Arrest over Jewish center shootings

A man with a history of spouting anti-Semitic rhetoric is suspected of shooting to death a boy and his grandfather outside a Jewish community center near Kansas City, Kansas, and then a woman at a nearby Jewish assisted living facility, CNN reported.

Police say Frazier Glenn Cross is the suspect in the shootings.

He is the founder and former leader of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups. Both organizations operated as paramilitary groups in the 1980s, according to the SPLC.

In the 73-year-old's anti-Semitic and white-supremacist activities, he has also used the name Frazier Glenn Miller, the SPLC said.

After he was apprehended at a nearby elementary school, Cross sat in the back of a patrol car and shouted "Heil Hitler!" video from CNN affiliate KMBC shows.

Investigators have determined that the shootings could be a hate crime, Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass said at a Monday news conference.

Cross faces charges of premeditated first-degree murder, officials said.

He obtained firearms from a "straw buyer," a middleman with a clean record who could buy weapons legally and then sell or give them to Cross, allowing Cross to avoid federal background checks, a U.S. law enforcement official said. He had three guns when he was arrested Sunday, authorities said.

Barry Grissom, the U.S. attorney for Kansas, told reporters Monday that he has "received communications" from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder expressing Holder's "concern and condolences."

"We are in a very good place from an evidence standpoint of moving forward with this case and we will be presenting it to the grand jury in the not-too-distant future," Grissom said.

If the suspected shooter is charged and convicted of a hate crime, under federal law, the death penalty could be on the table. That would apply if the charge is that the defendant was motivated by the victims' "race, color, religion or national origin."

The shootings took place at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and the Village Shalom Retirement Community in Overland Park a day before the start of Passover, a major Jewish holiday.