Midwest Shooting Suspect Kills Himself

This time, sociopathic white supremacism was driving not a pickup in Texas but a light blue Ford in the Windy City. On Sunday night, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, 21, an activist member of the anti-minority World Church of the Creator suspected in four drive-by shootings Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Illinois and Indiana, apparently killed himself after being chased by police. In his wake he left two people dead -- one former Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, who was black, the other a Korean-American shot down outside a church. The chain: shots fired at three black men Saturday afternoon in Springfield (one was wounded); a Saturday night shooting of an Asian student in Urbana; a spree in Chicago.on Friday night that left Byrdsong dead and six Orthodox Jews wounded: and a shooting in the university town of Bloomington Sunday morning that killed the Korean-American, a graduate student. Survivors of all the incidents described a white man, aged 20 to 30, in a light blue Ford Taurus. At first, police offered careful demurrals as to whether the shootings were racially motivated -- "We're not saying it's not a hate crime," said Chicago police spokesman Pat Camden. "What we are saying is at this particular moment in the investigation, the elements for a hate crime are not there" -- but the later identification of a suspect from a white supremacist group indicated that they had narrowed their field of inquiry. Then came the car chase. Northwestern officials expressed outrage at the shootings apparent racial component. "We are all sickened by these continual random acts of violence that are sweeping our country," said Northwestern Athletics Director Rick Taylor. Thats just whats sickening about them -- they dont seem to have been random at all.