ROCKY MOUNTAIN HATE

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

From his Denver jail cell, the nearly bald, swastika-tattooed murder suspect spoke the sort of poker-faced lunacy that the nation hoped it had left behind. "In a war," said Nathan Thill, 19, explaining why he shot defenseless Mauritanian immigrant Oumar Dia, "everyone wearing an enemy uniform is an enemy and should be taken out." Dia's "uniform" was apparently his skin color. Thill's "war," of course, existed only in his head. Or did it? Last week, after attacks on civilians and police by short-haired haters that left two people dead, one paralyzed and parts of the city looking like siege zones, Mayor Wellington Webb felt the need to pledge that "we are not going to give up the streets of Denver." Residents wondered whether their city had become ground zero for a new Aryan offensive.

The first skirmish occurred three weeks ago, when two men traded gunfire with police during a 20-mile car chase. Captured suspect Jerald Dean Allen flashed hate tattoos and announced, "I'm fighting for my cause." A week later, Matthaeus Jaehnig, 25, ended a similar chase by killing officer Bruce VanderJagt and then himself. Jaehnig was a longtime member of a group called the Denver Skins. Dozens of apparent skinheads attended his funeral, and a few days later, someone deposited a dead pig inscribed with the name VANDERJAGT near the slain policeman's station house.

By then, the police had another murder on their hands. Last Tuesday, they say, Thill and suspect Jeremiah Barnum, 23, bullied Dia, a hotel housekeeper, at a bus stop and knocked off his hat. When nurse's assistant Jeannie VanVelkinburgh picked it up for him, Thill opened fire. Dia died in minutes; VanVelkinburgh, a single mother of two boys, is paralyzed from the waist down. "It wasn't a planned thing," Thill told local station KMGH-TV. "Drank a little bit. I'm a deep thinker. Walked through town with my gun in my waist, saw the black guy and thought he didn't belong where he was at."

On Thursday came another antipolice incident. A man with "very short" hair hiding under a bush emptied a gun at an officer responding to an emergency call. The gunman missed, and by day's end more than 200 heavily armed police in helmets and bulletproof vests, using dogs and helicopters, had shut down blocks of west Denver looking for him.

There is no evidence of a conspiracy. "Some [of the crimes] may be copycats," notes police sergeant Dennis Cribari. But Carl Raschke, a University of Denver professor who tracks hate groups, is not reassured: "These people don't have to know each other. They click on the same Websites, they listen to the same music, they know the code." Last week, he surmises, they began a "game of chicken" with city authorities. Denver residents fear the game could take more tragic turns before it's over.

--By David Van Biema. Reported by Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Denver