WASHINGTON — An 88-year-old white supremacist was charged with murder Thursday, a day after officials said he left a signed anti-Semitic screed in his car outside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, then gunned down a security guard who opened the door to let him in.
Guard Stephen T. Johns was shot to death Wednesday by Holocaust denier James W. von Brunn, who left his car outside an entrance to the museum and walked in holding a rifle at his side, District Police Chief Cathy Lanier said at a news conference.
Von Brunn started shooting immediately, exchanging fire with two other guards who shot and critically injured him, Lanier said.
In his car, officers found a notebook with a handwritten note that read, “You want my weapons — this is how you’ll get them. The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews,” according to a court affidavit.
Von Brunn’s .22-caliber rifle held 10 more bullets, and investigators found more in his car and at an apartment in Annapolis, Md., that he shared with his son and his son’s fiancee.
Security guards fired at von Brunn at least eight times, hitting him in the face.
The museum remained closed Thursday and flags flew at half staff in honor of Johns, 39, who had worked at the museum for six years. Bouquets of roses, lilies and other flowers were left outside the museum walls.
Von Brunn, who tried to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve decades ago, remained in critical condition Thursday at a Washington hospital.
A self-described artist, advertising man and author, he wrote an anti-Semitic treatise, “Kill the Best Gentiles,” decried “the browning of America” and claimed to expose a Jewish conspiracy “to destroy the White gene-pool.”
He also wrote of a lifetime of seething anger.
“It’s better to be strong than right,” he said in one of his dark online postings, “unless you like dying. Crowds hate good guys.”
Von Brunn was charged with murder and killing in the course of possessing a firearm at a federal facility, both capital offenses under federal law, and authorities said Thursday that hate-crime charges were also possible. Johns was black.
Von Brunn is a native of St. Louis and a World War II veteran who served in the Navy, worked in advertising in New York City and moved to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the late 1960s, where he stayed in advertising and tried to make a mark as an artist.
Public records show that in 2004 and 2005 he lived briefly in Hayden, Idaho, for years home to the Aryan Nations, a racist group run by neo-Nazi Richard Butler.
Von Brunn had claimed on his website that he had a long-standing relationship with Willis Carto, a publisher of books denying the Holocaust.
Carto flatly denied that in a phone interview, saying he had not heard from von Brunn in years and never had any relationship with him.
In fact, Carto said, in recent months von Brunn “has spent a great deal of anger” attacking American Free Press, the weekly newspaper Carto publishes, “saying these papers and the people who published them were too soft on the Jews.”
