Hundreds Mourn Victim of Skinhead, 19, in Denver

DENVER â€”  Hundreds of people on Friday attended the funeral of an African immigrant gunned down by a skinhead at a downtown bus stop because he was black.

“It’s intolerable that something like that happens. It’s disgusting to me personally that it happened in our city,� Denver Mayor Wellington Webb said after Oumar Dia’s funeral at an area mosque.

Nathan Thill, 19, admitted in television interviews that he shot and killed Dia because he was black and then shot a woman who came to his aid so there would be no witnesses. She is paralyzed from the waist down, her doctor said.

“I don’t like some blacks. I guess it’s sort of a thing that I love my own people and I’d like to see a place where just we could be,� Nathan Thill, 19, told KUSA-TV in a jailhouse interview.

In another interview, this one with KMGH-TV, he said that when he saw Dia at the bus stop, he thought “how he really didn’t belong where he was, and I thought how easy it would be for me to take him out.�

Thill said he shot Jean VanVelkinburg because she was “a witness that had to be taken care of.�

Dia, a 38-year-old refugee from Mauritania who was saving money to bring his family to Denver, died of wounds to the head and neck.

Dia was waiting for a bus after getting off from work at a hotel just before midnight Tuesday.

VanVelkinburg, 36, whose spinal cord was severed when she was shot, said she did not regret trying to help Dia and believed he realized someone was trying to help him.

“He knew I was there and I was willing to do anything to save the man’s life,� the single mother of two told reporters Friday from her hospital bed.

Dia’s killing was the latest in a rash of violent incidents linked to skinheads in the Denver area.

Last week a decorated Denver police officer, Bruce Vander Jagt, was shot by a skinhead, Matthaeus Jaehnig, who then killed himself during a standoff with police.

After the police officer’s funeral, a dead pig with the officer’s name scrawled on it was left in front of the station house where Vander Jagt worked.

“I work with drug addicts and they don’t scare me as much as these people do,� said Lisa Meza, 30, who lives near the station.

The substation used three school buses to barricade its doors Friday as top commanders plotted strategy with a federal task force on hate groups.

Thill said he knew Jaehnig, but the relationship had nothing to do with Dia’s shooting. “There’s not no big underground next-Hitler Reich skinhead army springing up.�