Suspect fits profile associated with hate groups, other radicals

The man who surrendered to FBI agents in Las Vegas on Wednesday after admitting he shot five people at a Los Angeles Jewish community center fits a pattern known to law enforcement officials, sociologists and hate-group watchers.

Those who knew Buford O. Furrow Jr., 37, say he was lonely, overweight, teased by classmates, had an explosive temper, was an avowed racist and talked about going on a killing spree.

That description came after a gunman sprayed the lobby of a Jewish community center with 70 bullets and blood, wounding five people on Tuesday.

With Furrow in custody, acquaintances said he became involved with neo-Nazi groups in Washington state and Idaho after graduating from Timberline High School in 1979 about 60 miles south of Seattle in Lacey, Wash. He had attended Rancho High School in Las Vegas 1975-77. Timberline classmates described him as a quiet loner who wore thick glasses. He failed Army boot camp.

The shooting revived the questions tying American culture to guns and monsters -- gunmen gone mad in a high school cafeteria, a stock institution or a community center.

President Clinton renewed calls for stronger gun-control laws and called the Los Angeles shooting "deeply disturbing." Republican presidential frontrunner and Texas Gov. George W. Bush supported strict enforcement of current gun laws.

Southern Nevada has seen its share of such hate crimes. In 1993 UNLV student Srinivas Chirukuri was burned to death and Phillip "P.K." Shearer, 16, was beaten to death.

Chirukuri was a 23-year-old engineering student who died in July 1993, four days after suffering second- and third-degree burns over 60 percent of his body while working in a UNLV lab. He told authorities on the night of the fire that two people who said they didn't want any more foreign students on campus doused him and set him aflame.

Two 18-year-old men were arrested in Shearer's death. Metro Police did not consider the death an official hate crime, although the two arrested belonged to a loosely knit organization some said was a white supremacist group.

Criminal justice professor Harvey Kushner at Long Island University in New York put Furrow in the same category as convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Benjamin Smith, a white supremacist who killed two people in the Midwest before killing himself in July.

All three and others were "free-lancers or lone wolves" who are stirred into action by the language of white supremacy and the Christian Identity Movement, Kushner said. They are white, male and not tied to mainstream Christian beliefs, he said. Their lives are filled with failure.

In their failures they harbor simmering hatred, Kushner said.

No women have gone on such killing sprees, Georgetown University sociologist William McDonald noted. The male shooters come from varied backgrounds and age groups, he said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which tracks hate groups and has a file on Furrow, revealed that he apparently followed the beliefs of the so-called Phineas Priesthood. The priesthood opposes interracial marriage and interest charged by banks, Michael Reynolds of the center said. The shadowy group also has been linked to 1996 Spokane-area bombings and bank robberies and to recent fires set at Sacramento synagogues.

A probation officer checking Furrow's wallet found a card indicating he was a member of the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist group based in northern Idaho.

Along with an Aryan Nations membership card, he said he had been at the group's compound.

Sun wire services

contributed to this report.

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