Midwest Shootings -- Smith Had Preached Hate For Several Years

THE SUSPECT in this weekend's shootings started forming racist beliefs as a teen, but the 21-year-old began his public proclamations when he befriended a white supremacist.

The white supremacist who police believe killed two and wounded several people during three days of racist mayhem in Illinois and Indiana had been preaching hate and colliding with authorities for more than two years when he began his shooting outburst.

And although Benjamin Nathaniel Smith's racist beliefs apparently started taking shape when he was a young teenager, the 21-year-old began his public proclamations around the time he became friends in college with the minister of a white-supremacist church.

Smith died late Sunday after shooting himself three times, authorities said. None of the officers fired, and Smith didn't appear to shoot at them, police said.

Smith was alive when handcuffed but was pronounced dead a short time later at a hospital.

A .22-caliber handgun and a .380-caliber handgun found with Smith were consistent with the guns used in the shootings.

A federal agent today said that Smith had obtained the weapons last month from an illegal gun dealer in the Peoria area. Jerry Singer, a special agent for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said Smith bought a Bryco .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun on June 26 - days after he was turned away from a licensed gun shop. Then on June 29, Smith bought a .22-caliber pistol, Singer said.

Singer says the ATF had already been investigating the unlicensed dealer before Smith bought the guns.

Skokie police Sgt. Michael Ruth, a spokesman for the task force overseeing the case, said earlier today that investigators had determined that Smith tried to make a purchase at a Peoria Heights gun dealer June 23. He said Smith was turned down because a background check showed that one of his ex-girlfriends had filed an order for protection against him.

Yesterday, police raised the total of nonfatal shootings attributed to Smith from seven to nine, naming him as the prime suspect in a Saturday shooting in Springfield, Ill., and another in Decatur that left two black men wounded. Police were awaiting results of ballistics tests for confirmation.

Where he grew up

Smith was reared in upper-middle-class suburbs of Chicago. As a freshman in high school, he sometimes wielded a menacing-looking crossbow that scared neighborhood children and their parents.

Ed Murray, 47, who lives across the street from the flagstone-faced, four-bedroom house in which Smith grew up, said even his parents - Beverly Smith, 50, a real-estate agent and onetime village trustee, and her physician husband, Kenneth, 54 - were reclusive by Wilmette, Ill., standards.

Upscale high school

Benjamin Smith went to the upscale and academically renowned New Trier High School in nearby Winnetka, where he graduated in 1996. That year, he also pleaded guilty to a battery charge in the suburb of Skokie and was sentenced to a year of court supervision and drug counseling.

The following year, his parents sold their house for $555,000 and moved to a more modest frame house near a commercial area about three miles north in Northfield.

Neighbors said Kenneth Smith, who had been an internist associated with Northwestern University Medical Center, had given up his private practice. The Smiths, who have declined to talk to the media, have two sons younger than Benjamin.

Between the time the Smith family moved away from Wilmette and last April, when Benjamin Smith returned to his old Wilmette neighborhood to distribute scores of 32-page white supremacist pamphlets to his former neighbors, he appears to have developed stridently racist views. At the same time, he appears to have retained ties with high school friends holding similar views.

In the fall of 1996, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, first in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and then switched to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

He met Matt Hale, leader of the white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, who was then studying law. The two became friends, apparently bonding over a shared belief in the inferiority of blacks, Jews and "the mud races."

Over the next three years, Smith evolved into one of the church's most virulent parishioners.

But the "genesis of my racial awakening began in the eighth grade," he wrote in a March issue of the church's newsletter, "The Struggle."

"The Jew teacher began with the `slaughtering' of the Indians by white pioneers and settlers," Smith wrote. "He then moved to the `evils' of black slavery, and ended with the `murder of 6 million Jews.' . . . The entire class was mind-manipulation, pure and simple, but then it happened. . . . The L.A. race riots broke out overnight. I saw scenes of (blacks) burning down the City of Angels and dragging whites from their cars for no reason other than the color of their skin. The experience was brutal and frightening. . . . What would whites do if a full-scale race war broke out?"

Run-ins with police

Smith had several run-ins with campus police during his year-and-a-half tenure at the University of Illinois, said Lt. Mike Metzler of the Urbana Police Department. At one point, he and Hale were questioned for allegedly stuffing racist leaflets into the mailboxes of black law students.

After one run-in with police, he reportedly demanded that he be called "Erwin Rommel" - the World War II German field marshal.

Smith was expelled in February 1998 for allegedly possessing drug paraphernalia and striking his then-girlfriend, Elizabeth Sahr.

Sahr met Smith during her freshman year, and they dated throughout most of 1997. Sahr said Smith was physically, emotionally and verbally abusive.

Sahr said she didn't know of Smith's beliefs until near the end of their relationship.

Hours before Smith's death Sunday, Sahr told the University of Illinois student newspaper that the shooting rampage was likely his Independence Day celebration and predicted he would not be taken alive.

On to Indiana

In the summer of 1998, Smith enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington, changing his major to English and later to criminal justice, according to school officials.

Almost immediately, he made his presence known - albeit through a pen name, Benjamin "August" Smith, which refers to Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, according to World Church of the Creator documents. He employed the name when writing racially biased letters to the editor of the school paper and mailing anti-Semitic leaflets to a school Jewish group.

One of the Smiths' former neighbors in Wilmette, also said that Benjamin Smith adopted the name "August" because he regarded "Benjamin" as too Jewish.

But Smith's neighbors in a largely minority student apartment complex did not realize the odd, distant and somewhat unfriendly Ben Smith in their building was the Benjamin "August" Smith, who quickly earned a reputation in Bloomington, Ind.

"This building is 80 percent minority; he had blacks on both sides and above him," said Tyrese Alexander, a 23-year-old black student who lived in the apartment next to Smith's. "He never let on that he was Benjamin `August' Smith. There was no intensity in his eyes, no threat in his character. We had discussed (Benjamin `August' Smith) in class, and I never knew I was living next to this guy."

Someone seemed to know his identity. Neighbors said they believed he was asked to leave his apartment two months ago because the windows of his unit were broken repeatedly. The incidents were widely believed to be in retaliation for his racist views, residents said.

Over the summer and into the fall, Smith and another church member named David Carne passed out thousands of racist leaflets. For their efforts, the church named the two "Creators of the Month," an award for energetic members, for the month of August.

Summoned at school

In September, university Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students Richard McKaig summoned Smith for violating the university's rules on where and when fliers can be posted.

Smith stopped distributing his pamphlets on campus but continued to spread them throughout town - prompting a massive anti-hate rally last November.

As the crowd of 500 residents and students in Bloomington, Ind., snaked down the college town's main boulevard, the group faced a lone protester who was carrying a placard that read, "No hate speech means no free speech."

The bearer of the placard was Benjamin Nathaniel Smith.

Compiled from the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Associated Press.