WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Legal Center, a hate group monitor, identified the suspect in the deadly attack on a Jewish community in a Kansas City suburb as a prominent white supremacist.

The group, naming the suspect as Frazier Glenn Miller, 73, of Aurora, Mo., said he was in the 1980s the “grand dragon” of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and subsequently a founder of the White Patriot Party.

The SPLC statement Sunday evening said Miller served three years in prison on weapons charges and for plotting the assassination of SPLC founder Morris Dees.

CBS News also identified the suspect as Miller, and a security source confirmed to JTA that the suspect had a long history in the supremacist movement.

An assailant shot to death two people Sunday at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kan., and then shot to death a woman resident of Village Shalom, a Jewish assisted living facility a few blocks away.

The family of the two victims killed at the JCC identified them as William Lewis Corporon and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, ABC news reported. KSHB, a local TV station, said they were members of the Church of Resurrection.

According to various reports there was a dance class and an audition for a play at the JCC on Sunday, both for teenagers.

President Obama in a statement “pledged the full support of the federal government” in the investigation.