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player ready...Just months before killing himself at the end of an alleged hate-driven shooting spree, Benjamin Smith told the banal tale of his conversion to white supremacy.
“What set me into action was when I was forced to live in the dorms” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Smith wrote in the March newsletter of a hate group.
“I was from a well-to-do, mostly white area (with significant Jewish infestation),” he wrote of his life in Wilmette.
“I discovered that the vast majority of black, brown, and yellow students were here because the government was paying their way,” he wrote. “That bothered me. I felt as if what was once our government had begun to turn against white people.”
The words and the malevolent logic come as no surprise to those who know Smith, 21, as a fierce white supremacist who authorities believe embarked on a three-day rampage.
But the new information at least begins to answer some questions for those who knew Smith growing up on the North Shore and who recall him as a bookish, quiet kid who read philosophy and pronounced himself a Muslim halfway through high school.
Those who knew Smith then have struggled to understand how a smart student with several Jewish friends came to devote himself to a white supremacist group that honored him in January as its “creator of the year” for his leafletting blitzes.
Smith followed many paths before choosing one beaten by a racial hatred that alienated those closest to him.
Scott Dubin, who met Smith when they were 13, described Smith as his “best friend” at New Trier High School in Winnetka.
“I myself am Jewish,” Dubin said in an interview. “He must have really, really changed. He’s not the same person.
Just what changed for Smith during the three years since he left New Trier lies in a trail he left at two colleges in Illinois and Indiana, a path marked by increasingly frequent run-ins with school authorities.
“There’s nothing that anybody can recall about him that in any way was related to this despicable behavior,” said Henry Bangser, superintendent of New Trier Township District 203.
Smith enrolled at the University of Illinois in 1996 in the college of agricultural, consumer and environmental sciences.
In the four semesters Smith attended the school, university police had five contacts with him, ranging from marijuana possession charges to allegations that he was a peeping Tom.
From the start, there were signs that Smith was interested in white supremacy.
In September 1996, police responded to a call that someone was peeking in the windows of a women’s residence hall. When Smith was spotted running, police stopped him and asked for identification.
According to police, Smith produced a fake driver’s license with the name of Hitler’s field marshal, Erwin Rommel.
At the same time, said Smith’s ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Sahr, Smith was becoming violent.
Sahr met Smith during her freshman year, and they dated throughout most of 1997. Sahr said Smith was physically, emotionally and verbally abusive.
“He was pretty much a textbook abuser,” Sahr said Monday from her parents’ home in Oak Lawn. “At first they’re charming as hell and get you to believe that they love you and care for you. Then they turn.”
Sahr said Smith never spoke of his racist ideology while they were dating. Shortly after she broke off contact with him in January 1998, he was suspected of distributing hate literature in a dormitory.
Friends from the North Shore, who did not have much contact since he left for college, said they noticed a chilling transformation as well.
“He had changed completely,” said one 21-year-old Wilmette man, a former friend of Smith’s who asked that he not be identified.
In high school, Smith read Plato and talked about history–not at all the person whom he saw last Thanksgiving.
“He had a Nazi T-shirt and had tattoos,” the friend said. “There was some book he wanted me to read. He wanted me to take it home and read it and I said, `No, I’m not really interested.’ “
By that time, Smith also had become friends with Patrick Langballe, a 23-year-old former New Trier student who was accused in 1997 of spray painting swastikas on a Northfield synagogue.
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“Ben looked Patrick up when Patrick’s story hit the news.” said Geri Langballe, Patrick’s mother.
In April, Smith’s growing commitment to the white supremacist movement became apparent to many who knew him on the North Shore, when Wilmette police cited him for littering after he distributed racist pamphlets around neighborhood lawns.
The community near Indiana University was already well acquainted with Smith’s racism.
After withdrawing from the University of Illinois in February, 1998–following a clash with school officials over racist posters he hung in a residential hallway–Smith had enrolled at the Bloomington, Ind., school.
He soon began distributing his racist literature around campus and writing articles in the school newspaper defending his beliefs.
“There was no visible white supremacist movement in Bloomington until he came along,” said Jeffrey Willsey, director of the city’s Safe and Civil City project.
By this spring, Smith’s activities had became so well-known that he was the subject of a group discussion in an IU race and ethnicity class, said student Tyrese Alexander.
But many in Bloomington said they never expected him to take his agenda this far.
“It’s so scary because it could have been me or someone else,” said Alexander, who was Smith’s neighbor in Two Touchdown Terrace, an apartment complex across the street from Hoosier Stadium.
On Monday, groups that monitor hate crimes said the tragedy should be an alarm that more fundamental problems might exist in the community.
“I think that this has the potential to be a threat to the peace of mind of our community,” said Harlan Loeb, Midwest counsel for the Anti-Defamation League. “The trend is–and we’ve seen it in Columbine–that hate mongering is not a function of economic class.”
At the Smiths’ Northfield home, shades were drawn and Smith’s parents, a physician and a former Wilmette village trustee, declined to comment.
No one knows what might have pushed Smith from being an avowed member of a white supremacist group to being an alleged killer.
“There are absolutely two people who know what set him off,” said Pam Melick, a Wilmette resident and cultural relations consultant. “And that is Ben Smith and God.”