Binghamton Killer Kept His Fury Private (A look at the Binghampton shooter)

In light of the 10 year anniversary of this shooting approaching I figured I'd go ahead and post this article that elaborated on the behavior of the shooter, Jiverly Wong, especially since this shooting is much less well known than others.

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The day of the shooting, Jiverly Wong sent a TV station photos of himself with handguns.

In November, Jiverly A. Wong walked into an employment center in downtown Binghamton. He had been laid off from his job at a vacuum cleaner plant, and he needed help applying for unemployment benefits.

Speaking in broken English, he struggled to communicate with a receptionist. She told Mr. Wong that a phone number that he could call for assistance provided information in
Chinese or Japanese. She asked him if he was either one.
“No, I’m Vietnamese!” Mr. Wong told her, before turning around and storming out.

Nearly two decades after arriving in America from Vietnam, Mr. Wong still had trouble with basic English, a fact of life for many immigrants, but a problem he seemed especially sensitive about. He was an introvert who was secretive in the extreme, keeping his love of guns and target shooting — and even his marriage — hidden from his family, his oldest sister said. They had improved their English-speaking skills and advanced their careers, while Mr. Wong, now jobless, had moved back in with his parents on a dead-end street in nearby Union.
“I think he felt low and small,” said the sister, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Nga. “But he didn’t share his thoughts. He would always just say he was O.K.”

On April 3, Mr. Wong had a 10 a.m. appointment at the employment center. He did not show.
Thirty minutes later and less than two blocks away, Mr. Wong walked into the American Civic Association, where he had recently taken an English class with other immigrants. Mr. Wong, 41, returned to his old classroom and, in one of New York State’s deadliest mass shootings, killed 13 former classmates and association employees and wounded four others, firing 98 shots from two handguns in about a minute, before taking his own life, the police said.

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Scene outside the civic center where the shooting occurred

Beyond his struggles with language and work, Mr. Wong’s motivation for taking so many fellow immigrants to the grave with him may ultimately prove unexplainable. But in interviews with his sister, friends of the family, neighbors, former co-workers and people he met, a glimpse emerges of Mr. Wong’s fractured life.
Unlike Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech University two years ago, Mr. Wong displayed no outward sign of mental illness. But it now appears that he was harboring a growing paranoia, with a fixation on law enforcement rooted in a few brief encounters that seemed to convince Mr. Wong that the police were out to do him in.

Just before setting off on his massacre, he sent a two-page delusional rant to a Syracuse television station saying the police were spying on him, sneaking into his home and trying to get into car accidents with him.

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Jiverly Wong's gun permit.

His other burdens were easier to detect. Moving from one low-wage job to another, struggling to find stability and making few friends along the way, Mr. Wong had felt that he had let down the family, Nga said. “When everyone’s successful but you, you feel low,” she said. “And in our culture, if you’re the oldest son and you’re not doing well, you feel terrible.”

The last time she saw her brother, he seemed withdrawn, but polite as always. He raked the leaves on the lawn outside her house, and they reminisced about their childhood in Vietnam, laughing about how they used to race around on roller skates.
Mr. Wong was the second oldest of four children, and he came to the United States in July 1990 at the age of 22, immigrating from Vietnam with his parents and siblings under refugee status. His father, Henry Voong, 66, had fought in the Vietnam War, alongside United States forces, as an officer in the South Vietnamese Army, according to Nga and a friend of Mr. Voong’s.
The family — ethnically Chinese — had been excited about finally coming to America. “We loved this country,” Nga said.

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They quickly settled in the Binghamton area, and Mr. Wong’s father became well known in the Vietnamese community. He often volunteered at the Vietnamese Baptist Church in Binghamton, working as a translator and helping people with their immigration paperwork, even though his family was not Baptist, but Buddhist. “He show kindness,” said Ho Le, the church’s pastor. “He help the refugee people.”

His son seemed to have had a harder time assimilating. Within roughly a year, Mr. Wong left New York for Southern California. Nga said the warmer climate and the area’s large Asian population appeared to be part of the rationale for the move. Over the next two decades, Mr. Wong moved back and forth between the Binghamton area and the Los Angeles area.

In August 1991, he was arrested in California, his first arrest in the United States. Details about that case remain unclear. The next year he was arrested on a charge of passing a bad check, the authorities said.

At least five times since 1990, Mr. Wong was arrested or cited or had some minor contact with the police in either the Binghamton or Los Angeles areas. About 10 years ago, the New York State Police investigated a tip that he had a crack cocaine habit and was planning to rob a bank, but nothing came of it. At the time of the shootings, he was not a subject in any investigation, the authorities said.
In Inglewood, Calif., he was involved in a fender bender, but was not arrested. In Johnson City, near Binghamton, he told the police he suspected that someone had tried to break into his apartment; the police found a loose window pane but no sign of burglary. Two days later, an officer happened to pull him over for driving an uninspected vehicle.

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Jiverly Wong lived in this apartment complex in Inglewood, Calif., for seven years until 2007, when he left his job at a sushi delivery company and moved back to the Binghamton area to live with his parents.

In his letter to the television station, he wrote that the police made his life “terrible” when he lived in Johnson City, and accused them of entering his home 13 times in 1994. From 1990 to 1995, he wrote, “New York undercover cop” repeatedly tried to get into a car accident with him by braking suddenly in front of him as he was driving.
Nga said that she did not recognize the letter’s handwriting as being her brother’s, and that he had not told the familyabout his paranoia about the police. The letter might be a sign that he had “lost his rational thinking,” she said.

In 2000, Mr. Wong had settled in Inglewood, a city of 113,000 near Los Angeles International Airport, and started working as a driver for a company that prepares and delivers sushi for supermarkets, hospitals and universities, earning $9 an hour. He had become a naturalized citizen five years earlier, yet still struggled with English.

Home was a just short drive from the sushi company, at an apartment complex on Century Boulevard where the airplanes fly so low that you can count the passenger windows without tilting your head up. Mr. Wong lived from September 2000 to September 2007 in a studio apartment with a window that looked out onto a brick wall. “He’d be sitting in the hall with the postal boxes, smoking,” said Eric Sherman, a neighbor. “He’d nod his head, sometimes say hi. There wasn’t anything creepy or strange about him. He never did anything out of the ordinary, good or bad

Mr. Sherman said he used to see uniformed police officers monitoring the complex, which until recently had been a magnet for drug dealing and prostitution. “I’ve seen them standing across there, just watching the building,” said Mr. Sherman, pointing to the balcony of a building next door.
A housekeeper who worked at the complex said that in 2006 and 2007, men in suits who resembled agents came to the apartment complex “three or four times,” asking her and some tenants about Mr. Wong. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other agencies, said last week that it had no previous case involving Mr. Wong.

It was during this time that Mr. Wong’s life took a sudden twist. On Dec. 23, 1999, at the age of 32, he married Xiu Ping Jiang. But he kept the marriage a secret from most of his family, neighbors and co-workers, some of whom described seeing Mr. Wong with different women. The marriage did not last. He and his wife separated on May 16, 2005, and were divorced more than a year later, on July 21, 2006, because of “irreconcilable differences,” according to the divorce papers. The couple had no children. Her current whereabouts are unknown.

Mr. Wong stopped working at the sushi company in 2007 — leaving abruptly with no explanation, co-workers said — and he returned to the Binghamton area.
He moved in with his parents, youngest sister and an infant niece in a modest single-family house on Taylor Street in Union. He began working at a Shop-Vac factory in Endicott, where he continued to have difficulty communicating in English, sometimes pointing at the parts he needed out of frustration.

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Wong working at the vacuum factory

But there was one thing Mr. Wong was talkative about: guns. He was granted a New York State license to own a handgun in June 1997, and he would later become a member of two shooting ranges in the Binghamton area. A clerk at Wal-Mart in nearby Vestal said Mr. Wong would shop there for ammunition and bull’s-eyes for target practice. At Shop-Vac, he showed his pistol permit to co-workers and boasted of carrying a handgun in his glove compartment.

Last year, Mr. Wong went to one of the local shooting ranges and spent hours practicing on targets 50 feet away. He was using a semiautomatic Beretta pistol equipped with a laser sight, and he had a pile of shot-up targets at his side. Mr. Wong’s style of target practice caught the attention of the man shooting next to him, a few lanes over.
“He was basically shooting his shots in rapid succession with virtually no hesitation between shots, very smooth and steady and rapid shooting,” said the man, who asked that his name not be used.

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At the gunman's home in Johnson City on Friday night, the police were seen removing a rifle case, a box
with a picture of a rifle on the side, and two black boxes that may have been handgun cases.

Mr. Wong told the man that he had probably shot 10,000 rounds in about a year’s time. “He was pleasant,” the man recalled. “He was courteous. You would never suspect that he would pose a threat to anyone.”

After the Shop-Vac factory closed last year, Mr. Wong started receiving Trade Adjustment Assistance, a type of federal aid for workers whose jobs are moved overseas, and became a regular visitor at the employment center, said the center’s director, Terry Stark. One of the center’s suggestions to him was to enroll in courses in English as a second language, and Mr. Wong did, signing up for a class at the American Civic Association in late January.

Though he was an immigrant just like them, Mr. Wong had little in common with his classmates, and rarely engaged them or their teacher in conversations, his teacher, Elisabeth Hayes, said. He stopped showing up to classes in early March. “He never said anything,” said Long Ho, a Vietnamese immigrant who along with his wife, Lan Ho, 39, was in the same class as Mr. Wong.

On April 3, Mr. Ho and his wife were seated in class when Mr. Wong burst in. Mr. Ho tried to shield her from the bullets. He was shot in the right arm but survived. His wife was killed.

On Thursday, Mr. Ho, his right arm and left wrist and part of his face wrapped in bandages, sat in a wheelchair at his wife’s funeral in Johnson City. His son and daughter, both in elementary school, stood at his side, as friends and relatives rang bells and sang in Vietnamese. With his one good arm, he touched his wife’s body in the open coffin and bowed his head.
Asked why Mr. Wong had chosen to attack them, Mr. Ho, on the verge of weeping, his voice barely a whisper, replied, simply: “Nobody know.”

Very interesting, I've been constantly interested in Jiverly Wong so it's refreshing to see new info on a case with such little info.