Embattled authorities yesterday said they were right to wait 40 minutes outside a Binghamton immigration center before entering and finding 13 people massacred inside.
Cops first arrived at the American Civic Association at 10:33 a.m. Friday, three minutes after the first 911 calls started pouring in.
GUNMAN’S SISTER: ‘SHOCK’ OVER SHOOTING RAMPAGE
But the callers were foreign, and it was difficult to assess the situation, officials said.
Then, because cops heard no gunfire, suggesting there was no “active gunman,” they decided to wait for a SWAT team before entering, said Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski.
“Nobody could have been saved even if police walked in the door that first minute,” Zikuski insisted.
Officials said autopsies back up that assertion, indicating that the 13 victims of suicidal madman Jiverly Wong died instantaneously, or close to it.
“We definitively can say nobody was shot after police arrival,” Broome County District Attorney Gerald Mollen said.
Police eventually entered the building at 11:13 a.m. — finding the 13 innocents slaughtered and Wong dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Some survivors were discovered in the basement, still huddled together in terror, not realizing the carnage was over.
Authorities went on the defensive over their actions as Wong’s father emerged from seclusion — but said nothing to explain his fiendish son’s actions.
Instead, he only hugged neighbors who came by to offer their support.
Among his son’s victims was a married Haitian couple, whose two young children were left orphaned by the rampage.
Marc Bernard, 44, and his wife, Maria, 46, had a 12-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl.
The couple was in class when the out-of-work, divorced Wong burst in and gunned them and 11 others down in a hail of more than 30 bullets.
Wong, a Vietnam-born Chinese who knew the building’s layout from having taken English classes there, had backed his vehicle up against a rear exit to prevent escapes and used two legally acquired pistols — a .45-caliber and 9mm — during his killing spree, which also wounded four people.
Leroy Jackson, manager of the apartment complex where the Bernards lived, said he later drove by the American Civic Association, where he saw Marc Bernard’s green Mazda parked.
“I knew they were both gone. It’s hard. It hasn’t sunk in yet,” Jackson said. “Everyone is broken up by the news.”
At a memorial service for the victims last night, Hong Huyhn, the brother-in-law of Lan Ho, who was killed in the carnage, said: “We’re very sad right now. We never believed this could happen.”
Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton in Binghamton