US Holocaust museum shuttered after shooting
Güncelleme Tarihi:
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum was shuttered yesterday as it mourned a guard who died stopping a rifle attack by a gunman identified by authorities as an 88-year-old white supremacist. James von Brunn, a Holocaust denier who once tried to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board, is the suspect in Wednesday's assault at the museum. Guard Stephen T. Johns was killed.
Security engaged the gunman as soon as he stepped inside the crowded museum and began shooting, authorities said. Johns, 39, who is black, "died heroically in the line of duty," museum director Sara Bloomfield said. Bloomfield told NBC's "Today" show that Johns was both a terrific professional and "a very warm and friendly individual, and we at the museum are devastated by his loss."
Bloomfield said the museum takes security very seriously and that training had prepared guards to respond to the attack. "So we feel that this actually worked extremely well in terms of how many people's lives were saved in this incident," she told NBC.
One guard shot and critically wounded the assailant, who was being treated at a Washington hospital. A self-described artist, advertising man and author living in Annapolis, Maryland, von Brunn wrote an anti-Semitic treatise, "Kill the Best Gentiles," decried "the browning of America" and claimed to expose a Jewish conspiracy "to destroy the White gene-pool." He also wrote of a lifetime of seething anger.
"It's better to be strong than right," he said in one of his dark screeds online, "unless you like dying. Crowds hate good guys."