Police say Frazier Glenn Cross is the suspect in Sunday's shooting death of a boy and his grandfather outside a Jewish community center near Kansas City, Kansas, and then a woman at a nearby Jewish assisted living facility.
The capital murder count is connected to the deaths of William Lewis Corporon and Reat Griffin Underwood, said Steve Howe, district attorney for Johnson County. The premeditated murder count is linked to the death of Terri LaManno, he said.
Hate crime charges are possible, as police investigators say they have "unquestionably determined" that his actions were a hate crime, Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass said
But no hate crime charges were announced Tuesday.
U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom said that federal prosecutors are still collecting evidence and that federal charges could come later.
Legal experts say hate crime charges are possible, even though the victims were Christian.
The capital murder charge carries the possibility of a life sentence or the death penalty. No decision on whether to seek the death penalty for Cross has been made yet, Howe said.
Cross is the founder and former leader of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups. Both organizations operated as paramilitary groups in the 1980s, according to the SPLC.
In the 73-year-old's anti-Semitic and white-supremacist activities, he has also used the name Frazier Glenn Miller, the SPLC said.
After he was apprehended at a nearby elementary school, Cross sat in the back of a patrol car and shouted "Heil Hitler!" video from CNN affiliate KMBC shows.
He obtained firearms from a "straw buyer," a middleman with a clean record who could buy weapons legally and then sell or give them to Cross, allowing Cross to avoid federal background checks, a U.S. law enforcement official said. He had three guns when he was arrested Sunday, authorities said.
The shootings took place at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and the Village Shalom Retirement Community in Overland Park a day before the start of Passover, a major Jewish holiday.
The police chief said the gunman shot at five people, none of whom he is believed to have known. There were no other injuries, authorities said.
Police were investigating statements Cross made after his arrest but declined to provide additional details, Douglass said.
The Anti-Defamation League said it warned last week of the increased possibility of violent attacks against community centers in the coming weeks, "which coincide both with the Passover holiday and Hitler's birthday on April 20, a day around which in the United States has historically been marked by extremist acts of violence and terrorism."
On Monday, the ADL reissued a security bulletin to synagogues and Jewish communal institutions across the country, urging them to review their security plans for the Passover holiday, which began at sundown Monday
iT'S SOMPLE HE THEY HAVE ENUGH EVIDENCE THAT THEY CAN PPROVE THAT HE DID IT THAT HE SHOULD BE ARRESTED
iT'S SOMPLE HE THEY HAVE ENUGH EVIDENCE THAT THEY CAN PPROVE THAT HE DID IT THAT HE SHOULD BE ARRESTED
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