a reservation-police-issued bulletproof vest, likely taken from the stolen reservation police patrol vehicle, Weise killed the third victim (the security guard) immediately upon arriving at the school.

When the police first arrived, Weise briefly opened fire on them before going into the school. Once in there, he was said to be “waving and smiling” as he shot students at random. An attempt to break into an English classroom was thwarted by a quick-thinking teacher who had taken the precaution to lock the door.

Media coverage of Jeff Weise after the shooting was intense. Weise left electronic footprints all across the internet, on websites such as nazi.org, offering, as Wikipedia noted, “an unusual level of public insight into his thoughts and the hardships in his life that led to his depression and fascination with dark imagery in the months and years prior to the shootings.”

Besides being a neo-Nazi, liking Hitler, seeing white owls, having dreams about shooting, Weise also was interested in Bigfoot.

Needless to say, people interested in Bigfoot are not all killers, and all serial, mass, and rampage killers are not Bigfoot fans. But the overlap between the two in this case was worthy of my sociological attention. Such twilight language and coded messages exist all the more overtly in this World Wide Web age, and there’s no reason to ignore them and not examine what we might discover. (In this vein, I investigate past school shootings and the twilight language in my 2004 book, The Copycat Effect.)

The simple fact is the Red Lake school shooter liked to talk about Bigfoot, and we have the records to explore how Bigfoot worked into his cosmos.

Red Lake’s Jeff Weise

Jeff Weise would post as “Weise” at the Above Top Secret forum.

Here is “Weise” talking about Sasquatch among the Ojibwa, on 6-11-2004 (November 6th):

Almost everyone I know has a sasqautch story, almost everyone one has a person in their familly who’s probably seem him. At least thats how it is where I live, (on a Reservation in Minnesota).

I’ve asked a few elders about bigfoot, and in my language (Ojibwe) we have a name for him. I forgot it, and barely could pronounce it, but he exists in our neck of the woods, at least I believe he does. I heard a story from my cousin (he works in Tribal Government), he told me that a guy he worked with was out in the forest alone on a fast. He was near a swampy area, and midway through his fast he saw Bigfoot walking through the swamp, reaching down into the water along the way and pulling up a certain type of weed and slinging it over his shoulder.

The weed from the swamp he was pulling out was supposedly some kind of herbal medicine used by Native medicine men.

And to feed some of you peoples interest in the possibility of a sasquatch and alien connection? The lake I live by (Red Lake) is one heck of a big lake, and if you sit out at the beach on a clear summer night you’ll see lights over the lake. Everyone says they’re UFO’s, I believe that too. There was a UFO sighting in broad daylight a few years back, it was over the lake, people said it looked like a metal disc. Anyway, alot of people were reporting power outages and cars stalling on them around the exact same time.

I love living in this lively place…

Later on 11-11-2004 (November 11, 2004), responding to this quote (filled with incorrect info) from Brainiac: “Hi! The Bigfoot idea was recently found out to be made up, by the same guy that supposedly capture the creature on film in 1974. He said on his death bed that he made the whole thing up. The footage was real, but it was footage of a man in a gorilla costume… ”

Weise rather appropriately writes:

Lol, sorry, but that just wont fly in my part of the woods.

We’ve actually seen him, in the “flesh,” not just a video. The stories of bigfoot, as previously stated, have been around for hundreds of years, not just since the Patterson film.

Perhaps not coincidentally, on February 10, 2005, there were reports of tracks of Sasquatch being found on the Red Lake Reservation. Here are examples of two photographs (below) circulated on the web at the time. While initially they might look like bear prints, upon closer examination, more clearly defined Bigfoot-type toe prints are visible.

On March 21, 2004, the focus was on Red Lake, Minnesota and Jeff Weise’s carnage, and the Red Lake Bigfoot track investigations faded into the background. A year later, the talk was only of the Red Lake school shooting, not Bigfoot. This week, it may be about more school shootings, but I hope not. I’d rather be talking about Bigfoot, but to get there, I have to do what I’m doing, for awhile.