Shooter Tried to 'Arrest' Fed Members in 1981

Details about the twisted past of the elderly man who killed a guard at the US Holocaust Museum continues to surface. In a bizarre incident in 1981, James von Brunn, then 62, stormed into the Federal Reserve's headquarters in DC armed with two guns, a knife, and a fake bomb, and demanded to make a citizen's arrest of board members, reports CNN. Von Brunn, who said he was incensed at high interest rates, served 6 years in federal prison for the stunt, a sentence he blamed in part on a "Jew judge."

"He has an extremely long history with neo-Nazis and white supremacists," said a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama. "He's written extremely incendiary publications raging about Jews, blacks, and the like." Von Brunn, who remains in critical condition after today's shooting, had become a "hard-core neo-Nazi" by the 1970s, said the researcher. He associated with William Pierce, whose Turner Diaries inspired Timothy McVeigh. (More James Von Brunn stories.)