FIRST-RATE HATER
Big time racist pleased with church bloodbath
Jim Adkisson got lockjaw when his sentencing judge gave the confessed rage killer a chance to address members of the Tennessee church where he had launched a shotgun attack.
There would be no contrition from this angry man.
“No, ma'am,” sneered the 58-year-old former truck driver. “I have nothing to say.”
It wasn't necessary. He had spoken his piece clearly in a five-page disquisition on race, sexuality and politics he wrote before the shooting.
“This was a hate crime,” Adkisson wrote. “I hate the damned left-wing liberals… These liberals are working together to attack every decent and honorable institution in our nation. They are trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them.”
Ten years ago, on July 27, 2008, Adkisson stalked into a packed Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville as children were performing the musical “Annie.” He pulled a sawed-off Remington shotgun from his guitar case and fired three blasts of birdshot before he was quickly subdued.
He killed two people and injured six others. The dead included Greg McKendry, 60, a big man who stepped in front of the barrel to save others.
Adkisson, toting six dozen shotgun shells, had hoped for a higher body count, and he expected to die in a shootout with police. As he wrote in his note, ”Tell this to the cop who killed me: ‘Thanks, I needed that!'”
But he was a one-cycle news story because church heroes minimized his headline ignominy when they promptly wrestled him down.
While the shooting did not attract much attention beyond Knoxville and the UU church world, it was a forerunner of faith-centered violence by rabid right-wingers: six killed by a white suprema- cist in 2012 at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee; three killed by an aged neo-Nazi in 2014 at a Jewish facility near Kansas City; and nine killed by the avowed racist Dylann Roof in 2015 at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C.
In retrospect, Adkisson was a prototype of newly emboldened racist white men.
He wasn't much of a role model for upright Nazis: He couldn't hold a job or sustain a relationship.
Adkisson grew up west of Knoxville and did an Army hitch as a mechanic in the 1970s. A drinking problem and moodiness cost him a series of jobs and wives. His fifth wife, Liza Alexander, left him in 2000 after he threatened murder-suicide.
By 2008, he was terminally unemployed and surviving on welfare and food stamps.
Yet in the twilight of a two-term Republican presidency, the resident of a GOP-dominated state blamed liberal Democrats for his failures. Friends and neighbors said he extracted talking points from his copies of conservative tomes by Fox News luminaries like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Bernard Goldberg.
He chose the Knoxville UU church because ex-wife Alexander once was a member there.
“The Unitarian Universalist Church is not a church. It is a cult,” he wrote. “This is a collection of sick, weird, and homosexual people… They embrace every pervert that comes down the pike.”
It was not a coincidence that his attack followed closely the June 2008 primary election victories that cinched Barrack Obama's Democratic presidential nomination. That was his trigger.
“I am protesting against the Democratic National Convention for running a radical, leftist candidate for President of the United States, namely Osama Hussein Obama (Yo Mama!!!),” Adkisson wrote. “He has no experience. He has no brains. He is a joke. He is dangerous to America. Hell! He even looks like Curious George!”
He ranted about the media (“the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party”), gay sex (“an abomination before the Lord”), interracial relationships (“How is a white woman having a n----- baby progress?”), and “environmental nuts.”
He blamed Democrats for bringing ruination to the military, religion, education, the U.S. Supreme Court, the battle against terrorism — even the Boy Scouts.
“I wanted to kill every Democrat in the U.S. Senate, every Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and all 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book entitled ‘100 People Who Are Screwing Up America,’” he wrote. “I would like to kill everyone in the mainstream news media.”
He said he settled for the UU “foot soldiers.”
The bloodbath left Adkisson feeling pleased with himself.
“See, if you'd met me in a bar (or) on a street, you'd say, ‘Well, that's a nice fella,'” he told detectives. “And I am."
Refusing an insanity defense, Adkisson pleaded guilty to murder and was sent to prison for life. He's still there, now 68.
Though he opted not to speak at his sentencing, he sent a clear message to the tearful UU congregants seated behind him in the courtroom.
At one point, he conspicuously used an extended middle finger to scratch the back of his head.
“He had a look of sheer evil on his face,” said Vicki Masters, who was directing the play at the church. “Evil as well as arrogance.”
John Bohstedt, who helped disarm Adkisson that Sunday morning, blamed the hate speech that continues to escalate in America.
“There are a lot of people who hate liberals,” he told the Knoxville press, “and if we stir that around in the pot and on the airwaves, eventually there will be people who… get infected by the violent rhetoric and put it into violent action.”