White supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, who was responsible for killing three people at a Jewish community center and assisted-living/Jewish retirement facility in Kansas City, Kan., in 2014, died in prison on Monday.
Miller was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2015 for his attacks on the two Jewish sites in Overland Park. His execution by lethal injection was pending active legal appeals, NPR reported. He died in the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas at the age of 80.
None of the three victims, who were chosen at random, were actually Jewish. Miller fired at other people during the attacks at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and nearby Village Shalom retirement home, but they escaped unharmed.
Though an official cause of death has not been announced, a news release from the Kansas Department of Corrections said “preliminary assessment indicates the death was due to natural causes.” Miller said during his 2015 trial that he had chronic emphysema.
Miller founded two white-supremacist militias: the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the White Patriot Party.
In April 2014, he opened fire in the parking lot of Overland Park’s Jewish Community Center, where he killed 69-year-old physician William Corporon and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Underwood. He then drove to the nearby Village Shalom retirement home and shot to death 53-year-old Terri LaManno, who was visiting her mother.
Miller said repeatedly in his trial and interviews with the press that he went to those locations seeking to kill Jews, NPR noted. All three victims were Christians. According to the New York Post, on March 30, Miller called the American Friends of Kiev hotline and spoke to Rabbi Menachem Siegal, director of the United Jewish Communities of Eastern Europe and Asia.
Siegal reported that Miller condemned him for raising money on behalf of Jews, who Miller felt “cause all of the problems” and “destroyed the whole economy in the United States and the world.” Miller added, “Hitler should have finished off the job in Europe by coming to the United States and getting rid of every Jew.”
He died the same day, May 3, that a relative of two of the Kansas City victims published a book in honor of their lives.
