Jiverly Wong
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Jiverly Wong (December 8, 1967 – April 3, 2009) was the perpetrator of the 2009 Binghamton mass shooting in upstate New York, in which he killed 13 people and himself. The shooting is currently ranked as the sixteenth-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Biography edit
Wong was born into an ethnic Chinese (Hoa) family in South Vietnam. He and his parents, Henry Voong and Mui Thong, immigrated to New York in the late 1980s; he moved to California some time later. In 1992, Wong was arrested there and convicted of a misdemeanor charge of fraud for forgery. Wong became a naturalized American citizen in November 1995; the following year, he registered a gun in Broome County, New York. Sometime after that, he left the United States to live in Ottawa, Ontario, in Canada.
He returned to the U.S., taking up residence in Inglewood, California, in December 1999. In California, Wong registered another gun. While living there, Wong married and later divorced Xiu Ping Jiang. The couple had no children. Wong worked for almost seven years as a delivery man for Kikka Sushi, a catering company located in Los Angeles.
Wong failed to show up to work one day in July 2007, having moved to Binghamton, New York, that month, near his parents. Later, he called the company to get a copy of his W-2 earnings statement in 2008, asking that it be forwarded to a New York state address. Although early reports suggested Wong had recently lost his job at a local IBM plant in nearby Endicott, New York, IBM said they had no records showing Wong had ever worked for the company. Wong worked at a local Shop-Vac vacuum cleaner plant until it closed in November 2008.
Wong had been taking English classes at the center, beginning in January 2009 and continuing through March. His attendance was intermittent, and he stopped coming altogether. He shot the students and teacher in the classroom where he had formerly attended sessions.
Motive edit
A proper motive for the shooting has not been made clear, and with Wong's suicide, will likely remain unknown. It has been theorized that Wong was angry at society in general due to having allegedly been a victim of racism. It is also possible that he felt depressed over losing his job and upset about his inability to find another one.
Those close to Wong described him as an Americophobe who also once talked about assassinating then-President Barack Obama.