Message board posts indicate Sikh temple shooter never made direct threats

A widely circulated picture of Wade Michael Page, the shooter who killed 6 Sikhs in WI

OAK CREEK, WI, USA— Victims of the Oak Creek Sikh Temple massacre still wonder if the deadly attack could have been prevented.

Wade Michael Page was a member of the Hammerskin Nation, and he believed the world would be a better place with just one race.  He was being watched.  So why couldn’t he be stopped?

Wade Page shot and killed Pardeep Kaleka’s father, along with six others, including himself back in August.

With a bandage on his eyebrow, after an accident that happened while giving his little girl a bath, Pardeep Kaleka says he misses his father every day.

“It makes you feel frustrated,” says Kaleka.

Frustrated because one group knew Page was filled with hate and was so concerned it tracked him online for almost a decade.

“You would think that somehow, someway, that they would be able to at least talk to him, at least do something,” says Kaleka.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had an entire file on Page, filled with photos, his music, and evidence of his desire to push the white-power movement.

TODAY’S TMJ4 sat down with ADL’s regional director.

“It’s a shame that we couldn’t have done something to stop it,” says Lonnie Nasatir of the ADL.

Both the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center shared some of its findings on Wade Page with the I-TEAM, including pages and pages of his posts on Hammerskin message boards.

“The usual mantra of the fact that this country is never going to be strong unless we get rid of those people who aren’t of the Aryan blood,” Page allegedly wrote.

Those thoughts and feelings are protected under the First Amendment.

“Even though the speech may be hate speech, many times it’s protected speech,” says Nasatir.

In the posts provided to the I-TEAM by the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Page never made a direct threat.

“Maybe there was something somewhere that we may have missed that talked about what he was going to do but I really don’t think that was the case,” says Nasatir.

Page mainly made posts in effort to recruit.

One post read, “… All white nationalists are welcome.  If you are wanting to meet people, get involved and become active then you really need to attend.  Stop hiding behind the computer or making excuses.”

“It makes you feel frustrated,” says Pardeep Kaleka.  “Frustration that they can’t do more and that his rights are protected even with hate rhetoric being spewed out of his mouth, even while he’s recruiting other impressionable kids that might be going down the same path.”

Again, in this situation, without a direct threat, there was very little the agency could do.

The agency once worked with the FBI and stopped someone from trying to blow up the federal building in Springfield, Illinois.  It also does a lot of work within our school systems, teaching kids at a young age that it’s not OK to hate.

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