Jeff Weise

200
Jeff Weise bigraphy, stories - American spree killer

Jeff Weise : biography

August 8, 1988 – March 21, 2005

Jeffrey James "Jeff" Weise (August 8, 1988 – March 21, 2005) was a Native American student at Red Lake Senior High School in Red Lake, Minnesota, located within the Red Lake Indian Reservation of the Ojibwe people. He is known for having murdered a total of nine people in a shooting spree on March 21, 2005. He first killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s companion before going to the reservation high school, where he murdered seven more people and wounded five others.

Before Weise was born, his young parents separated, and Jeff lived mostly with his father and grandparents. From the age of three, he lived with his mother in the Minneapolis area; she later married and had two more children. When Weise was nine, his father committed suicide on the reservation; when he was eleven, his mother suffered brain damage in a car accident and had to be confined to a nursing home. As a result, Jeff Weise was taken from his stepfather in Minneapolis and placed with his father’s family on the reservation. Weise lived primarily with his paternal grandmother and an aunt. Residents of the reservation have suffered high rates of unemployment and poverty, violence and suicide.

Weise struggled in school. In May and June 2004, Weise tried twice to commit suicide and was briefly hospitalized. He was under treatment for depression, and had been prescribed Prozac as an anti-depressant. His case revived the public discussion about the use of Prozac for children and adolescents; the US Food and Drug Administration had published a warning about it in October 2004 as a factor in increased suicides and violence among youths.

Life

Jeffrey James Weise, called "Jeff," was born in 1988 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the only child of 17-year-old Joanne Elizabeth Weise and 21-year-old Daryl "Baby Dash" Allen Lussier, Jr., (March 25, 2005), Salon, 8 August 2005 an unmarried Ojibwe couple from the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota. Only Ojibwe people live on the reservation, located in northwest Minnesota 250 miles north of Minneapolis; it is one of two "closed" reservations in the country. The couple separated before the boy was born.

In November 1988, Joanne’s parents forced her to give up three-month-old Jeff to the care of his father, who lived with his parents and family in Red Lake. In June 1991, when Jeff was nearly three years old, his mother Joanne reclaimed him, and she took him to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. He later claimed in online postings that his mother was alcoholic, and had physically and emotionally abused him.

In 1992, Joanne Weise began dating Timothy Troy DesJarlait. He allegedly also abused Jeff., Washington Post, 25 March 2005, accessed 20 December 2012 The two married on June 27, 1998, after having had two children: a daughter Daphne, born in 1995, and son Sebastian, born in 1997., New York Times 24 March 2005, accessed 18 December 2012

In 1993, Weise’s father "Baby Dash" Lussier married Roma Jean Ryan."Obituary: Daryl Lussier, Jr.," The Pioneer, (Bemidji, Minnesota), 22 July 1997, p. 2 Lussier, Jr. had worked for a time at the Chippewa Trading Post on the reservation and as a logger. On July 21, 1997, when Jeff was nine, his father committed suicide by shooting himself. He had been in a standoff with the Red Lake Police Department for some days in Red Lake.Davey, Monica. “Tribe Buries 3 on a Long Road to Healing,” March 26, 2005, The New York Times, 26 March 2005 His father, Daryl "Dash" Lussier, Sr., a sergeant in the tribal police force, had tried to intervene but was unable to bring a peaceful end.

On March 5, 1999, when Jeff was eleven, his mother was in a car accident, in which a tractor-trailer crashed into the car which her cousin, Elizabeth May Jourdain, was driving. The women had been drinking mid-day. Jourdain died in the accident and Joanne Weise suffered such severe brain damage that she had to be committed to a nursing home in Bloomington, Minnesota and has been unable to live independently. In 2000, Timothy DesJarlait separated from Joanne, and completed the divorce in May 2004. Their custody arrangements covered only the children they had together and not Jeff.Hanners, David. “Web postings show many sides to Weise,” Duluth News-Tribune, 26 March 2005, p. 1A.