Guard killed in Washington Holocaust museum attack
Pastor Dale Morgan
Guard killed in Washington Holocaust museum attack*
Karin Zeitvogel
June 11, 2009 - 1:14PM
An elderly white supremacist with a history of anti-Semitic tirades has
opened fire inside the national Holocaust Memorial Museum, fatally
wounding a security guard before being shot by return fire.
Panicked tourists scattered, ducked and took cover as the shots rang out
in the museum entrance shortly after noon in the heart of the US
capital, not far from the White House.
The gunman was identified as 88-year-old James von Brunn, a Maryland
resident who has served time in prison for taking a gun into the Federal
Reserve, in an apparently botched anti-Semitic attack, a federal law
enforcement official told AFP.
"It appears to be a lone gunman who entered into the museum and opened
fire with what appears to be a rifle at this point," Police Chief Cathy
Lanier said.
Police said the security guard, named as Stephen Tyrone Johns of nearby
Maryland, was pronounced dead after being rushed to a nearby hospital.
The gunman was in critical condition, Mayor Adrian Fenty said.
President Barack Obama expressed his shock and sadness after the attack,
saying the killing underscored the need to counter prejudice.
"I am shocked and saddened by today's shooting at the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum. This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain
vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms," Obama
said in a statement.
Von Brunn has written books on the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler, and his
views on white superiority including "Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog," or "Kill
the Best Gentiles," which his website calls "the culmination of his
life's work."
In a recent posting on his blog, he railed that "America is a
Third-World racial garbage-dump -- stupid, ignorant, dead-broke, and
terminal."
Police and the FBI said they had no warning of the attack, which erupted
at 12:50 pm just inside the packed museum, which is often visited by
school groups, when the man walked into the entry foyer with what
appeared to be a rifle.
"An armed gunman came into the entrance and immediately opened fire
striking one security guard. There was fire, gunfire returned. The
gunman was hit," said Mayor Adrian Fenty.
Former defense secretary William Cohen said he was standing outside with
a museum official when the gunman entered, apparently from a red vehicle
left parked in the street.
"When the shots rang out, we just ducked down and scattered," he said.
"So we ran up the stairs. We didn't know how many shooters were there,
how many shots were going to continue, how many people were involved."
"People panicked and wanted to evacuate the building. I said 'don't go
down,'" said Cohen, who was at the museum because a play written by his
wife Janet Langhart Cohen was to be staged there Wednesday evening.
Angela Andelson, 22, visiting from San Francisco, was walking toward the
exit of the museum when she heard a loud bang "like someone had dropped
something."
Then she saw a "gunman coming in (carrying) a long looking kind of gun.
"I just ran in to one of the exhibits to try to take cover," she said.
"People were screaming and ducking down, getting on the floor, getting
under benches."
Another witness, Maria Hernandez, was with her grandparents walking
through the haunting exhibits which chronicle the Holocaust and the
genocide of six million Jews under the Nazis.
"We were in the exhibit 'Remember the Children' and we heard rounds
fired and through the glass doors I saw a security guard firing towards
the shooter and a man on his belly on the floor and when I looked back
again, we were heading toward the exit, I saw blood all over the floor,"
she told AFP.
"He was hit real bad."
The FBI said it had sent members of a special response squad for the
capital to support the police, but it had no information "to indicate
threats to area landmarks."
The Israeli embassy issued a statement saying: "We are shocked and
saddened by today's shooting incident."
More than 30 million people have visited the museum since its opening in
1993, including 85 heads of state.
Obama last week became the first US president to visit the Nazi death
camp in Buchenwald, Germany where he renewed a historic commitment to
Israel.
Flanked by Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama laid a white rose at a memorial plaque
for the camp's more than 56,000 victims.
He said Buchenwald was "the ultimate rebuke" to those "who insist that
the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is
baseless and ignorant and hateful."