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The madman who gunned down Sikh worshippers blew his own brains out after he was blasted in the gut by a crack-shot Wisconsin cop, the FBI said yesterday.
“I’ve seen the video — it was an amazing shot. And thank goodness,” FBI Special Agent Teresa Carlson said.
The unidentified Oak Creek officer hit racist Wade Michael Page in the stomach, “thereby neutralizing the threat,” Carlson said.
“Subsequent to that wound, it appears that Page died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”
Cops first thought the 40-year-old white supremacist was killed in a hail of police bullets after he murdered six Sikh temple members and wounded two others.
But video of a portion of Sunday’s bloodbath shows Page killing himself with a Springfield Armory 9mm semiautomatic he’d bought about a week before the rampage.
Carlson said she didn’t know if the cop’s shot would have been enough to kill Page, who had pumped up to nine rounds into Brooklyn-born Oak Creek Police Lt. Brian Murphy.
Murphy is up and walking around his hospital room as he continues to make a miraculous recovery, Carlson said.
The feds are developing theories but may never know for sure why the hard-drinking, unemployed US Army veteran chose to attack total strangers in a holy place.
“We’re trying to piece together, and eventually we will piece together, as much as we can,” said Steven Conley, assistant agent in charge of national security for the FBI in Milwaukee.
“We will have a good idea of the motive by the time this investigation is done. But again, why that building, that temple, at that time — that may have died with Page.”
Meanwhile, the owner of the gun shop where Page bought his gun and three 19-shot magazines said the killer seemed normal and sailed through a background check.
“He didn’t have a shaved head or 9/11 tattoo. He didn’t talk stupid or act stupid,” gun-shop owner Kevin Nugent told the LA Times. “He raised no eyebrows whatsoever.”
Page forked over $650 for the Springfield.
In another development, a new report said Page’s former girlfriend was in the FBI’s cross hairs as early as 2005 for her involvement in the white-supremacist movement.
Brenda Misty Cook was interviewed by the feds’ Joint Terrorism Task Force while in jail seven years ago, she claimed in a post on a neo-Nazi Web forum.
“In 2005, the JTTF visited me in jail in WI, but they also visited my mother in IL,” she posted in August 2010, using the screen name “LuLuRoman,” according to the iPad newspaper The Daily.
She wrote 860 posts on a supremacist forum linked to the hate group Hammerskins, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks white-supremacist activities.