http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/local/14964753.htm

Posted on Tue, Jul. 04, 2006

Former KKK leader critically hurt

Police say Jeff Berry was injured in a fight with his son in Garrett.

From The Associated Press

SPENCERVILLE — Police believe a former Ku Klux Klan leader who held a television news crew hostage in his DeKalb County home seven years ago was injured in a fight with his son.

Jeffrey Lynn Berry, 53, of Harlan was listed in critical but stable condition in a Fort Wayne hospital after the attack Saturday at a home in Garrett, DeKalb County police Sgt. David Cserep said.

Officers armed with a search warrant entered the home of a Berry’s 35-year-old son, Anthony, late Sunday as part of their investigation, Cserep said. Investigators do not believe any weapons were used in the fight, he said.

Jeff Berry sustained internal head injuries, the sheriff’s department said. As of this morning, Anthony Berry had not been arrested in connection with his father’s beating. But if he is, it would not be his first brush with the law.

In 1996, Berry and his sister Tonia pleaded guilty to charges of hitting and kicking a 21-year-old black man at Glenbrook Square in late 1995. Police said Berry and his sister had made racial remarks to George Johnson after seeing him talking to a white woman. Also in 1996, Berry was charged with a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief stemming from an alleged attack on a tenant in the Berrys’ home.

Jeff Berry formerly led the DeKalb County-based American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In 2001, he pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit criminal confinement with a deadly weapon for conspiring to hold a TV news crew hostage in his DeKalb County home in 1999.

Reporter George Sells IV and camerawoman Heidi Thiel of Louisville, Ky., TV station WHAS interviewed Berry in November 1999, but said he became angry when he learned the story also would include comments from a former Klan member.

Berry refused to let them leave until they surrendered the video of the interview with him, they said. Another man, who carried a shotgun, locked the door.

He was sentenced in 2001 to seven years in prison and was released in December 2004, according to the Indiana Department of Correction.