by Fred Rosen
While there was a time when he was younger when he’d felt alienated from everyone, including his brother, Bryan had now taken a leap of rebellion that David also yearned to do. He cut his hair, bought the boots and jacket, and tattooed his body, and soon, two of the three Freeman brothers were full-fledged skinheads.
Erik quaked in terror before his older brothers.
They terrorized him on a regular basis and made him feel unsafe in his own house, in his own bed. He never knew when one or the other might reach out to hit or threaten him. While he was the apple of his parents’ eye, they couldn’t be around all the time to protect him. Life in the Freeman house for the youngest brother became a minefield. Erik fell victim to Bryan and David’s sadistic impulses.
Benny, meanwhile, visited the Freemans regularly. He was not indoctrinated the way Bryan was. For him, becoming a skinhead was just something to do. His sense of what was right and wrong had already been affected by his father’s past and his own juvenile troubles.
The local newspaper reported that Benny was convicted on juvenile charges of theft, burglary, receiving stolen property, and trespassing, which stemmed from the thefts of a .357 Magnum revolver and a .22 caliber Ruger semi-automatic pistol. His first probation officer, Karen Hammer, was quoted as saying, “He (Ben) indicated that the guns were going to be sold for drugs.”
As part of Benny’s probation, Judge Reibman made him watch Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List. When he finished seeing it, Benny claimed the Holocaust was made up, a definite surprise to Spielberg who could not be reached for comment.
After Hammer, Jason Weaver, a Lehigh County juvenile probation aide, took over Benny’s case.
“Ben seemed angry. I couldn’t tell why. I fear his skinhead activities are going to catch up with him soon,” Weaver wrote in his notes.
Benny’s troubles were not confined to the legal system. He was also having problems in school. He attended Whitehall High School, but he cut classes a lot, was suspended, and “particularly had a problem with minority students,” according to Karen Hammer. He carried a copy of Mein Kampf and turned in essays on the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy. He also carried a KKK key ring.
He was later transferred to the Parkland School District and attended Lehigh County Vocational-Technical (VoTech) School before finally dropping out in the fall of 1994.
Benny had no positive belief system, and his family had problems, ranging from his father’s repeated arrests and convictions to his grandfather’s falling out with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Benny was ripe for the skinhead message Bryan and David were preaching. He would join. If anything, it sounded like fun. Benny shaved his head and bought the clothes. The tattoos would come later. Now, there were three members of the Freeman/Birdwell family who had embraced white supremacy and neo-Nazism. They began hanging out with Allentown’s skinhead gangs. The Freemans and Ben Birdwell were frequently seen with their skinhead brethren harassing African Americans and other minorities at the Whitehall Mall in the Allentown area.
They were boys without a moral compass. Three teenagers looking for action. Three young men with the strength to kill and the will to do it. All it would take now was a channeler, someone who could translate those feelings into action.
That someone was already in the neighborhood.
Twenty miles outside Allentown is a farm that looks like any other from the outside, but what grows there fouls the soil.
Mark Thomas’s farm is a gathering place for his Christian Identity Group, the Christian Posse Comitatus, a loose congregation of Klansmen, racist skins, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists of other persuasions, who travel there each weekend from across the state to hear him preach his version of white supremacy. As many as fifty gather on any given weekend, with that number swelling to two hundred on summer weekends and even more for his Oktoberfest every fall.
Thomas is an extremely intelligent and lucid man with the craggy face of a frontier pioneer. He combs his hair across his forehead like his idol, Hitler. With the square cut mustache adorning his upper lip and his dark eyes, he looks astonishingly like the former head of the Third Reich.
Thomas describes himself in an article as “a philosopher, and to most conservatives, a renegade. The only thing I really hate is Judaic Christianity and any political system that puts the love of money before the love of people. I am a humanist, a liberal, and an old hippie, if you follow the original definition of those words, and I have become a stranger in a strange land,” the last a reference to Robert Heinlein’s science fiction classic about an alien with a benign interest in cannibalism.
Christian Identity is a movement within the white supremacy movement that uses scripture, among other things, to prove white superiority. Thomas is a Christian Identity minister, ordained by Robert Butler, a founding father of Christian Identity, at the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, in 1990. Civil rights watchdog groups, like the Anti-Defamation League and the Alabama-based Klanwatch, view Aryan Nations as one of the country’s most violent white supremacist groups.
Thomas, though, has publicly denounced violence to achieve his goals.
Thomas believes that blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and other nonwhites will be relocated to their places of origin. If they refuse to go peacefully, they will be made to go. As for Jews, they will be cast into the fires of hell. Thomas, though, does acknowledge that not all Jews are the devil. Just most.
Thomas believes that white supremacy is the will of God, that there will be an imminent race war that will cleanse the earth of racial corruption and restore God’s white Christian kingdom to its rightful place as ruler of the universe.
Bryan, hearing this from Thomas himself and other skins, realized how Thomas’s ideology compared astonishingly well to that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Like the Witnesses, Thomas believed in an eventual Armageddon, but at the end of his, only whites would be left standing, regardless of whether they were of the 144,000 to go to heaven.
In Thomas’s world, even if you were not in that number, you would not be allowed paradise on earth if you were a nonwhite. And if you believed in Thomas’s doctrine, all that was required was to channel the hate inside you, much easier than the discipline required to be a Jehovah’s Witness.
Mark Thomas has a site on the Internet where he writes extensively about his beliefs. The Freeman brothers and their cousin Ben were attracted to Thomas because he is a very intelligent man who couches his anti-Semitic, racist beliefs behind logical arguments “derived” from the Bible. To children like the Freemans and Birdwell, who grew up on the Bible and knew it forward and backward, and who had a perverted value system, Thomas’s scriptural interpretation was the same as the Witnesses, only more palatable.
In an article on his Website, Thomas deified the Unabomber, making the terrorist’s manifesto analogous to the United States after the Civil War. Thomas writes, “It is a glorious fact that the Ku Klux Klan saved the White race from oblivion in the conquered South following the Civil War.” He believes Germany built “the kingdom of God” in the 1930s. To some, Thomas’s arguments for the supremacy of the White race seem plausible.
Thomas has managed to attract a loyal following. David, Bryan, and Ben were just following the crowd in embracing Thomas’s rhetoric.
When David and Bryan began publicly extolling their neo-Nazi beliefs, Principal Michael Platt at Salisbury Township High School was quoted as saying, “The reaction around here varied. There were some faculty members who just said they were going through a phase, and others who wondered how much we should tolerate. From a legal standpoint, I don’t believe there is anything we could have done, as long as they did not interfere with the educational process.”
As far as the students were concerned, the Freeman brothers’ conversion to white supremacy was looked on with something between curious interest and apathy. Still, regardless of what one thought, they made quite a sight, what with their shaved heads, combat boots, and camouflage jackets. One student in p
articular was intensely interested in their belief system.
Jack Kramer was a Salisbury student who saw in Bryan Freeman a particularly good story. Bryan was a good student, bright, and articulate. Clearly, he and his brother were not ignorant idiots embracing a far right political belief because they could not distinguish between right and wrong, or because they did not understand the implications of the hate that spewed forth from their lips.
Jack wanted to get them on video tape. He set up an interview session at Bryan’s house. David couldn’t make it, but Benny, their initiated cousin, could.
The tape opens with Bryan sitting by a window. His huge form is silhouetted against bright sunshine. Bryan’s fresh-scrubbed features and powerful body fitted into overalls, his immense tattooed arms and tattooed forehead dominate the frame. A swastika armband was prominently displayed on his left upper arm. Benny sat next to him with a cold, bemused smile on his face and an SS swastika armband covering his upper arm.
“When did you become involved in the white power skinhead movement?” Jack began.
“I’ve been hanging out with the skinheads for about a year,” Bryan answered.
“What about you?” Jack turned to Benny.
“About six months.”
“Why’d you become involved?”
“Well, after I got out of lock-up,” Bryan answered patiently, “I had long hair, I was still pretty much white power, and I started hanging out with all the skinheads. It seemed pretty cool, so I shaved my head.”
“Do you feel that all communication with other races is off?” Jack asked.
“Yes,” Bryan answered firmly. “We should have no contact at all; they’re the enemy.”
There was no emotion in his voice, just calm, slowly delivered hate. For the rest of the interview, Benny remained silent, a smirk on his face, while his cousin took center stage. It looked like Bryan relished every moment.
“What bothers you or frustrates you about these other races?”
“Well, the biggest thing that I think is a problem is the fact that they can call racism on anything and we can’t. They have Negro college funds, Chinese college funds, Indian college funds; you don’t see a White man’s college fund anywhere.”
“Have you ever had any personal experience with minorities that caused you to hate?”
“Well, I have a cousin who’s a half breed.”
“Do you know any of the history of the skinheads?”
“I know some of it, yeah.”
“Such as?”
“I know that pretty much George Lincoln Rockwell was the founder of the movement in the United States. Rockwell was the founder of the Nazi Party in America.”
“How do you feel about whites who try to act black or dig minorities?”
“I think it’s disgusting,” Bryan said, with obvious loathing. “Especially the race mixers. They have the gift of being white, but they’re willing to throw it all away to breed with animals.”
Bryan’s answers were beginning to sound rote, like he was spitting out propaganda that had been implanted in his head. He sounded like a Storm Trooper in World War Two Germany.
“How do you feel about those who associate with blacks?”
“A crime punishable by death. To all involved.”
The interview was over.
TWELVE
Neither Brenda, nor Dennis was eager to give their two problem children an allowance. All they’d do with the money was buy more drugs and beer, or some awful Nazi flags and armbands and iron crosses they kept in their messy rooms.
Along with Benny, Bryan took a job as a counter boy at a nearby Wendy’s. There, Bryan worked with his school friend, Sally Dobbins, who also knew David. From her emerges a different picture of the skinheads all of Allentown would come to hate.
“Bryan was always nice to everybody. He never really had any problem with anybody,” Sally recalls.
That was on the outside. Inside, Bryan was roiling. During one of his rehab stays, he had been diagnosed as suffering from depression. The drug lithium, used to treat manic depressive disorder, had been prescribed, but Bryan had refused to take it.
Sally and David were both high school sophomores, so she had ample opportunity to observe and interact with him.
“David was always quiet. He kept to himself … (and) he actually got good grades. (In particular), David’s social studies teacher liked him because he was quiet and got good grades. He used to sleep during class and wake up and pass the test. I think both brothers were on the school honor roll.”
When they attended school, as opposed to the rehab facilities their parents sent them to, both Freemans excelled in their studies. Studies, though, were different from home life.
Sally remembers that “most of the time, they were kinda pissed-off at home, angry all the time, because they went through different phases.… I know they did drugs, but they didn’t do it while they were skinheads, because when you’re a skinhead, you drink, but you don’t do drugs. Skinheads are totally against drugs.
“They drank beer sometimes, and Jack Daniels. I remember when we were all high at someone’s house one night and they had Jack Daniels and beer.”
Boilermakers. The eighty-proof bourbon, or one hundred-proof version, also available, plus a chaser of Rolling Rock, make for a powerful combination.
Since both boys looked older than they were, it was easy for them to go into any liquor store and purchase the beverages that should not have been available to them until they were twenty-one.
When the boys were in middle school, Sally recalls, they experimented with various drugs. “I think when they came to the high school they got into a different scene.” As for their conversion to white supremacy, “They became skinheads because I think, they felt left out because their family didn’t care about them.” The boys made it clear to Sally and probably their other friends that this was in truth how they really felt about their parents and younger brother.
Brenda and Dennis were intelligent people. They could not have been unaware of how their sons felt, yet they apparently did nothing to show them love. Quite the opposite, as Sally vividly recalls.
“One night, I went over there (to the Freemans house). Their mom was making spaghetti. When it came time to have dinner, they asked me, ‘Have you had dinner?’ I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘You’re welcome to eat here.’”
The invitation was polite but cold.
“They invited everyone to eat at the table, me and my friend that was with me, everyone except Bryan and David. And we were like, ‘Don’t they get dinner, too?’ And I guess they just weren’t good enough or something. It was an eerie feeling. They were not welcome because they were too bad; they were being punished.”
This incident took place during the summer of 1994, around the time Brenda took up the “tough love” mentality of being strict with her kids and setting limits to get them to understand that she, as the parent, would not tolerate aberrant behavior. The denial of the privilege of eating dinner with family and guests may have been one part of Brenda’s tough-love platform.
“Erik sat at the table without his brothers,” Sally continues. “The brothers noticed the preferential treatment he was getting.” Sally believes that “the parents loved Erik because he was young and following along with their religion. And since Bryan and David were skinheads, they didn’t believe in that.”
While Brenda, David, Erik, Sally, and her friend ate, David and Bryan stood outside, smoking cigarettes. After dinner, the girls joined them and then went over to a friend’s house to hang out. Benny soon joined them. Cruising along in Bryan’s car, he’d snap a cassette in, and out would come skinhead rock. White Power and Aryan Nation were just some of the bands Sally recalls they listened to. Skinhead rock is not just popular with dyed-in-the-wool skinheads; it is popular with disaffected teenagers all over the world.
“I would hang out with them because I am proud of my heritage and I am white,” Sally said.
When
she listened to the music, “I’d understand what they (the bands) were saying. There’s good and bad in both races.”
Sally had no way of knowing, because Bryan never told her, that until he was about ten he had been a devout Jehovah’s Witness, with an intimate knowledge of the Bible, which he could still quote if he wanted to. “They didn’t usually sit and talk about their parents, and Bryan said nothing about his split from the religion.”
The religion, though, really wasn’t the problem. It was the rules that their parents set up for them, rules the teenagers thought were unrealistic. “The only thing they ever got pissed-off about was like, if we went out after work they had to be home at 8 P.M. or earlier. They were not allowed to stay out. They’d come home and probably snuck back out again because they weren’t allowed to do much.”
After a while, their frustration turned to threats toward their parents. “Everyone heard them (make threats),” Sally observed.
They didn’t make threats that often, but when they did, they were specific. “They’d say something like, ‘I’m just gonna get so sick of it, I’m just gonna have to kill ’em,’ or something.”
The threats didn’t sound truly serious to Sally.
“You’re not gonna do that; you’re just angry,” she would tell Bryan after one of his threats. And then Bryan would drop it, like he hadn’t said anything.
“They were just mad and had these rules to follow,” Sally stated for emphasis.
They were close to losing control, but on the outside, anyway, David was his usual laconic self and Bryan exuded warmth. Both before and after his institutionalizations, and after he became a skinhead, “Bryan was so nice to everybody.”
Underneath, they were spoiling for action. Still, Sally recalls, they kept their racist beliefs to themselves. “The only time anything ever started is, say, if a black person started something with them. Then they would get angry.”