Police have identified the dead attacker, who killed six people inside a Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin state as a military veteran, while American leaders expressed their sorrow to the shocked Sikh community struggling to cope with Sunday’s tragedy.
Police Chief in Oak Creek, Milwaukee area of the Midwest American state, John Edwards named the dead suspect as Wade Michael Page, 40, a six-year Army enlistee. A senior law enforcement official said Page rose to the rank of sergeant before being demoted to specialist and leaving the military in 1998, The Washington Post reported. Page shot the first police officer to arrive on the scene eight or nine times at close range after the officer went to render aid to a victim of the shooting he found in the parking lot, Edwards said. The shooter also fired at two police cars and disobeyed commands to drop his weapon before an officer fatally shot him with a squad rifle, the police chief said.
Police said five Sikh men and one woman ranging in age from 39 to 84 were killed in the shooting rampage. Three other people were wounded, and two are in critical condition, Edwards said. Page “was the only shooter that was involved at the temple,” Edwards told reporters, according to the Post report. Police said Page received a “general discharge” from the military and was “ineligible for reenlistment.”
Earlier, Police sources told CNN the army veteran may have been a white supremacist. The Post quoted an unnamed Defense Department official as disclosing that 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, the official said. Meanwhile, relatives of Satwant Kaleka, the president of the gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, said Monday that he was killed fighting the attacker. “From what we understand, he basically fought to the very end and suffered gunshot wounds while trying to take down the gunman,” Kanwardeep Singh Kaleka, his nephew, said according to a CNN report.
“He was a protector of his own people, just an incredible individual who showed his love and passion for our people, our faith, to the end,” he said, near tears. The FBI said it had not determined a motive for the Sunday morning shooting and that investigators were looking into whether the attack might be classified as domestic terrorism. Kaleka, a member of the temple, said those inside the gurdwara, or Sikh temple of worship, described the attacker as a bald white man, dressed in a white T-shirt and black pants and with a 9/11 tattoo on one arm — which “implies to me that there’s some level of hate crime there.” Because of their customary beards and turbans, Sikh men are often confused with Muslims, and they have been the targets of hate crimes since the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the CNN reported.