The Long List of Murders Committed by White Extremists Since the Oklahoma City Bombing
Slate/June 18, 2015
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
Wednesday's mass murder of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina is the most high-profile example of white extremist terror in the United States since Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. But though not each incident makes national headlines, a tally kept by the Southern Poverty Law Center indicates that the murder of law enforcement officials and innocent civilians by racial supremacists, anti-government paranoiacs, and other believers in white fringe movements has been depressingly common in the two decades since Timothy McVeigh's attack. Below (taken from SPLC's records and confirmed by outside news accounts) is a list of 27 deadly attacks since Oklahoma City—comprising a total of 60 victims—carried out or believed to have been carried out by white extremists.
October 9, 1995. An Amtrak employee is killed when a train derails near Hyder, Arizona because the track it's traveling on has been sabotaged. The perpetrators are never found, but anti-law enforcement propaganda messages from the "Sons of Gestapo" are found near the scene.
April 12, 1996. A neo-Nazi named Larry Wayne Shoemake, who is found to have owned at least 22 firearms and an estimated 20,000 rounds of ammunition, kills a black man in a random Jackson, Mississippi attack.
July 27, 1996 A bomb set by Eric Robert Rudolph, who is affiliated with the "Christian Identity" fundamentalist movement, kills one person at the Atlanta Olympics.
January 29, 1998. Another bomb set by Rudolph kills a man at a Birmingham abortion clinic.
May 29, 1998. Three militia sympathizers named Alan Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean fire 29 shots at a Cortez, Colorado police officer who is trying to apprehend them because they've stolen a water truck, killing him. The three evade capture but are believed to ultimately have died in the desert wilderness surrounding the crime scene.
October 23, 1998. With his wife and children nearby, an abortion provider in Amherst, New York is shot and killed through the window of his home by James Charles Kopp.
July 1, 1999. Brothers Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams, who also have connections to the "Christian Identity" movement, kill a gay couple in Redding, California.
July 2-July 5 1999. Neo-Nazi Benjamin Nathaniel Smith kills black basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong and and a Korean graduate student and wounds nine other non-white victims in a three-day shooting spree.
August 10, 1999. Neo-Nazi Buford Furrow kills a Filipino immigrant after firing 70 shots inside a Jewish community center near Los Angeles.
April 28, 2000. An unemployed immigration attorney named Richard Baumhammers who believes "non-white immigration" should be banned shoots and kills five people in the Pittsburgh area.
December 8, 2003. Steven Bixby kills two police officers in Abbeville, South Carolina during a dispute over the state's decision to use a 20-foot strip of the Bixbys' land to widen a highway.
May 24, 2004. Wade and Christopher Lay, a father-son pair obsessed with the 1993 government siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, kill a bank security guard in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
January 21, 2009. Neo-Nazi Keith Luke rapes and kills an immigrant from Cape Verde in Brockton, Massachusetts, then kills a 72-year-old homeless immigrant.
April 4, 2009. Richard Andrew Poplawski, a frequent poster on the white supremacist Stormfront website who apparently believes a national "gun ban" is imminent, kills three Pittsburgh police officers.
April 25, 2009. Joshua Cartwright kills two Okaloosa County, Florida sheriff's deputies. Per a police report, Cartwright's wife says he was paranoid about the U.S. government and "extremely disturbed" by Barack Obama's election.
May 30, 2009. Shawna Forde, Albert Gaxiola, and Jason Bush kill a Latino man and his nine-year-old daughter in Arivaca, Arizona during a robbery intended to raise funds for the "Minutemen American Defense" group.
May 31, 2009. Scott Roeder kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the Wichita, Kansas Lutheran church where Tiller serves as an usher.
June 10, 2009. An 89-year-old white supremacist named James von Brunn kills a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. from point-blank range.
Feb. 18, 2010. Joseph Andrew Stack flies a plane into an Austin, Texas IRS office, killing one person.
May 20, 2010. A father-son pair named Jerry and Joseph Kane (who conduct "seminars" about how "sovereign citizens" can evade debt) kill two West Memphis, Arkansas police officers.
September 26-October 3, 2011. Avowed white supremacists David Pedersen and Holly Ann Grigsby kill Grigsby's father and stepmother in Washington, a man they believe is Jewish in Oregon, and a black man in California.
August 5, 2012. A white supremacist named Wade Michael Page kills six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
August 16, 2012. "Sovereign citizen"-movement adherents Brian Smith and Kyle Joekel, who are now awaiting trial, allegedly kill two Louisiana sheriff's deputies in a trailer-park ambush.
September 4, 2012. Christopher Lacy, a software engineer who lives in a rural trailer and apparently sympathizes with the "sovereign citizen" movement, shoots a California Highway Patrol officer who dies the next day.
April 13, 2014. Frazier Glenn Miller, a 73-year-old with a long history of KKK activity, kills three people in the area of a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas.
June 8, 2014. Jerad and Amanda Miller kill two police officers in a random attack at a pizza restaurant in Las Vegas, then kill a customer at a Walmart. The Millers had spent time on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's property during protests related to Bundy's dispute with the federal government.
June 17, 2015. Dylann Roof allegedly kills nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Update, June 19, 2015: Eric Frein, who's accused of murdering a Pennsylvania state trooper in a Sept. 12, 2014 sniper attack, likely belongs on the list above; Frein (allegedly) carried out a premeditated attack on a law enforcement officer and appears to have prepared to hide from authorities in "survivalist" fashion thereafter. (He was caught after 48 days.)
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