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 The online activity by Frazier Glenn Cross follows a trend in
which prolific posters on hate online forums are becoming
"disproportionately responsible" for racist murders and mass
killings, according to a report released on Thursday by the Southern
Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights organization.
The report said nearly 100 people in the last five years have been
murdered by frequent users of one white supremacist website,
Stormfront. The site describes itself as a community of "White
Nationalists" and "the voice of the new, embattled White minority."
"It has been a magnet for the deadly and deranged," said Heidi
Beirich, author of the report.
According to the report, past participants in forums on the website
included Wade Michael Page, an Army veteran who opened fire at a
Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012 killing six people before taking
his own life.
Another was Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian extremist who
massacred 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree in Oslo and at a
nearby youth summer camp in 2011.
Stormfront owner Don Black told Reuters that Cross had never been
allowed to post on his site, and that Breivik and other killers
named by the SPLC had been banned.
"We're obviously a big website, and any site is likely to have a few
unstable people pass through. Facebook, Twitter, and particularly
Craigslist have had their share," Black added in a statement he
posted on his website.
"Like all good propaganda, it's a mix of truth, half-truth and
outrageous lies," Black wrote of the SPLC.
Frazier Glenn Cross often posted on Stormfront until he was banned
from the site in 2005 after testifying in a trial against white
supremacists, said Mark Potok, a senior fellow with the Southern
Poverty Law Center.
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Law enforcement and human rights groups have identified Cross as a
former senior member of the Ku Klux Klan and someone who has
repeatedly expressed hatred for Jewish people.
Cross, who also goes by the name Glenn Miller, later switched to
another white supremacist forum, Vanguard News Network, where the
center tracked his postings over the last five years.
"These killers are really hiding in plain sight on these forums,"
Beirich said.
Vanguard did not immediately respond to an email to the website
seeking comment.
Cross faces one count of capital murder in the fatal shooting of
Reat Underwood, 14, and his grandfather, William Corporon, 69,
outside a Jewish community center and a charge of first-degree
murder in the death of 53-year-old Terri LaManno. Cross is being
held on a $10 million bond.
Potok called on law enforcement, particularly the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security, to increase its focus on racist online forums.
(Editing by Kevin Gray and Gunna Dickson)
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