A 73-year-old man accused of killing three people at Jewish facilities near Kansas City is a former Ku Klux Klan leader, NBC News reports, citing law enforcement officials.
Frazier Glenn Cross Jr. of Aurora, Mo., allegedly shot and killed a 14-year-old Eagle Scout and his grandfather in a parking lot at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City campus in Overland Park, Kan., the news site says. He then fatally shot a woman at a retirement community several blocks from the scene of the first shooting, the report says, citing law enforcement officials.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, says Cross is also known as Glenn Miller or Frazier Glenn Miller and is the former grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which he founded in the 1980s.
The SPLC sued Cross in the 1980s for intimidating African Americans, and he has had several run-ins with the law since then, including being accused of violating the terms of a court order that settled the intimidation lawsuit, the report says.
Cross, according to the SPLC, quit high school as a senior to join the U.S. Army, serving two tours in Vietnam and 13 years as a member of the elite Green Berets before he was forced to retire in 1979, after 20 years in uniform, because of his Klan affiliation.
After that, the SPLC says, he went on to be active in the neo-Nazi group "The Order," which advocated violence against blacks and Jews, among others.
He ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for North Carolina governor in 1984 and as a Republican for a state Senate seat in 1987, according to the SPLC.
Read more at NBC News and the Southern Poverty Law Center.