A lunatic armed to the teeth burst into a citizenship class for immigrants yesterday in Binghamton and turned their search for the American dream into a bloody nightmare, slaughtering 13 people before turning his weapon on himself, officials and sources said.
The gunman, believed to be 42-year-old Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Voong, had been complaining that he couldn’t find work and that his unemployment checks were only $200 a week, a friend told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Hue Huynh, a Binghamton grocery store proprietor whose husband worked with Voong years ago, said the man had driven a truck in California before recently returning to Binghamton, then losing a job there.
“He’s upset he don’t have a job here. He come back and want to work,” she said. Her husband tried to cheer him by telling him he was still young and there was plenty of time to find work, but he complained about his “bad luck,” she said.
Besides the dead, four people were critically wounded, officials said.
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Wielding two handguns and wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a bright nylon green jacket, the killer drove his car up to the back door of the building to block the easiest escape route.
The lone gunman then entered through the front door and started blasting his cruelly trapped victims.
“It obviously was premeditated,” said Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski. “He made sure nobody could escape.”
One of the victims, identified by family as Roberta King, 72 was a substitute teacher who had come in for the day to teach an English class in which Voong had been a student, according to her colleague.
“She was a wonderful person,” said Priscilla Pease, 64, who survived the attack herself. “[She’s] a mother of 10 children and just loved teaching international students.”
Pease said Voong, a Vietnamese immigrant, had been ditching classes.
“It was a Level 2 intermediate ‘English as a Second Language’ class and the gunman . . . was a regular student,” she told The Post. “He hasn’t come to class as often as the other students lately.”
Cops said the horrific bloodletting began with the shooter blasting one of the center’s receptionists to death and wounding another, who was able to play dead and then call 911.
He then headed through the building toward the citizenship class, as a few lucky people managed to flee, a witness told The Post.
“I saw a bunch of people bail out that front door and they were coming — they were running,” said truck driver Ron DeBolt, who was passing by the center at the moment of the attack. “They had a purpose to get out of that building.”
Forty people were trapped in the building for several hours, hiding as they waited out the rampage.
“People were there in the process of being tested for their citizenship,” said Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat whose district includes Binghamton. “It was in the middle of a test. He just went in and opened fire.”
Some of the trapped people — mostly immigrants seeking social services — managed to find shelter from the attack in a closet and in the building’s boiler room.
Fearing a hostage situation, police called in FBI negotiators.
A SWAT team eventually stormed the building. A witness said a heavily armored officer led the way in with a plastic shield. Moments later, wounded victims started being carried out.
“I saw them take three people out. The first one was carried out by four people,” said Tommy Kerr, a salesman at a Chevrolet dealership near the civic association.
“He was very, very limp. The second was on a stretcher. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or not. The third, I saw his head move, his knees were in the air. It’s very scary. It’s very upsetting.”
Authorities declared the situation under control at 2:40 p.m.
The gunman’s body was found lying on the floor of an office with documents on him that identified him as Voong.
Cops in Binghamton would not officially name Voong — who also goes by the last name Wong — as the killer, but law-enforcement sources said that the name may be an alias he had used in the past.
The gunman was also found with a large hunting knife in his waistband, a backpack full of ammo along with a 9 mm handgun and a .45-caliber handgun — both of which were registered to Wong.
A woman who answered the phone at Voong’s home in Johnson City, just outside Binghamton, told ABCNews.com: “He shot those people? No. No.”
The woman, who identified herself as Voong’s sister, said he had headed out in the morning to take classes at the civic association. She said she did not know he had been involved in the shooting.
“I’m going to pass out,” she told ABC and hung up the phone.
When reached later, she said: “How? He didn’t have a gun. I think somebody’s involved, not him. I think he got shot by somebody else.
“I think there’s a misunderstanding over here because I want to know, too,” she said.
Voong lived with his mom, dad and sister and had worked at an Endicott, N.Y. tech company called Interconnect until he was recently laid off, neighbor Barbara Monell said. company president Jay McNamara, however, denied he worked there.
“He was very quiet,” neighbor Monell, 25, told The Post, who added that cops searched Voong’s family home “and they came out with two long rifle cases and two handgun cases. They also had ammunition.”
A former co-worker at Interconnect, Christine Guy, told CNN: “I can’t believe he would do something like this. He respected everybody.”
The Civic Association’s president, Angela Leach, was not at the building yesterday because she had the day off.
“[She] is very upset right now,” said Mike Chanecka, a friend who answered a call at her home. Leach could be heard weeping in the background.
The massive scope of the killing reverberated worldwide.
“Michelle and I were shocked and deeply saddened to learn about the act of senseless violence in Binghamton,” President Obama said while in Europe yesterday.
Gov. Paterson traveled to the upstate city after getting word of the massacre and talked of the horror the immigrants at the center faced.
The victims “had that goal [of citizenship] thwarted today, but there still is an American dream and all of us who are Americans will try to heal this very, very deep wound for the city of Binghamton.” With Post Wire Services