WASHINGTON — An elderly Maryland man with a long history of ties to neo-Nazi organizations walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday and opened fire, killing a security guard and sending visitors scrambling for cover, law enforcement officials said.
An FBI official said the shooter had been preliminarily identified as James W. von Brunn, 88, who was described by the Anti-Defamation League and other watchers of hate groups as a longtime white supremacist and anti-Semite.
"We've been tracking this guy since the late 1970s," said Heidi Beirich, research director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "He has an extremely long history with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and is extremely hard-core."
The gunman, who was shot by museum security officers, was in critical condition at nearby George Washington University Hospital, police said.
The security guard wounded in the attack, 39-year-old Stephen Tyrone Johns of Temple Hills, Md., an African American, died after being taken to the same trauma center.
Joseph Persichini Jr., head of the FBI's Washington Field Office, and other authorities said that they had no indications in advance that the prominent federal-government-affiliated museum might be targeted.
He said they would be intensively investigating the suspect's recent movements.
"The preliminary indication is that this incident involved a lone suspect," Persichini said.
Von Brunn is "certainly the guy we're looking at, but we have to do fingerprints and do other work. We have to make sure and be absolutely positive," said another FBI official, who was briefed on the shootings but spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Von Brunn was described as a close associate of neo-Nazi organizations who has railed against Jews and blacks for decades. He has also been linked to Holocaust-denial groups, which contend that the Nazis' systematic extermination of millions of Jews in Europe beginning in the late 1930s never happened.
He has had other brushes with the law, and in 1983 was sentenced to at least four years in prison for attempting to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board. Records show that he was arrested after entering the board headquarters in Washington in 1981 with a bag that contained a revolver, a hunting knife and a sawed-off shotgun.
Von Brunn told investigators that he wanted to hold board members hostage because he considered them responsible for high interest rates and other economic difficulties.
