Wade Michael Page’s neighbours are largely of one view about the man who shot dead six worshipers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on Sunday.
“I stayed away from him,” said Char Brown, who lived in the same building and said she endured him playing loud rock music late into the night.
Another neighbour, Jennifer Dunn, a psychiatric nurse, said she regarded Page as “creepy” in part because he would not look her in the eye. Dunn too complained about the music and said that the night before the attack on the Sikh temple it seemed particularly loud.
FBI investigators will be looking into what it was Page was listening to in the hours before the massacre and whether it shaped his state of mind given he played in two white power bands that performed with lyrics urging racial domination.
The bands – Definite Hate and End Apathy – came to be an important part of Page’s life after a failed army career, dismissal from a series of jobs and a rocky relationship with a girlfriend who left him earlier this year.
Char Brown’s husband, David, called Page “very standoffish” and “not real friendly”. He said he rarely saw Page emerge from his flat other than to go out with an instrument case on his back.
But Page’s stepmother, Laura Page, said it wasn’t always that way. She described him as a “normal little boy” and struggled to explain how he came to be a mass murderer with a Facebook picture of him in front of a Nazi swastika.
