The hate-filled descent of Buford Furrow
White supremacist's shooting rampage puts state's justice and mental health systems under scrutiny
Friday, September 17, 1999
By HEATH FOSTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Click here for timeline of Furrow's life to date.
When Buford Furrow Jr. showed up drunk and suicidal at a Kirkland psychiatric hospital one afternoon last October, he couldn't have made his proclivity for violence more obvious.
The stocky, blue-eyed engineer admitted to Fairfax Hospital staff that he had a semiautomatic pistol in his car and that the night before he had fought off a strong urge to open fire at the crowded Alderwood Mall.
Buford booking photo
Furrow's left arm and index finger bore deep wounds inflicted in recent moments of self-hatred. His wallet contained an official membership card of Aryan Nations, a militant Neo-Nazi group that wants to empty the world of Jews and dark-skinned people. And he was talking repeatedly about his fantasy of murdering his ex-wife, a fellow neo-Nazi soldier.
Then, when workers refused to give him his truck keys, he pulled a switchblade and threatened a social worker and the hospital director.
"Give me my f---ing keys (or) . . . I will cut you up," he said. Furrow didn't drop the knife until the third time a King County sheriff's deputy ordered him to do so at gunpoint and then booked him into the King County Jail.
Nine months later, Furrow strolled into the North Valley Jewish Community Center near Los Angeles and opened fire, wounding a 68-year-old receptionist, a 16-year-old counselor and three young boys. Then he killed a friendly Filipino American postman who crossed his path, later saying he did so because the postman's dark skin and employment with the U.S. government made him a "target of opportunity."
On each of the 285 days in between his Fairfax Hospital arrest and his hateful rampage, Furrow was in custody or under the supervision of Washington agencies.
His mental health was evaluated repeatedly -- by psychiatric experts at the King County Jail, Harborview Medical Center and Western State Hospital, as well as by a seasoned King County Superior Court judge, prosecutor and three community corrections officers.
In hindsight, it is easy to conclude that these experts let a plainly dangerous man slip through their fingers. In a brief interview at his Olympia home, Furrow's 66-year-old father said he believed the state failed to give his son help that might have prevented the tragedy.
Furrow's trajectory through Washington's mental health and criminal justice systems is likely to be a central issue in his upcoming trial, given that his team of federal public defenders is widely expected to rely on a mental-health defense.
Furrow spent six weeks in intensive treatment, first at Harborview Medical Center and later at Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, before he began serving time in the King County Jail for his assault at Fairfax.
A review of previously undisclosed records and interviews with many of those involved in his case shows that authorities did consider Furrow's mental illness as they made decisions about the first-time offender's treatment, jail sentence and conditions of his supervised release.
Perhaps naively, those who came into contact with Furrow after he was stabilized, including his attorney, prosecutor, sentencing judge and community corrections officers, decided that he was not likely to reoffend as long as he stayed on his psychiatric medications. For that reason, they did not delve deeply into his white-supremacist history. And they did not take steps that could have kept Furrow in custody longer and under closer scrutiny upon his release. For example:
The King County Prosecutor's Office did not charge him with a second count of assault in the Fairfax incident, which would have added three months to his sentence, or add a deadly-weapon enhancement, which would have tacked on another year.
The community corrections officers who evaluated Furrow before sentencing never requested his hospital psychiatric records as they could have, thus missing information that might have led them to recommend that Furrow stay in mental health treatment after his release.
King County Superior Court Judge Harriett Cody did not require continuing mental health treatment despite a new law that allowed her to do so.
And the community corrections officer who supervised Furrow after his release did not visit Furrow in his home or search his car, as he could have, to see whether Furrow was drinking or amassing weapons and ammunition.
Critics charge that these seasoned professionals had a responsibility to take a harder look at Furrow's mental health and animosity toward minorities, especially given the facts they had available to them.
For example, the presentence investigation that community corrections officers prepared for Cody noted that one of Furrow's Fairfax victims confided the assault was so terrifying that seven months later, she still feared he might seek revenge against them. She emphasized Furrow's white-supremacist beliefs, and warned, "He definitely needs a supervised program."
"It was irresponsible not to get his (psychiatric) records," said Mark Leemon, a Seattle attorney who has successfully sued the Department of Corrections for failing to adequately supervise ex-prisoners before. "Here is a guy who is crazy enough that he is thinking of killing his wife and her friends, is thinking of shooting people in a mall, and has a mental illness that leads him to be involuntarily committed for treatment. I can't imagine that (his psychiatrists and psychologists) would have been thinking that his medications were a panacea, and that as long as he stayed on them, he would be just great."
But other experts question whether mental illness alone drove Furrow's well-planned attack on the day-care center. Sources close to the FBI investigation say agents believe it was pure racism that motivated him.
Other events in Furrow's personal life, such as a failed attempt to reconcile with his ex-wife over the Fourth of July weekend, his intermittent unemployment and the stress of living at home with a mother suffering from Alzheimer's disease, may have played an even greater role in his decision that he had little left to lose.
Even if authorities had done everything possible to keep Furrow under their thumb, there's no certainty they would have prevented the former Aryan Nations first lieutenant from speeding south to Los Angeles to find a place to massacre Jews.
"When something like this happens, there's always the suggestion that somehow government could have prevented it," said David Boerner, professor of criminal law and ethics at Seattle University and a former King County prosecutor who has reviewed Furrow's case. "But I think that misleads the public into believing that we can guarantee a safe world. There's no such thing. There are evil people in the world."
• • •
Under state law, Furrow's psychiatric records are confidential, as is his official diagnosis. But according to Department of Corrections records, he battled serious depression and in recent years had suffered frequent and increasingly severe anxiety attacks.
Police got a clear view of his disturbed mental state in a written confession after his arrest for the Fairfax assault.
"Sometimes I feel like I could lose it and kill people," he wrote. "I also feel like I could kill myself."
Jail psychologists quickly recognized Furrow as someone who needed treatment. At their prodding, within days of his arrest, a specially trained mental health evaluator for King County determined he posed a danger to himself or others, and Furrow was civilly committed for psychiatric treatment at Harborview. He tried to commit suicide there, corrections records show. Later, he voluntarily agreed to extend his treatment at Western State, court records show.
What kind of continuing treatment hospital psychologists and psychiatrists felt Furrow needed is not part of the public record. Nor is it clear how much he shared with them about his extensive past involvement with Aryan Nations.
Groups that monitor the white-supremacy movement believe Furrow became deeply involved in the early 1990s, when he began spending time at the 20-acre compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, that is a base for Aryan Nations and the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian.
The church, founded by Richard Butler, holds that people of white Northern European descent are the true Israelites tricked out of their birthright by Jews and forced to live with other races. Disciples believe that Jews are the son of Satan, and blacks, but not whites, are descendants of animals.
Eventually, Furrow rose to the rank of first lieutenant in the Aryan Nations security force, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. It was also on the compound that he met Debbie Mathews, widow of one of the movement's modern martyrs.
Her husband, Robert Mathews, was the founder of the Order, a racist, anti-Semitic group tied to the June 1984 assassination of Alan Berg, an outspoken Jewish host of a Denver radio talk show. Wanted for a number of other crimes, Mathews was killed later that year during an FBI siege of his house on Whidbey Island.
Debra Mathews lived in the bucolic town of Metaline Falls in northeastern Washington, and in 1994 Furrow got a job in nearby Colville at LaDuke and Forge Equipment, a farm machinery company.
Reached at her home last week, Mathews said she didn't want to discuss her relationship with Furrow. But according to Butler, he married Mathews and Furrow in a March 1995 ceremony at the compound.
The two took a romantic honeymoon to Las Vegas, but it didn't take long for the relationship to sour, according to Mathews' neighbor and friend of 20 years, Meda Van Dyke.
On a drive into town about a year after their union, Van Dyke said Mathews complained that Furrow was trying to gain complete control of her life and her finances.
"He wanted to control what she did, and what she spent for, and she just couldn't handle that," Van Dyke, an 82-year-old rancher, remembered.
In December 1995, Furrow was laid off, and during the next few years he lived only sporadically with Mathews in Metaline Falls, Van Dyke said.
In March 1998, Furrow was hired as a design engineer at Northwest Gear, an Everett aircraft-parts maker. That spring, Mathews went over to the coast for a weeklong visit with Furrow, Van Dyke said. Mathews reported having a "lovely time," but that Furrow failed to persuade her then to sell her land and move across the mountains, Van Dyke said.
Depression and suicidal impulses began to plague Furrow more intensely that year until his arrest at Fairfax Hospital last October, court records show.
Because his mental health records are not public, the nature of the treatment he subsequently received at Harborview and Western State is not clear. Ira Klein, director of civil adult services at Western State, said the hospital's goal is to stabilize patients with therapy and medication, and then return them to the community with continuing mental health services.
Furrow returned to jail in early December, when he was arraigned on assault charges. And by the time of his sentencing May 21, Furrow appeared to be a changed man.
Powell, the community corrections officer who evaluated Furrow's case before his sentencing, wrote in abbreviated notes that Furrow then described the assault as "an act of desperation. . . . He was trying to get help. . . . He kept going to hospitals for treatment, but his medication wasn't doing the job. Current medications are working nicely."
Whether psychiatrists agreed with that assessment, Powell never knew, because he didn't review Furrow's mental health records, according to corrections officials.
Powell did note in his report to Judge Cody that Furrow faced some daunting challenges. The assetless Furrow felt a full-time job would "destabilize his condition," yet was not looking forward to living with his father, Buford Sr., who he said suffered from severe depression and his mother Monnie, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
"Furrow confided that he plans to stay at his parents' residence only as long as it took to find his own place," Powell wrote. "He felt that his mother's illness would have counterproductive influence on his peace of mind."
Nonetheless, Powell argued that Furrow had responded well to treatment and was "deserving of some measure of the court's leniency."
At the sentencing, Furrow's public defender, Leona Thomas, also assured Cody that he had been stabilized.
"I think it's one of those situations where the medications made a very dramatic difference very quickly," Thomas said, according to a transcript of the proceedings.
And Furrow offered the court his own sane-sounding mea culpa: "I would like to say I am sorry for what happened. I really feel a lot of remorse for the two women that I assaulted and I have a lot more respect now for the people in the mental-health profession, you know, what they have to go through in dealing with people like myself who are in real bad shape. And I also would like to thank you . . . for getting me up to Harborview and getting me on medications and kind of helping me out. I do feel quite a bit better than I was when I came into the jail system."
State law allowed Cody to sentence Furrow, who had no criminal history, to as many as nine months in jail. If King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng had added an additional assault charge, or a deadly weapon enhancement, Furrow could have faced a sentence of more than two years.
But Dan Donohoe, spokesman for Maleng, defended the decision. He said under the statewide prosecutorial standards his office adheres to, the single assault charge was a good fit for the crime Furrow had committed.
Cody sentenced Furrow to eight months for the assault. He served 165 days because of credit for good behavior. She did not require Furrow to continue with treatment, though she sternly admonished him to stay on his medications.
"It's not within any of our power to make you take your medications," she observed.
She also required him to stay away from his victims, from alcohol and from firearms.
In a recent interview, Cody said that because Furrow's case could potentially come before her again, she could not comment on why she did not take advantage of a 1998 law that allowed judges to require mental health treatment as a condition of release.
Cody stressed that she takes each sentencing decision seriously, but must act within the limitations of Washington laws, which dictate specific sentence ranges for specific crimes.
"There are shortcomings in what I am able to do under the law," she said. "It's not illegal to be a white supremacist."
Once Furrow was released, he moved in with his parents in Olympia, and his case was transferred to Pat Gosney, an experienced community corrections officer dealing with about 75 other cases at the time.
Furrow checked in with Gosney June 16, who noted at the time that Furrow was "taking medications that really help him with his fight against depression."
A few days later, Gosney received a detailed letter from Fairfax Hospital describing the assault on the social worker and hospital director and urging him to make sure Furrow continued with treatment and stayed in weekly contact with his corrections officer.
In early July, Gosney upgraded Furrow's classification from minimum to medium, which meant he would have to meet with Gosney at least twice, instead of once, a month.
Little is known of what Furrow did with his free time this summer. Van Dyke, Mathews' longtime friend, said that Furrow was seen in Metaline Falls over the Fourth of July Weekend.
"He . . . tried to get Debbie to sign over her property and car to him," Van Dyke said. "He was always trying to reconcile with her, but she wouldn't do it."
Furrow's failure to patch up his relationship with Mathews may have contributed to his downward spiral. But when he checked in with community corrections officer Gosney July 6, he was reportedly "in a good mood." Furrow showed Gosney the medications he was taking then, and Gosney discussed counseling options in the community Furrow could explore, according to his notes. He also took a urine sample to see whether Furrow was staying away from drugs and alcohol.
The next day, lab results detected amphetamines or methamphetamine in Furrow's system. Furrow insisted he hadn't been taking the drugs and agreed to have the sample retested at his own expense. The new test had no evidence of anything but the prescribed psychiatric drugs Furrow was taking, and Gosney concluded that the psychiatric drugs might have caused a false positive in the earlier test.
Gosney was impressed by the calm way that Furrow handled the incident and told him so at a July 20 meeting. "I informed (Furrow) that this situation was probably a little tough to deal with, however, it shows positive progress regarding his moods, attitude and anger," he wrote.
Furrow reported to Gosney's office again on Aug. 3, and Gosney again spotted nothing unusual. Furrow "was in good mood . . . no problems to note," he wrote.
Four days later, on Aug. 7, Furrow paid cash for a red GMC van at the Tacoma Kar Korner used-car lot, the same van found outside the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles after the shooting.
