NATHAN JOHN THILL sees himself as a "deep thinker" who knows it's ""very hard to decide the right thing to do." One night last week Thill, 19, evidently decided that killing a black man at random was the Right Thing to do. After having a few drinks in a Denver strip club, Thill and another man accosted Oumar Dia, a 38-year-old immigrant from Mauritania, at a downtown bus stop. According to police, the two white men made racist remarks, grabbed Dia's hat and threw it on the sidewalk. A bystander, Jeannie Van Velkinburg, 36, picked up the hat and gave it back to Dia. Then the shooting started and she tried to run. Dia was killed instantly. Van Velkinburg, a nurse's aide and mother of two, was shot in the spine and paralyzed from the waist down. ""It wasn't a planned thing,'' Thill told a TV reporter. ""Walked through town with my gun in my waist, saw the black guy and thought he didn't belong where he was at. [I thought] how easy it would be just to take him out right there. Didn't seem like much to me.''
Senseless and terrifying, the double shooting is one of a series of violent incidents involving Denver-area skinheads in the past three weeks--a spate of car chases and shootings that has cops preparing for guerrilla war. On Nov. 6 police in suburban Jefferson County got into a nightlong siege with a skinhead named Jerald Dean Allen, 20. Allen and an accomplice then broke out, triggering a half-hour car chase in which Allen allegedly fired more than 20 rounds at pursuing cops before he was captured. On Nov. 12 Matthaeus Jaehnig, 25, led police on another car chase and was finally cornered at a Denver apartment complex: Jaehnig shot and killed Officer Bruce Vander Jagt, 47, then committed suicide. Last week someone left a dead pig with Vander Jagt's name on it outside the police station where he'd worked. Two days later a Denver cop responding to a prowler call was fired on by an assailant hiding in some bushes. The shooter missed and ran away. A passing motorist then reported being stopped by two armed men who demanded a ride. Police said one of the men, who reportedly had a shaved head, fit the gunman's description.
Though no one knows whether the string of incidents is connected, local officials seem to be preparing for the worst. Denver Mayor Wellington Webb pushed his police department to establish a task force that will include counterterrorism experts from the FBI. A Jefferson County supervisor, John Stone, said he was ready to help the cops ""go to war'' with skinheads. ""As far as I'm concerned, if you need machine guns, we'll get you machine guns,'' Stone told Sheriff Ron Beckham. ""If you need a tank, we'll get you a tank.'' Such talk reflects the fact that skinhead violence was for years a problem in the Denver area. A group called the Denver Skins made headlines in the late 1980s, prompting a police crackdown that forced the Skins to disband or go underground. Nathan Thill and Jerald Allen, for example, gave cagey answers to reporters when asked if they were skinheads--although both admitted they believed in ""white pride'' or white power. ""In a war, anybody wearing the enemy's uniform . . . should be taken out,'' Thill said, adding that he shot Dia ""because he was black.''
There is little doubt that Matthaeus Jaehnig, who killed Officer Vander Jagt, was a skinhead. A high-school dropout with at least seven arrests for petty crimes like theft, criminal menacing and carrying concealed weapons, Jaehnig is known to have attended a ""training camp'' at Hayden Lake, Idaho, home base of the Aryan Nation, a notorious neo-Nazi group. He and Vander Jagt had tangled once before. In 1993 Jaehnig was charged with ordering his dogs--a Rottweiler and a pit bull--to attack Vander Jagt when the officer came to his home on a neighbor's noise complaint. When they met again, after a car chase that began 30 miles outside Denver, Jaehnig was being pursued by a police SWAT team into the courtyard of the apartment complex. Vander Jagt, leading the chase, was cut down by a blast of rifle fire as he closed in. Jaehnig then grabbed the dying cop's pistol and, minutes later, used it to kill himself.
The baffling part of this ugly story is that Jaehnig, unlike many skinheads, was no dead-end kid. His father, who died in 1991, was a minister who founded the Denver Waldorf School, a private academy built on progressive values. His mother is a teacher who is widely admired as a gentle, deeply caring person. So if Matthaeus Jaehnig could be so thoroughly seduced by hate, Denverites wondered last week, is anyone's kid safe?
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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