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This time, however, the burst of automatic fire, the squadrons of bomb specialists and FBI officers and the stretchers with victims airlifted to local hospitals were no movie scenes.

Just before 11 o'clock Tuesday morning, a plump, balding white man who appeared to be about 40 walked through the front entrance of the North Valley Jewish Community Center on Renaldi Avenue in this San Fernando Valley suburb, about 38 miles from downtown Los Angeles. He opened fire with an AR-15 Bushmaster rifle, spraying 70 bullets in an arc across the reception area and one classroom, before fleeing. Five people were wounded, including three small children who attend a day-care center here.

About 12 hours later, Los Angeles police identified a suspect in the shootings: Buford O. Furrow, 37, a resident of Washington state, who owned the red van police discovered Tuesday afternoon filled with explosives, ammunition, survivalist gear and pamphlets associated with the Christian Identity movement, an extremist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic sect. When he turned himself in in Las Vegas Wednesday, Furrow told authorities he wanted the shooting to be "a wake-up call to America to kill Jews."

About 20 minutes after the shooting, Furrow allegedly hijacked a green 1999 Toyota Corolla about two miles from the center, near Van Nuys Airport in the San Fernando Valley. He abandoned his red van with Washington state plates and made off at high speed in the Toyota.

The police immediately surrounded the van, picking through it gingerly. About two hours later, they laid out a bounty of survivalist gear and weaponry: four boxes of ammunition, containing thousands of bullets, much of it automatic firepower, as well as a U.S. Army Ranger Handbook -- a tactical field guide for infantrymen -- a military knife and some CDs.

Also inside was a booklet called "War Cycle Peace Cycle," published in Virginia. The Web site advertising the book talks about cracking down on civil disobedience, and also offers a Christian newsletter. Exactly what Christian Identity materials were discovered in the van has not been disclosed. But the movement holds that white Northern Europeans are the true "Israelites" and all other races are "mud people." Abortion clinic bombing suspect Eric Rudolph attended a Christian Identity commune in Missouri, where the pastor proclaimed that "the Jews are the devil's seed and the children of the anti-Christ."

Late Tuesday, FBI agents visited an Olympia, Wash., house, believed to be the home of Furrow's father, and neighbors told reporters they'd been interviewed by the FBI about Furrow's behavior and possible whereabouts.

KING-TV in Seattle says Furrow is a suspect in an ammunition theft from an Army base near Tacoma.

An Internet search for Buford Furrow turned up an entry from a man by that name in Olympia, Wash., where the suspect is believed to live, in the guestbook of the Web site of the Osborne Brothers, a country-western band. "Saw you on Grand Old Opry (19/12/98) when you gave out your web page info," he wrote. "You have been by my brother-in-law's place a few times in Columbia, SC, Bill Wells. I grew up on country music, Blue Grass, back in Roanoke, Va. Just like to say that I enjoy you guys, not enough of the real 'old time' music being played any more. Keep up the good work. Buford."

By about 6.30 p.m., a huge force of special-weapons officers from the LAPD had surrounded the 7 Star Suites Hotel in Chatsworth, bolstered by FBI agents and bomb specialists. As night fell, they hoisted an armored vehicle on to the hotel roof, preparing to burst into the building. The police were tipped off by a passer-by, who saw the Toyota parked in the hotel parking lot after local TV stations had broadcast the car's plate for hours. But by 10.30, 12 hours after the shooting, it still wasn't clear that Furrow was inside the hotel, nor that he was alive. Yet the stakeout continued.

Next page | "Where is a place that you're safe at?"