The Biography of Wade Michael Page, the Killer of Oak Creek Shooting

Wade Michael Page, Oak Creek Shooting SuspectWade Michael Page has been identified as the man who killed 6 people in a Gurudwara located at Oak Creek in Wisconsin, United States.

Michael Page, 40, a United States Army veteran who served as a specialist from 1992 until 1998, was shot and killed by police in the parking lot of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee.

Page was in the Army from 1992 to 1998. He trained at Fort Sill, Okla., and served at Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Page worked as a repair technician for the Hawk missile system and later was detailed to Psychological Operations as a specialist.

Page rose to the rank of sergeant before being demoted to specialist and leaving the military in 1998. In June 1998 he was disciplined for being drunk on duty and had his rank reduced to specialist from sergeant. He was not eligible to re-enlist.  Later Page was  discharged from the Army  for “patterns of misconduct”.

Officials at the Southern Poverty Law Center said they had been tracking Mr. Page for about a decade because of his ties to the white supremacist movement and described him as a “a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band.”

Michael Page had been a member of the racist skinhead band End Apathy, based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 2010, said Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.

Michael Page was a “frustrated neo-Nazi” who led a racist white supremacist band. Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the nonprofit civil rights organization in Montgomery, Ala., said Page had been on the white-power music scene for more than a decade, playing in bands known as Definite Hate and End Apathy. “The name of the band seems to reflect what he went out and actually did,” Potok said.

“There is a whole underworld of white supremacists music that is rarely seen or heard by the public,” Potok said, describing lyrics that talk about carrying out genocide against Jews and other minorities, he said.

Page also tried to buy goods from the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group, in 2000, she said. The SPLC describes the National Alliance on its website as “perhaps the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America.”

In a 2010 online interview with End Apathy’s record label Label56, Page said he had founded the band in 2005 because “I realized … that if we could figure out how to end people’s apathetic ways it would be the start towards moving forward.”

Police were searching an apartment at a duplex in the Cudahy neighborhood near Milwaukee, presumed to be the residence of the gunman. Generators and floodlights were set up along the street and a bomb squad was on the scene.

Mr. Page was living in a rented apartment in Cudahy, about five miles from the sprawling temple Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, a suburb of Milwaukee.

A search of the Lexis-Nexis online records service showed that Page had lived at least 20 addresses in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Colorado, California and Texas.

Joseph Rackley of Nashville, N.C., said  that Page lived with his son for about six months last year in a house on Rackley’s property. Wade was bald and had tattoos all over his arms, Rackley said, but he doesn’t remember what they depicted. He said he wasn’t aware of any ties Page had to white supremacists.

“I’m not a nosy kind of guy,” Rackley said. “When he stayed with my son, I don’t even know if Wade played music. But my son plays alternative music and periodically I’d have to call them because I could hear more than I wanted to hear.”