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At Least 3 Other Anti-Semitic Shootings in US in Past 20 Years 


FILE - Police officers gather at the scene of a shooting at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park, Kan., April 13, 2014.
FILE - Police officers gather at the scene of a shooting at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park, Kan., April 13, 2014.

There have been at least three other significant anti-Semitic shootings in the United States in the past 20 years, and the Anti-Defamation League reports that anti-Semitic attacks, particularly vandalism, are on the rise.

On Aug. 10, 1999, five people were wounded at the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center when white supremacist Buford Furrow fired 70 shots in the lobby of the building. Furrow later killed a mail carrier, fled in a taxi to Las Vegas, and there surrendered to authorities. He told the FBI he wanted the shooting to be "a wake-up call to America to kill Jews."

Furrow was found guilty of murder and civil rights violations. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

On July 28, 2006, one person died and five others were injured in Seattle, Wash., when a gunman opened fire at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.

The gunman, Naveed Haq, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin, was convicted of aggravated murder under Washington's hate-crime statute and sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus 120 years.

On April 13, 2014, three people were killed in Overland Park, Kan., in shootings at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and in Village Shalom, a Jewish retirement center.

The gunman, white supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., 73, of North Carolina, was convicted of murder and other crimes and sentenced to death in 2015.

In its 2017 audit of anti-Semitic events, the Anti-Defamation League said it logged 1,986 incidents, an increase of 57 percent over the findings of a year earlier. Notable was a spree of 163 bomb threats made against Jewish institutions in the first three months of 2017. An additional six bomb threats against Jewish groups took place later in the year.

The largest increase in types of incidents in 2017 — 86 percent over 2016 — was vandalism. The ADL recorded 952 incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism in 2017, many of them cemetery vandalisms or schoolyard incidents.

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