Los Angeles Times - May 19, 2011
Chilling portrait of neo-Nazi's home life emerges
The 10-year-old son of neo-Nazi leader Jeffrey R. Hall tells Riverside investigators of shooting his father and says Hall beat him and other family members regularly.
By Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times
A chilling family portrait emerged Wednesday in the case of a 10-year-old Riverside boy charged with murdering his neo-Nazi father, including outings to practice target shooting, a house with guns and knives stashed in easily accessible places and, the boy told police, regular beatings by his father. And he knew exactly where to find the family's .357 magnum revolver.
The boy gave a harrowing account of how he carried out the early morning attack May 1 as his father, 32-year-old Jeffrey R. Hall, was dozing on the living room couch, detectives said in a court declaration filed in connection with charges against the boy's stepmother, Krista F. McCary.
The 10-year-old told police he grabbed a Rossi .357 magnum revolver from a closet and "went downstairs with the gun, pulled the hammer back, aimed the gun at his dad's ear while he was asleep and shot him," Riverside Police Det. Greg Rowe wrote in the declaration. The boy "went upstairs and hid the gun under his bed."
The court document, based on police station interviews of McCary and four of the family's five children, offered the first glimpse of a household terrorized by Hall's alleged out-of-control violence and rants. The boy was a target of that abuse "on a daily basis," McCary, 26, told police, adding that her husband "kicks, hits and yells" at him more than the other four children.
"He was tired of his dad hitting him and his mom…he thought his dad was cheating on his mom and thought he might have to choose which person he would live with," Rowe said, referring to McCary in the court declaration. "He knew his mom and dad had a gun, and he knew where they kept it."
These details came out on the same day that the boy appeared in Riverside County Juvenile Court for a detention hearing. Judge Charles J. Koosed approved a request by the boy's attorney, Public Defender Mathew Hardy, for a mental health evaluation. Hardy said he may pursue a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity. The boy is expected to enter a plea at his next hearing, set for July 22.
McCary has been charged with five felony counts of child endangerment and four counts of criminal storage of a firearm. The four other children, ranging from 2 months to 9 years of age, have been taken into protective custody and placed with a relative, police said.
Police found an unloaded .22-caliber rifle in the garage of Hall's home, 10 feet away from an unlocked and stocked ammunition cabinet. They also found several sharp-edged weapons in the master bedroom.
The prosecutor in the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ambrosio E. Rodriguez, cautioned that the court declaration was a "very short summary" of the evidence leading to McCary's arrest.
"It in no way gives a full explanation of the evidence we have in the case involving the juvenile's actions and mental state during the murder," he said.
From the outside, the family's stucco home near UC Riverside blended in seamlessly with the rest of the well-kept suburban neighborhood, though neighbors complained about Hall's occasional neo-Nazi barbecues and gatherings. Inside, police found squalor: dirty clothes strewn across floors, bedrooms smelling of urine, filthy bathrooms and beer bottles littering the downstairs, under the swastika of a National Socialist Movement flag.
Numerous complaints had been made to Riverside County Child Protective Services, the declaration stated, but most of the allegations were determined to be unfounded and may have stemmed from Hall's bitter child custody dispute with his ex-wife, the mother of the 10-year-old boy.
Sylvia Deporto, assistant director of childrens' services, said state law prohibits her from discussing any abuse investigation involving the family. In general, however, she said it's difficult to prove allegations of abuse unless confirmed by family members, who are often fearful of retaliation, or there is physical evidence.
Riverside police said they had no reports of domestic violence at the home prior to the shooting.
Rodriguez said there was nothing to indicate that Hall's neo-Nazi activities led to the shooting.
"I don't think you can deny that Jeff Hall's involvement, his leadership in the Nazi movement, is going to be an issue in this case. Think of the hate, the vitriol," Rodriguez said. "I don't see how that doesn't become an issue in a case when we're talking about a 10-year-old boy and what happened in the house."
Hall was the director of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement in the Western United States and last year lost a bid for the local water board.
Paul Mones, a Portland, Ore., attorney who has handled numerous cases involving children accused of killing a parent, said the vast majority of patricide cases are committed against controlling fathers abusing multiple members of their families.
"Many people know the situation in the house, but adults don't typically speak out for kids," Mones said. "If there's anything to take away from these cases, it's that kids suffer silently, and kids are put in the impossible human situation of ending it violently."
Maureen Pacheco, assistant director of Loyola Law School's Center for Juvenile Law and Policy, said she was dismayed that the details of the alleged shooting and abuse were made public in a court declaration, even though releasing the account was "legal, without a doubt."
A decade ago, California voters also approved Proposition 21, which opened to the public juvenile court proceedings involving alleged violent felonies.
"It's important to remember that because this boy is so young, he can't be prosecuted as an adult," she said. "That means he eventually is going to come back into society."
This article was found at:
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Southern Poverty Law Center - Hate Watch May 18, 2011
Stepmom of Boy Accused of Shooting Neo-Nazi Dad Faces Gun Charges
by Leah Nelson
Prosecutors Tuesday charged the widow of Jeffrey Hall, the California neo-Nazi who allegedly was shot to death by his 10-year-old son on May 1, with five counts of child endangerment and four counts of criminal storage of a firearm.
Krista McCary, 26, the boy’s stepmother and Hall’s widow, is accused of leaving the loaded pistol used to kill Hall on a shelf where the five children in the house had easy access to it.
In the meantime, the boy, who is being charged as a juvenile with the murder of his father, was expected to appear in court today to enter a plea. His attorney told reporters he is considering an insanity defense.
Hall, 32, advocated for a “white nation” and often led rallies of white supremacists giving stiff-armed Nazi salutes and waving swastika-adorned flags amid hundreds of angry counter-protesters. He was considered something of a rising star in the neo-Nazi universe. Hall made news last fall when he quietly submitted his name as a candidate for the Western Municipal Water District board of directors in Riverside County. He affirmed his neo-Nazi beliefs when confronted by the media as the election approached. Hall lost the race by a wide margin but still received almost 28 percent of the vote – more than a self-avowed Nazi might be expected to receive.
Evidence suggests that Hall involved the 10-year-old in the activities of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), the neo-Nazi group whose Southwest chapter he headed. Along with using his home as headquarters, he gave the child a belt bearing the SS insignia and was teaching him to shoot a gun. The NSM is notorious for drawing children in at a very young age, with organizations like the Viking Youth Corps, which is open to children of “European descent.”
The NSM, currently the largest neo-Nazi group in America with 50 chapters in 32 states, has its roots in the original American Nazi Party, which was founded in 1959 by former Navy Cmdr. George Lincoln Rockwell. Seven years after Rockwell was murdered by one of his followers in 1967, two of his chief lieutenants formed the National Socialist American Workers Freedom Movement in St. Paul, Minn. Leadership passed in 1994 to “Commander” Jeff Schoep, who gave the group its present name.
This article was found at:
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/05/18/stepmother-of-boy-10-who-shot-neo-nazi-dad-faces-gun-violations/
Southern Poverty Law Center - Hate Watch May 18, 2011
Stepmom of Boy Accused of Shooting Neo-Nazi Dad Faces Gun Charges
by Leah Nelson
Prosecutors Tuesday charged the widow of Jeffrey Hall, the California neo-Nazi who allegedly was shot to death by his 10-year-old son on May 1, with five counts of child endangerment and four counts of criminal storage of a firearm.
Krista McCary, 26, the boy’s stepmother and Hall’s widow, is accused of leaving the loaded pistol used to kill Hall on a shelf where the five children in the house had easy access to it.
In the meantime, the boy, who is being charged as a juvenile with the murder of his father, was expected to appear in court today to enter a plea. His attorney told reporters he is considering an insanity defense.
Hall, 32, advocated for a “white nation” and often led rallies of white supremacists giving stiff-armed Nazi salutes and waving swastika-adorned flags amid hundreds of angry counter-protesters. He was considered something of a rising star in the neo-Nazi universe. Hall made news last fall when he quietly submitted his name as a candidate for the Western Municipal Water District board of directors in Riverside County. He affirmed his neo-Nazi beliefs when confronted by the media as the election approached. Hall lost the race by a wide margin but still received almost 28 percent of the vote – more than a self-avowed Nazi might be expected to receive.
Evidence suggests that Hall involved the 10-year-old in the activities of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), the neo-Nazi group whose Southwest chapter he headed. Along with using his home as headquarters, he gave the child a belt bearing the SS insignia and was teaching him to shoot a gun. The NSM is notorious for drawing children in at a very young age, with organizations like the Viking Youth Corps, which is open to children of “European descent.”
The NSM, currently the largest neo-Nazi group in America with 50 chapters in 32 states, has its roots in the original American Nazi Party, which was founded in 1959 by former Navy Cmdr. George Lincoln Rockwell. Seven years after Rockwell was murdered by one of his followers in 1967, two of his chief lieutenants formed the National Socialist American Workers Freedom Movement in St. Paul, Minn. Leadership passed in 1994 to “Commander” Jeff Schoep, who gave the group its present name.
This article was found at:
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/05/18/stepmother-of-boy-10-who-shot-neo-nazi-dad-faces-gun-violations/
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Former B.C. neo-Nazi abandons racist views after birth of daughter
ReplyDeleteCBC News February 7, 2012
A B.C. man who was a recruiter for white supremacist groups says he's changed his hateful ways and has moved on to become a motivational speaker who helps others leave racist organizations.
Tony McAleer, 44, looks back ruefully on his past involvements with such groups.
“It was like a quick sugar high at the time, but the long-term damage — not just to myself but to other people — it wasn’t worth it,” McAleer says.
McAleer said he used to attend cross burnings conducted by the Aryan Resistance Movement in Idaho and was seduced by the power that came with being a skinhead.
“It was exciting. There's an element of fantasy to it,” he told CBC News in a recent interview. “It was as bad as it could get and there was an excitement that came from that.”
McAleer eventually gained notoriety from his activities, making media appearances to espouse neo-Nazi views. He also ran a telephone hotline that resulted in an arrest for contempt of court.
In those days, McAleer and his racist colleagues were fighting for the West Coast to be a whites-only enclave.
But he said that he suddenly questioned his ideology at a pivotal moment — the birth of his daughter.
“The nurse handed her to me in the delivery room ... this tiny fragile human being who is not capable of hatred, whatsoever,” McAleer said.
He said he slowly withdrew from the racist organizations as he struggled to raise two children as a single dad with a history that made him virtually unemployable.
Then he met psychologist Dov Baron, who is Jewish, who became a mentor and helped McAleer re-invent himself as a money manager and motivational speaker.
“I've done a pretty good job of fading to black and covering my tracks and living a life where nobody had any idea about my past,” McAleer said. “I have to acknowledge and I do acknowledge the things that I have done and I have a healthy shame about those things,” he said.
Now McAleer is speaking out against what he calls senseless violence.
In a recent appearance on the CBC Radio B.C. program On The Coast, McAleer commented on the charges laid against three alleged neo-Nazis in connection with six alleged assaults on visible minorities in the Vancouver area.
“I just know where it’s going to end up and I have compassion for where they're at and what it’s like to be that confused young man, seeking significance, going out and seeking it in a way that's not healthy,” McAleer said.
But there can be a downside to McAleer’s outspokenness, according to his friend Baron.
“He is taking a massive risk,” Baron said. “First of all, Tony is a businessman. He is well respected in his business community. There will be people who will turn their backs of him, without a shadow of a doubt.”
But McAleer said he can’t remain silent, and is writing a book about his transformation, entitled The Neo-Compassionist.
“I’ve watched the movement suck people in and spit them out again,” McAleer said. “And there’s going to come a time when you’re going to question, ‘Why am I in this?’”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/02/07/bc-neo-nazi-converted-mcaleer.html
Boy who shot neo-Nazi dad just another killer, prosecutor says
ReplyDeleteThe murder trial of the 12-year-old boy begins in Riverside. His defense attorney tells judge the boy was manipulated to kill his father by his stepmother.
By Andrew Khouri, Los Angeles Times October 31, 2012
The 10-year-old son of a Riverside neo-Nazi leader was just another killer when he shot his sleeping father on the couch on an early May morning last year, a prosecutor told a judge Tuesday.
Sitting unshackled, the now 12-year-old boy listened as Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Soccio told a Riverside County judge that the sandy-haired boy knew that killing his father, Jeffrey Hall, 32, was wrong.
Hall's role as a regional director of the National Socialist Movement is simply a "red herring," he said.
The boy "is no different than any other murderer," Soccio said in his opening statement. He "would have shot his father if he was a member of the Peace and Freedom Party."
But Public Defender Matthew Hardy said the boy, who had learning disabilities, pulled the trigger after being manipulated to kill Hall by his stepmother, Krista F. McCary. Hardy portrayed her as angry over the possibility her husband was about to leave her for another woman.
"We are not going to suggest she killed him," Hardy told the judge. "She used this young man to kill him."
The boy, whose name is not being released by The Times because he is a juvenile, has been charged with murder. If the allegations against the boy are found to be true, he could remain in juvenile custody until he is 23.
During his opening statement, Soccio portrayed the family as rather normal, showing the court several photos, including one of the family frolicking in the surf.
Soccio said the boy shot his father with a .357 magnum revolver because he believed Hall was about to leave McCary and take custody of the boy. So, Soccio said, he "found a way to stop it."
While on a backyard swing set the day before, the defendant told one of his sisters about the plan, Soccio said.
Superior Court Judge Jean P. Leonard, who is acting as a juvenile judge in the case, must rule that the child knew that his actions were wrong at the time of the shooting to find the murder allegations true.
Hardy argued that the child's sense of right and wrong was clouded by the household in which he lived, where National Socialist Movement meetings took place, guns were accessible and beatings were regular. The upbringing conditioned the boy to violence, he said.
In the end, Hardy argued, the child believed that he was protecting his family and putting an end to the violence Hall inflicted upon them. The boy thought he would become a "hero," Hardy said.
"He would not have pulled the trigger if he thought it was wrong," Hardy said.
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ReplyDeleteRiverside Police Officer Michael Foster, a prosecution witness, testified that the child expressed remorse on the day of the shooting.
"He asked me things like 'Do people get more than one [life]?' " he told the court.
McCary, 27, said Tuesday that she viewed the boy as her son, and he shared that view, calling her mother.
She testified that the boy knew right from wrong, was difficult to control and was prone to violent outbursts. Her husband, a plumber who was unemployed at the time of the killing, abused drugs and beat the boy more than the other children; when he was intoxicated, the family would go to another room to avoid him, she said.
McCary said she had an "open relationship" with her husband and was not angered by the possibility of his relationship with another woman. Still, she said, she expressed a desire to end the marriage because of her husband's mood swings.
"You were never sure which Jeff you were going to get," she said.
In the early morning hours of May 1, 2011, McCary testified, she came downstairs after hearing a bang.
"When I flicked on the lights, I could see blood on the floor," she testified.
The family's suburban home near UC Riverside blended in with the well-kept neighborhood. But neighbors complained about Hall's occasional neo-Nazi gatherings and police discovered filthy bathrooms, bedrooms smelling of urine and a National Socialist Movement flag hanging above strewn beer bottles.
After McCary found her husband bleeding on the couch, she testified, the boy admitted shooting him.
"He said 'I shot dad.' "
"I said, 'Why?' "
"He didn't answer."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nazi-trial-20121031,0,1929178.story
Boy guilty of murdering his neo-Nazi father
ReplyDeleteThe judge — who found that the Riverside boy, then 10, had the mental capacity to know killing his father was wrong — faces a vexing question: What to do with him?
By Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times January 14, 2013
A Riverside County judge on Monday found a 12-year-old boy responsible for murdering his neo-Nazi father, taking a swipe at both the family and social workers for failing to protect the troubled youngster before he felt compelled to reach for a gun.
"There were so many warning signs,'' Superior Court Judge Jean P. Leonard said from the bench.
But the judge said the evidence showed that the Riverside boy, who was 10 years old when he pulled the trigger, possessed the mental capacity to know that killing his father was wrong. He plotted the murder and then tried to conceal his guilt by stashing the .357 magnum revolver under his mattress, Leonard noted.
Leonard found the boy guilty of second-degree murder and of using a gun while committing a felony.
The youngster's father, Jeffrey Hall, was a West Coast leader for the neo-Nazi organization known as the National Socialist Movement. The judge said Hall's attempts to indoctrinate his son into the hate group corrupted the thought process of a boy who already was disturbed and displaying violent tendencies.
"It's clear that this minor knows more than the average child about guns, hate and violence,'' Leonard said. "This is not a naive little boy unaware of the ways of the world.''
The judge now faces the vexing question of what to do with the boy. Because he was charged as a juvenile, he can be held in state custody only until he is 23. The Times is withholding the boy's identity because of his age.
Most juvenile murderers are sent to one of three juvenile detention facilities run by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The institutions house California's most violent juvenile offenders. None currently has an inmate under 14 years old.
The boy's attorney, public defender Matthew Hardy, said it would be a "tragedy" if his client is sent to one of the state facilities.
"That's not a place for children. He'll be spending his time learning how to become a gangbanger or a killer,'' Hardy said.
Leonard indicated she may be open to alternatives, including placing the boy at a facility in Indio run by the Riverside County Department of Probation. The youngster's sentencing hearing, known as a "disposition" in juvenile court, is scheduled for Feb. 15.
As the judge read her decision Monday morning, the boy sat quietly next to his attorney, showing little emotion. Dressed in a gray button-down shirt and peering though plastic-rimmed eyeglasses, the boy wrote on a yellow pad as the verdict was revealed.
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Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Soccio said that emotionally, it was a very difficult case to prosecute, given the age of the boy and the abuse and neglect he had sustained most of his life. Soccio met with him afterward, expressing a hope that he would receive the care he desperately needs.
ReplyDeleteStill, Soccio said, he was relieved that the boy is to remain in custody.
"Right now in court he was docile, and he can be very sweet," Soccio told reporters after the hearing. "But he's also very dangerous.''
The boy's attorney said during the trial that Hall, when drunk or high, routinely beat his son. Shortly before he was killed, Hall also threatened to leave the family and to set the house on fire with his children and second wife inside.
The boy probably thought he was protecting his family when he fired that revolver, Hardy said.
"He didn't think it was wrong; he thought it was justified," Hardy said after Monday's hearing. "He thought he had to do it."
Hardy plans to appeal Monday's ruling, saying he believes Leonard erred when she found that the boy had the mental capacity to know shooting his father was wrong. Hardy said the boy made conflicting statements to police after the shooting, at one point saying he believed his father would "wake up" and rejoin the family.
"When we create a monster in this society, and I'm not saying [the boy] is a monster, but when we create a monster, we have some responsibility for what that monster does,'' Hardy said.
County social workers visited the Hall family's home more than 20 times, Hardy said, and at the time of the shooting, the boy was a dependent of the court, a designation intended in part to shield him from further abuse.
In the early morning hours of May 1, 2011, the youngster crept downstairs with the loaded revolver, pulled the hammer back and shot his father point-blank in his head as the man slept on the family's living room couch.
The first signs of the boy's penchant for violence surfaced at an early age. When he was a toddler, his grandmother refused to baby-sit him because of his outbursts, and he later was expelled from eight schools for violent behavior, including an attempt to strangle a teacher with a phone cord, according to evidence presented at the trial.
Anna Salter, a clinical psychologist from Wisconsin who appeared for the prosecution, testified that the boy's mental function and grasp of reality probably was warped while he was in the womb, when his mother used heroin, LSD and methamphetamine. The boy's parents divorced shortly after he was born and Hall was awarded full custody of his son when the boy was 3.
The boy's grasp of the world was corrupted even more after his father, an unemployed plumber, joined the neo-Nazi movement in 2009, bringing him along on at least one outing with a hooded member of the Ku Klux Klan and letting him tag along with "patrols" along the Mexican border to search for illegal immigrants, Leonard said.
"He was abused and he was neglected from the womb forward, and this had to affect his thought process,'' the judge said Monday.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-neo-nazi-guilty-20130115,0,2412218.story
Where did this boy end up serving his sentence? and what happened to the step mom?
ReplyDelete