Jeff Weise

Who was Jeff Weise?

Jeffrey James "Jeff" Weise was a student at Red Lake Senior High School in Red Lake, Minnesota, located within the Red Lake Indian Reservation of the Ojibwe people. He is known for having murdered a total of nine people in a shooting spree on March 21, 2005. He killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion before going to the reservation high school, where he murdered seven more people and wounded five others.

Before Weise was born, his young parents separated, and Jeff lived mostly with his father and grandparents. From the age of three, he lived with his mother in the Minneapolis area; she later had two more children and married their father. When Weise was nine, his birth father committed suicide on the reservation; when he was eleven, his mother suffered severe brain damage in a car accident and had to be admitted to a nursing home. Weise was taken from his stepfather in Minneapolis and placed in the custody of his father's family on the reservation. Weise lived primarily with his paternal grandmother and an aunt. Residents of the reservation have suffered high rates of unemployment and poverty, violence and suicide.

Weise struggled in school.