![Review-Journal Online]()
HOME PAGE
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
|
Thursday, August 12, 1999
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Furrow started high school in valley, described as lonerThe suspect in an attack on a
Jewish center did not participate in any student activities, yearbooks
show.
By
Joe Schoenmann
Review-Journal
As an adult,
Buford O. Furrow Jr. embraced racism, attending Aryan Nations meetings in
Idaho, marrying into an infamous white supremacist family and, eventually,
confessing to the Jewish community center shootings in California.
But from 1975 until 1977, when he was a
teen-ager, Furrow attended Rancho High School in North Las Vegas, a school
that was then what it is now -- a cultural melting pot of students from
many ethnic backgrounds. The young Furrow would have spent time in
freshmen and sophomore classes among Hispanic, Asian and black students.
Rancho's principal was Mario Monaco,
now 71. He said Wednesday he didn't remember Furrow. But he said Rancho
was not the place where Furrow picked up any racist tendencies.
"Oh, we had those kinds of problems
like every other school, but nothing serious," Monaco said.
Rancho yearbooks show Furrow passed
through school in relative anonymity, without developing ties to
traditional kinds of student activities. Only stamp-size class photos show
he was part of the Rams' community at all.
He's not listed as a member of any
club, he's absent from the rosters of sports teams, his face doesn't
appear amid the crowd shots of homecoming dances, school parades or
football games.
Furrow, now 37, does
not stand out in the memories of longtime Rancho counselor Ken Divich, who
saw thousands of students during his 25 years at the school from 1962 to
1987.
"Had he been a problem, I
probably would have seen him," Divich said Wednesday. "Problems came my
way. It's a good sign that his name doesn't really ring a bell. There
would have been some recall if he had been a problem. Someplace along the
line I would have seen him."
To Rick
Kraske, who was in Furrow's sophomore class, it's peculiar that an
individual could emerge from that setting with a racist mind-set.
Cross-racial friendships were the norm at Rancho when he was a student.
"Rancho had a little ethnic turbulence
in the early '70s," said Kraske, a nurse manager at Sunrise Hospital and
Medical Center.
"But by the time I got
there, it was a tolerant and ethnically diverse environment."
From Las Vegas, Furrow moved with his
mother, Monnie, and father, Buford Sr., to Washington state, where he
graduated in 1979 from Timberline High School in Thurston County. The
elder Furrow had been stationed at Nellis Air Force Base before he retired
as a chief master sergeant in 1977.
From at least 1992 to 1993, the younger Buford lived in Rosamond, Calif.,
a town of 7,000 south of Bakersfield in Kern County. Phil Crosby, Kern
County Sheriff's Department commander, said the only contact Furrow had
with the department was as a witness to an auto theft and a victim of a
petty theft.
"Otherwise, we have
nothing to show that he was involved in racist organizations, no
information of any kind involving weapons or threats or inclinations
toward violence," Crosby said Wednesday.
Furrow's racism seemed solidified by
the mid-1990s. That's when he began working as a security guard for a
white supremacist encampment in Idaho.
Christian Teague, office manager for the Church of Jesus Christ
Christian-Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, said Furrow
attended meetings and was a member of the group's security team. But he
was only an infrequent attendee and was not a registered member of the
organization, she added.
T.J. Leyden, a
former white supremacist and now a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal
Center, a human rights organization in Los Angeles, said Wednesday he
remembered Furrow teaching hand-to-hand combat at the compound in the
mid-1990s.
Teague said her records do
not indicate Furrow ever taught self-defense.
"He must be mistaken," she said of
Leyden.
At the same time, Johnny
Bangerter, organizer of Las Vegas white supremacists in the late 1980s,
remembers Furrow and said he was "very, very active."
Furrow's desire to become involved,
Bangerter guessed, had something to do with his eventual marriage to Debra
Mathews. Mathews is well known to white supremacists because she had been
married to Robert Jay Mathews, founder of the neo-Nazi group known as The
Order. He died in December 1984 during a 35-hour standoff with FBI agents.
Within the past five years -- Teague
didn't know the exact date -- Furrow and Debra Mathews took part in a mass
wedding at the Hayden Lake compound. The two did not get a marriage
license, she said, and separated within the last two years.
Bangerter said he knew Debra Mathews
well, and he was shocked to know Furrow was connected to her.
"I hadn't talked to her in about five
years, but she's a real good person," he said.
Bangerter, now
living in St. George, Utah, with his wife and five children, strongly
condemned the shooting. But he acknowledged that Furrow's actions seem to
fit the mental state of someone seeking attention.
"I think this shooting and his marriage
to Debbie, I think that kind of shows he wants to make a name for
himself," he said. "And that's ... tragic."
Bangerter also said Furrow's behavior
may have stemmed from strategic discussions held at the Hayden Lake
compound in the mid-1990s. It was there, Bangerter said, that Aryan
Nations started talking about breaking up into smaller groups to avoid
detection by federal agents. Larger groups were likened to the Bismarck, a
massive German warship sunk on its maiden voyage in World War II.
"The idea was to break us up into
splinter groups, five-man cells or, better, single-man cells," he said.
"That's a lot of the reason why you don't see many people at the Aryan
Nations meetings anymore."
On the
Internet Wednesday, a racist magazine called the Nationalist Observer also
touted the works of so-called lone wolves in discussing Furrow.
"The lone wolf ... is still at large as
of 5 a.m.," said the answering machine linked to a phone number listed on
the Internet. "White racists, white youth and the growing army of lone
wolves don't give a damn about the occupation government or its laws."
That also fits with the observations of
the Wiesenthal Center. Mark Weitzman, director of the center's Task Force
Against Hate, said there seems to be a "smaller core of racists or
extremists than there had been in the past."
"And they are more inclined to
violence, and they see a race war going on," he continued.
He warned that the attack on children
is not at all surprising.
"The emphasis
on children is an old Nazi emphasis," he said. Then he recited the 14-word
mantra of the American neo-Nazi movement: "We must secure the existence of
our people and a future for white children."
"It shows the emphasis they have on
their children and, conversely, they would recognize other children, Jews
and others, as targets," Weitzman added.
Teague, in Hayden Lake, would not
condemn Furrow's act just because it was directed at children.
"I don't agree with his actions, but
when you're pushed too far, you tend to snap," she said. "Yes, it was
children. But a lot of white children die at the hands of blacks. This is
the action of a lone individual, but it's no secret that I don't like
Jews."
Reaction among Nevada political
leaders and the Las Vegas Jewish community was understandably angry. As
the only Jewish member of Nevada's congressional delegation, Rep. Shelley
Berkley, D-Las Vegas, was particularly outraged by the attack.
Berkley, a member of the House
Judiciary Committee, took the opportunity to promote a hate-crimes bill
that she said Republican committee members are delaying.
"We have a national crisis on our
hands," Berkley said. "This country is awash in violence. And we have a
piece of hate-crimes legislation bottled up in the House that they won't
allow to come to a vote on the floor of the House. It's like, `Hello?' It
would allow the federal government to come in in situations just like what
happened in Granada Hills, and we can't get it out of the committee."
Berkley and Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev.,
also mentioned the need for gun control legislation. The pair favor safety
locks on guns, background checks for all gun buyers and a limit on the
types of ammunition clips manufactured and sold.
"I don't know if these measures would
have prevented this tragedy," Bryan acknowledged, "but the public takes a
look at these types of incidents and thinks, `What is reasonable?' And
they feel these measures are reasonable."
Jason Skoboloff, community director of
the Las Vegas Anti-Defamation League, said Furrows was part of what he
called a "tangled web" of anti-Semitic and racist groups that have cropped
up in the West since the 1970s.
"People
should be aware that these groups do exist in the area," Skoboloff said.
"They travel from Los Angeles, up through Nevada and up to the Northwest"
where he said many of these organizations are headquartered.
The Anti-Defamation League has
monitored at least 20 hate groups in the Las Vegas area, Skoboloff said.
Their recent activities have not been especially violent, more along the
lines of graffiti and hate mail, said Ronni Epstein, executive director of
the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas.
"For the last couple years, it's been relatively quiet," Epstein said.
"That does not mean that we will not be vigilant."
Review-Journal writers Michael Amon,
Lisa Kim Bach, Steve Friess, Natalie Patton and Mike Zapler contributed to
this report.
E-mail this story to a friend:
Give us your FEEDBACK on this
or any story.
1999 BEST OF LAS
VEGAS RESULTS
Fill out our Online Readers'
Poll
![]() |
Printable version of this story
This photo of Buford O. Furrow Jr., center, was taken at the Aryan
Nations National Congress held at Hayden Lake, Idaho, on July 21, 1995.
Johnny Bangerter, in black T-shirt, a former Las Vegas white supremacist,
met Furrow at the event, where he said the lessons of the Oklahoma City
bombing were discussed. Bangerter, now living in St. George, Utah,
strongly condemned the shooting.
Photo by Associated
Press.
Buford Furrow wasn't a joiner during his Las Vegas high school
days. He is seen here as a freshman in a 1976 Rancho High School yearbook
photo.
All
Roads Lead Here
![]()
|
