Suspect Is Called Racist Loner

Buford Oneal Furrow was by all accounts a classic quiet man given to extraordinary eruptions of rage, sometimes against himself, sometimes against others, as brutally evident in his alleged attack Tuesday at the North Valley Jewish Community Center.

Friends and neighbors describe him as a loner with extreme racist beliefs and a history of mental health problems. He had a hard time holding jobs, despite returning to college as an adult and earning an engineering degree.

He was an active member of the Aryan Nations, a group that believes Jews descend from Satan, blacks from animals, and that members of both groups should be killed. Furrow lived for a time not far from the Aryan Nations’ northern Idaho compound and taught hand-to-hand combat there. A photograph of him taken at the compound shows him outfitted in full neo-Nazi regalia, a heavyset man with thinning hair and thin mustache.

Furrow, 37, lived for a number of years with the widow of Robert Mathews, the founder of the racist group The Order. The relationship with Debbie Mathews was marked by high-volume arguments and ended more than a year ago. A final attempt at reconciliation in July failed.

Furrow, who had worked most recently as an engineer for an aerospace parts manufacturer, was hospitalized for a month last year in the psychiatric unit of a county hospital in Seattle.

After his discharge, Furrow was arrested for pulling a knife on workers while trying to commit himself into a different facility, the Fairfax Psychiatric Hospital in Kirkland, a Seattle suburb.

Fantasies of Murder

He ominously told investigators in that case that he was a white separatist who fantasized about murder sprees. Local prosecutors took him at his word, saying Furrow “poses a grave threat to himself and society should he be released.”

On Oct. 28, after his arrest, Furrow told King County authorities: “I have been having suicidal and homicidal thoughts for some time now. Yesterday, I had thoughts that I would kill my ex-wife and some of her friends; then maybe I would drive to Canada and rob a bank.”

“I wanted the police to shoot me,” Furrow said, according to a transcript of his interview. “I own a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun made by Taurus. I always carry it in the glove box of my car. I also have several knives.”

Before that incident, Furrow had been drinking heavily and had cut himself many times with a knife, including one cut the day before that almost severed his finger, he told investigators. While being interviewed by the clinic staff, he had been persuaded to give up his car keys. But then he turned violent, demanding his keys back. When staff members refused, Furrow pulled a knife, according to court documents.

Furrow was charged with second-degree felony assault on Nov. 2 and remained in custody as the case proceeded to trial. By the time he pleaded guilty to the charges on April 26, he had already served almost the maximum possible sentence and was set free.

Shortly after, Furrow attempted the final failed reconciliation with Mathews, who was considered his wife, then moved back to his childhood home outside Olympia, where he lived with his father, a retired Air Force enlisted man, and his mother, who is in failing health. At some point, he began making the arrangements that led him to the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills on Tuesday morning.

‘Can’t Hold a Job’

For the past several years, Furrow’s parents, Buford Furrow Sr. and Monnie, have expressed anguish over their only child’s mental condition and his inability to hold jobs.

Buford Sr. had many conversations about it with his next-door neighbor of 35 years, Clint Merrill.

“It was hard for him to keep a job. His stress got to him,” Merrill said of the younger Furrow, whom he called Neal. “He’d get all worked up and quit.”

On Wednesday, Merrill visited the Furrows several times to provide support amid a sea of reporters and law enforcement authorities. Merrill said he was questioned at length by two FBI agents. Merrill said he told them, emphatically, that the Furrows are “just wonderful people, the parents. We’re just completely shocked and surprised. His parents are so nice. They’re the best neighbors we’ve ever had. They’d do anything for us, as we would for them.”

Merrill said he told the FBI agents that he’d never heard the younger Furrow say anything bad about anyone.

Merrill said Furrow’s father had tears of anguish in his eyes.

“They’re in shock, just like everybody,” Merrill said. “They are taking it very hard. They just have no idea how anything like this could happen. No inkling.”

Furrow’s neighbors said there was nothing in his words or actions that make sense of Tuesday’s shootings. The last time his parents talked to Furrow was last Saturday, when he said he was “just going out for a ride” in his pickup.

It was then that he drove to a used car lot, traded his truck and $4,000 cash for a red panel van in Tacoma, Wash. He must have left for Los Angeles immediately. A bartender in Chatsworth said Wednesday she served him a drink Sunday evening, 36 hours after his family last saw him.

The house that Furrow shared with Debbie Mathews is in a remote valley about five miles west of the small town of Metaline, population 164, near the Canadian border.

Mathews shrugged and refused to answer questions after coming to the door of her small trailer home Wednesday afternoon.

“You bet this is a surprise. I didn’t have a clue,” was all she would say.

Outside the small brown trailer a Confederate flag waved. A woman in a trailer next door said Furrow came home on the Fourth of July weekend and attempted to reconcile with Mathews, but Mathews would have no part of it.

“He wanted to get back together with her, but she said you have way too many problems. I told her I knew she had done the smart thing. I knew he had just gotten out of jail,” said the woman, who declined to give her name.

Mathews sat on her porch the night of the shooting, the neighbor said, “and she was just in shock. She didn’t have a clue. We were scared he was headed back up here last night. I’m just glad he snapped somewhere else.”

“She doesn’t condone violence, even though she has some different beliefs. She thought he finally got the picture and was just out of her life. That’s what she really wanted . . . just for him to leave her alone,” the neighbor said.

Mathews has lived in Metaline for years and is described as a kindhearted neighbor who frequently shows up to help neighbors with tasks on their ranches.

Metaline resident Debbie MacArthur said Furrows’ alleged crime is “disgusting. But the whole world is disgusting. The whole world seems like it’s coming unglued,” she said.

‘Violent Temper’

Meda VanDyke, an 82-year-old rancher who lives near Mathews, said, “I didn’t see him a lot. He was pleasant when I saw him. His wife told me he had a violent temper she couldn’t put up with.”

VanDyke, who has known Mathews for many years, said Mathews met Furrow at the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. She said they had a marriage ceremony performed by Richard Butler, the group’s founder.

“The Aryans all hate Jews, and all minorities, but he never talked about any of that to me,” VanDyke said.

Thomas J. Leyden, 33, a former white supremacist, said he met Furrow three years ago at the Aryan Nations camp in Hayden Lake. “He was giving hand-to-hand combat training,” Leyden said in Los Angeles.

Leyden said that the camp was held every year around April 20--Adolf Hitler’s birth date--and that one of the goals of the camp was to share information about how to recruit youth. “All the racist recruiters went up there. . . . They don’t do it anymore. Now they have the Net and they talk every night,” said Leyden, who has worked on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s anti-hate task force for the past three years.

A leader of the Aryan Nations, Neuman Britton of Escondido, disavowed knowledge of Furrow and said he did not advocate “going out and killing the rank and file of any race.”

Britton suggested that Furrow might have become frustrated at the degree of racial integration in American society and struck out. “I’m not saying it’s right, but I understand how he could have become overwhelmed with it,” Britton said.

After Furrow left Metaline, he lived in a mobile home park in Lynnwood, a Seattle suburb. The landlord of the park, Helga Helverson, said he “never said anything about Jews or anybody else. He always was by himself and had no friends in the trailer park.”

“You know, he was a wonderful tenant. He came and did his laundry. He went to work in the morning and he came home. That was all. It doesn’t sound like him. He was so quiet. He was supposed to have some kind of sickness that was crippling him. I have no idea what it is. But he didn’t seem sick.”

Neighbors in Olympia described Furrow on Wednesday as cheerful, with a ready smile.

Clint Merrill’s daughter, Loni, went to Timberline High School with Furrow and remembers him even then as a loner, somebody who would sit by himself on the school bus.

“He was unassuming. He was just there. Very unobtrusive,” she said.

Tim Tyrolt, a manufacturing engineer who lives next door to Furrow’s parents, said he was a year ahead of Furrow at Timberline High in nearby Lacey. He said Furrow was so quiet that he never even realized the two had been at the same school until years later.

One certainty following this week’s events is that Furrow is unlikely to be that forgettable ever again.

*

This story was written by McDermott with reporting by Murphy in Metaline, Wash., and Meyer and Times researcher Lynn D. Marshall in Seattle.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Aryan Nations Profile

Aryan Nations is a pseudo-theological group that militantly advocates anti-Semitism and the establishment of a white racist state.

Headquarters: Near Hayden Lake, Idaho

Leader and founder: Richard G. Butler Age: 77

Founded: Mid-1970s

Publications: Aryan Nations Newsletter, Calling Our Nation, The Way

Quotes from the Aryan Nations Web site:

We believe that the Cananite Jew is the natural enemy of our Aryan (white) race. This is attested by Scripture and all secular history. The Jew is like a destroying virus that attacks our racial body to destroy our Aryan culture and the purity of our race. Those of our race who resist these attacks are called ‘chosen and faithful.’

We believe that there is a battle being fought this day between the children of darkness (today known as Jews) and the children of light (Yahweh, the everliving God), the Aryan race, the true Israel of the Bible.

Sources: “Danger: Extremism--The Major Vehicles and Voices on America’s Far-Right Fringe” published by the Anti-Defamation League; Aryan Nations web site