By Christopher Goffard and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times –
Years before Wade Michael Page stormed into a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee, killing six and critically wounding three others, he spent time in California with a scholar who was researching white supremacist groups.
The man who authorities said Wednesday shot himself in the head after being wounded by a police officer during Sunday’s attack never struck Pete Simi as threatening.
Simi, then a graduate student at the University of Nevada doing research in Orange County, said in an interview that his dissertation took him into bars filled with neo-Nazis, where he frequently felt frightened.
But not by Page. “When I was with him individually, I felt pretty comfortable,” Simi said.
Page kept rifles in his bedroom but expressed no animus toward Sikhs, he said. Nor did he give any impression that he could become a mass killer.
“I never said, ‘This is the guy,’ ” said Simi, now a criminologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Page did, however, display vivid signs of the racist worldview Simi was studying. As they headed to lunch at a favorite pizza parlor in Orange, Calif., during the holiday season, Page froze at the sight of a stained-glass menorah on the door.
“He freaked out. He said, ‘I’m not going in there; I’m not going to open the door,’ ” Simi said.
“I said, ‘What if I hold the door open for you? Will you walk through so I can eat some pizza?’ He was willing to do that,” Simi recalled. “It’s the principle that anything Jewish is contamination.” And yet, he said, “He’d eat the pizza made there.”
Simi described his contact with Page from 2001 to 2003, when Page lived in the Old Towne Orange section with a housemate who shared his white-supremacist views.
Page told Simi that his stint in the U.S. Army, which lasted from 1992 to 1998, contributed to his beliefs, both because he met at least two fellow troops who were white supremacists and because the Army struck him as anti-white. Page was discharged for a pattern of misconduct.
As Page saw it, “whites were punished while blacks got coddled,” Simi said. “The deck was stacked against whites in the military, and he realized all of society was structured that way.”
Simi said Page met white-supremacist musicians in 2000 at Georgia’s Hammerfest — one of the biggest white-power music festivals in the country. Within months, he moved to Southern California to get into the music scene.
“Before he ever got into neo-Nazi stuff, he was a lover of music,” Simi said. “He loved Rush, the band, and he would talk about how much he respected and admired their music.” Page shaved his head and wore a tattoo of a German soldier on his calf, he said.
As part of Simi’s research, he visited Page’s house regularly and slept on the couch, hanging out with him for days at a time. They went to bars and white-supremacist rock events. Page played bass guitar in an Orange County-based white-power band, Youngland, which appeared at bars and music festivals.
Page worked sporadically as a machinist, drank heavily and frustrated his friends by sponging off them, Simi said. Page had moved out of the house by the summer of 2004, he said.
Around that time, Page moved to North Carolina, where he also had a checkered job history.
He worked about seven months at a Fayetteville Harley-Davidson dealer but was fired in 2004 for clashing with female staff and supervisors. John Tew, general manager at the dealership, said Page “dressed and acted like a neo-Nazi from Day One” and, on the day he was fired, left behind an application to join the Ku Klux Klan. When Page returned for it, Tew told him he’d thrown it away.
“That’s the road he wanted to go down,” Tew said in an interview.
In August 2010, Page was fired from his job of four years as a truck driver for Barr-Nunn Transportation Inc., based in Granger, Iowa. Page — who still lived in North Carolina — had been cited for impaired driving, the company said in a statement.
During Simi’s California research, some white supremacists bristled at the thought of a researcher in their midst, he said, but Page “seemed very open about describing his beliefs.” His worldview included virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric, hatred of affirmative action, disdain for multiculturalism, and pronounced misogyny.
“He expressed frustration that more whites weren’t standing up and defending themselves,” Simi said. “He felt music was one way to try to do that.”
Page found camaraderie in Orange County’s white-power music scene, Simi said. “He told me it changed his life.”
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Simi said, Page expressed anger at Muslims and said in an email that the Middle East should be bombed. Sikhs, who wear turbans and facial hair, are sometimes mistaken for Muslims.
