Kansas City JCC shooter sentenced to death

(JTA) — The white supremacist who killed three people at two suburban Kansas City Jewish institutions has been sentenced to death.

F. Glenn Miller Jr., 74, was sentenced Tuesday by Johnson County District Judge Kelly Ryan, the Kansas City Star reported. Miller, who is also known as F. Glenn Cross, is only the second person sentenced to the death penalty since Kansas reinstated it in 1994, according to the Star.

In September, a jury found Miller guilty of capital murder and recommended the death penalty.

Miller was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder in the April 2014 deaths of Reat Underwood, 14, and his grandfather, William Corporon, 69, outside the Jewish Community Center of Kansas City in Overland Park, as well as Terri LaManno, 53, outside the Village Shalom assisted-living facility. None of the victims was Jewish, but Miller assumed they were when he shot them.

He also was found guilty of aggravated assault for pointing a shotgun at a woman and asking if she was Jewish, and of firing into the JCC.

A former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon, Miller has been unapologetic about the shooting, in which he said he was trying to kill as many Jews as possible. During his trial, he waived the right to an attorney and argued the jury should find him not guilty because his shooting spree was a “patriotic attempt” to “defend my people against genocide.”

Miller told the Kansas City Star in an interview last November that he began planning the attacks when he became so sick with emphysema that he thought he would die soon and that he conducted reconnaissance missions of the JCC and Village Shalom in the days before the shootings.

“I wanted to make damned sure I killed some Jews or attacked the Jews before I died,” he told the newspaper.

Soon after his arrest, Miller told officers that he was an anti-Semite and asked them, “How many did I get?”