Interview of the Sikh temple shooter - a glimpse into the deranged mind
Before Wade Michael Page walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, with a 9mm handgun and murdered six worshippers, he was a leader of a racist white-power band called End Apathy. In 2010, he gave an interview to the white supremacist website Label 56 — a window into the mind of a man who would become a mass murderer.
Page said that when he started the band in 2005, its name reflected his wish to "figure out how to end people's apathetic ways" and start "moving forward." "I was willing to point out some of my faults on how I was holding myself back," Page said. The inspiration, he added, "was based on frustration that we have the potential to accomplish so much more as individuals and a society in whole." He did not discuss violence in the interview.
Page told the website that he had been a part of the white power music scene since 2000, when he left his native Colorado on a motorcycle. He attended white power concerts in Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia and Colorado. At various times, he said, he played in the hate rock bands Youngland (2001-2003), Celtic Warrior, Radikahl, Max Resist, Intimidation One, Aggressive Force and Blue Eyed Devils. End Apathy, he said, included "Brent" on bass and "Ozzie" on drums — former members of Definite Hate and 13 Knots.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which called Page "a frustrated neo-Nazi," found that in 2000 he had also attempted to purchase goods from the National Alliance, then America's most important neo-Nazi hate group.
Page was a U.S. Army veteran who received a less-than-honorable discharge in 1998. What drew him to the white power scene, or whether he specifically targeted Sikhs — who, with their beards and turbans, white supremacists may have mistaken for Muslims — remains unknown.
The Label 56 interview reads today as an artifact of a movement that rarely produced mass shooters of this scale — a man describing his frustrations and his music in calm, ordinary language, giving no hint of what he was capable of.
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