White supremacist who killed 3 at Jewish centers sentenced to death

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — A Kansas jury on Tuesday said a white supremacist who shot three people to death outside two Jewish centers last year should be put to death for the crimes.

Frazier Glenn Cross, 74, a former senior member of the Ku Klux Klan who has been representing himself in court, was found guilty last month of killing Reat Underwood, 14, and his grandfather, William Corporon, 69, outside the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, and Terri LaManno, 53, outside a Jewish retirement home, both in Overland Park, Kansas. The jury also convicted Cross of three counts of attempted murder for shooting at three other people.

Cross said during the trial he shot them because he thought they were Jewish but none of those killed were in fact Jewish.

Cross, 74, gave a Nazi salute to the jury, and declared "Death to the Jews" at the end of his closing statement before the jury retired to consider his sentence.

At his two-week-long trial, Cross admitted he committed the killings, and said he had wanted to kill as many Jews as he could.

Cross, also known as Glenn Miller, said Jews control the media, financial institutions and the movie industry and he blamed Jewish women for backing a movement that led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973 to legalize abortion.

At the end of his closing statement on Tuesday, Cross glared at jurors over his reading glasses as he sat in a wheelchair and dared them to give him the death penalty.

"I voluntarily sacrificed my freedom for my people," Cross said. "Do you see fear in me? You see a proud white man."