Why? Of all the questions about the Red Lake shootings it's the biggest. And it's the question that might never be answered. The pictures of Jeff Weise on TV and the newspapers are of a young boy, innocent and almost angelic in his Batman t-shirt, blowing out his birthday candles. How do you reconcile those pictures with the image of a merciless killer, walking the halls of Red Lake High school shooting his classmates in the head? People who knew him say he was no longer a little boy. He was six feet tall and weighed 250 pounds. What happened to this young man in the span of 16 short years to bring him to this? As MPR's Bob Reha reports, his family life was difficult:

Wiese has been described as a loner. Someone who wore long black coats and was picked on by classmates. Student Ashley Morrision described Wiese as scary and weird.

Audrey Thayer, the head of the local ACLU, says the shooting is tragic. But she says people need to remember Wiese had a lot of tragedy in his life. His mother lives in a nursing home after being seriously injured in a car accident. His father committed suicide eight years ago. Thayer says people need to see Wiese beyond stereotypical descriptions.

"I know there was some discussion of media portraying that the kids were picking on this young guy in high school," says Thayer. "You always have jabs at each other. Look further back, and see what the history of this young man was."

The Star Tribune says Weise was a mystery, but that there were certainly signs of trouble:

Sondra Hegstrom, who said she had had classes with Weise, said he was quiet and "never said anything." He was teased -- "terrorized," she said -- by people who thought he was weird.

He often wore "a big old black trench coat," she said, and drew pictures of skeletons. "He talked about death all the time."

A couple of his friends had said he was suicidal, she said. They quoted him as saying once, "That would be cool if I shot up the school."

The friends dismissed it as talk, Hegstrom said.

But Willy May, 18, who knew Weise from school, said people shouldn't have been surprised.

"He fits the profile of a Columbine shooter, man," he said.

May said Weise always wore combat boots "with red shoelaces," similar to those of the shooters at Columbine High School.

He said that Weise "always had stacks of drawings, disturbed drawings." Some, he said, would show people with bullets going through their skulls.

The Pioneer Press looks at Weise's postings on neo-Nazi Web sites:

Officials investigating the country's worst school shooting since Columbine said they'll be looking into Weise's posts to neo-Nazi forums, but they didn't know if his political or racial beliefs played a role in the shootings.

"It's premature to make that speculation," said Michael Tabman, special agent in charge of the FBI's Minneapolis office, who is heading the investigation.

Weise, writing under the pen names Todesengel — German for "angel of death" — or "NativeNazi," appeared to do most of his online writing at www.nazi.org, the Web site maintained by a group calling itself the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party.

On the site, the group it believes in "a resurrection of traditional values" and that it is "a think tank for environmentalist and nationalist ideals."

"Make no mistake; they're a hate group," said Molly Altorfer of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Minneapolis. "They are seductive because relative to other outwardly militant hate groups, they seem low-key. They couch their hate in this sort of new-agey social theory message."

The FBI says it took less than 10 minutes for this misguided kid to shoot up the high school. How long will it take for Red Lake and the rest of Minnesota to recover?