RED LAKE, Minn. -- In the months before he killed his kin, classmates and himself, Jeff Weise painted an utterly nihilistic -- and often eloquent -- word portrait of life on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

In Internet postings, he described it as a place where people "chose alcohol over friendship," where women neglect "their own flesh and blood" for relationships with men, where he could not escape "the grave I'm continually digging for myself."

In his dark and self-pitying depictions of life on the reservation, Weise appears to have drawn from his singularly troubled personal history: When he was 8, his father committed suicide on the reservation after a standoff with police. About four months later, his mother suffered severe brain damage in an alcohol-related car accident.

Before that accident, while Weise was living with his alcoholic mother in the suburbs of Minneapolis, she often locked him out of her house and her boyfriend locked him in a closet and made him kneel for hours in a corner, according to his grandmother, Shelda Lussier, 54, in whose home on the reservation the boy had lived since the age of 9.

In an interview outside her brown-sided home, Lussier said Weise, a hulking boy who stood 6-foot-3 and almost always dressed in black, tried to hurt himself 14 months ago by jabbing his arms with a pen.

With his self-professed loathing of reservation life and burdened by the psychopathologies of his parents, Weise on Monday joined the ranks of America's schoolhouse mass murderers. He killed nine people, including his grandfather, a teacher and five schoolmates, before killing himself.

Still, Weise was not all wrong in his assessment of Red Lake. Like many Indian reservations -- especially the poor and isolated ones in and around the Great Plains -- this can be a dangerous, soul-crushing place to grow up.

As compared with the tidy, if soulless, Denver suburb where 15 people were killed in 1999, when two teen-age boys went on a well-armed rampage at Columbine High School, Red Lake exists in a distant and exponentially more dismal dimension of the American experience.

"I'm living every mans [sic] nightmare," Weise wrote online in January. "This place never changes, it never will."

If that sounds like teen-age overreaching, here is the voice of Sister Sharon Sheridan, 73, principal at St. Mary's Mission School on the reservation, reacting to the shooting: "You can't condone what happened here, but you sure can understand it."

In Washington this week, the director of behavioral health for the Indian Health Service, which provides health care at Red Lake and for hundreds of reservations across the country, said the complex behavioral problems that have scarred several generations of Weise's family are all too common on reservations. "This is a tragedy that I have seen the potential for in so many other places in Indian Country," said Jon Perez, who is also an adolescent psychologist. "I am worried about making sure that this doesn't have to happen again."

As the months, weeks and days ticked by before Monday's shooting, Weise was sending clear signals -- what Joe Conner, a clinical psychologist and expert on mental health care for Native Americans, described as "huge red flags and baggage everywhere" -- of serious adolescent mental illness.

Twice in the past school year, he stopped attending Red Lake High School -- and received home tutoring -- because he became severely depressed and was unable to handle teasing from his classmates, according to his grandmother. She said the last time he had been at school -- before he stormed in Monday with guns blazing -- was about five weeks ago.

The last time he saw a mental health professional at Red Lake hospital was on Feb. 21, she said. She remembers the date because it was the same day he refilled his prescription for 60 milligrams a day of Prozac, which he had been taking since last summer.

Online, he seemed to be reaching out in strange directions, especially for a Native American kid. He wrote sympathetically about Hitler and grumbled about racial interbreeding among tribal members.

But there appears to have been no one in the school or on the reservation who read the red flags.

A bleak mountain of federal research suggests the extraordinary risks and hardships of growing up Indian, as compared with growing up as a member of any other ethnic group in the United States.

The annual average violent crime rate among Indians is twice as high as that of blacks and 2 1/2 times higher than that for whites, according to a survey last year by the Justice Department. Indian youth commit suicide at twice the rate of other young people, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reports. The overall death rate of Indians under age 25 is three times higher than that of the total population in that age group.

When compared with other groups, the commission found that Indians of all ages are 670 percent more likely to die from alcoholism, 650 percent more likely to die from tuberculosis, 318 percent more likely to die from diabetes, and 204 percent more likely to suffer accidental death. Despite considerable income gains in the past 15 years -- some of it due to Indian gambling operations -- Native Americans remain the poorest single ethnic group in the country, with about half the average income of other Americans.