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WORLD> America
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As NY gunman's life unraveled, he took others'
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-04-05 09:34 Wong was born in Vietnam and moved to the States in the early 1990s and soon afterward became a citizen, friends and relatives said. He worked at IBM for a time, friend Hue Huynh said, but decided to move to California. There, he worked for seven years at a caterer called Kikka Sushi, eventually making $9 an hour, said Paulus Lukas, the company's human resources manager. "He was really good at doing his job -- we respected him for that," Lukas said. "He's never late, he's always punctual. And when he finishes his job, he goes home. He doesn't complain, he doesn't argue with people. He gets along." But one day he simply didn't show up for work, Lukas said. Early last year, he called asking the company to send his tax forms to a New York state address. Back in New York, he worked at the Shop-Vac plant in Binghamton. Former co-worker Kevin Greene told the Daily News of New York that Wong once said, in answer to whether he liked the New York Yankees, "No, I don't like that team. I don't like America. America sucks." Zikuski said Wong was fired from that job, where he assembled vacuum cleaners. That's apparently when things really started to go downhill. "People who end up doing this particular thing have an accumulation of stressers in their lives, and ultimately there is the one that broke the camel's back," Dietz said. "Job loss is one of the big ones, and those stressers are happening more often this year." Huynh, the 56-year-old proprietor of an Asian grocery store in Binghamton frequented by the gunman's sister, ran into Wong at the gym recently and noted that he was complaining about how he couldn't find work. His unemployment benefits were only $200 a week, and he lamented his bad luck, she said. "He's upset he don't have a job here. He come back and want to work," Huynh said. Her husband tried to cheer him up by saying that he was still young and had plenty of time to find work. Wong's story is similar to how friends were describing the recent trials of a man accused of opening fire on Pittsburgh police officers during a domestic dispute Saturday, killing three of them. They said he had recently been upset about losing his job; police say that, like Wong, he was wearing a bulletproof vest. A woman reached at the home who identified herself as Wong's sister said late Friday she did not believe he was the gunman. "I think somebody involved, not him," she said. That's not an unusual response, Dietz said. "What will be revealed if the investigation goes deep enough is that many people in a shooter's world knew that he was angry, mad, unreasonable, scary at times, and recently some of them came to learn that he was threatening and armed," said Dietz, who is not involved in the Binghamton investigation. "They've known that for a long time, but none of them did what they should have done with that information." State police got tips suggesting that Wong may have been planning a bank robbery in 1999, possibly to support a crack-cocaine addiction, Zikuski said. But the robbery never happened, and Zikuski had no other information. Wong's father was well-known in the Binghamton area through his work years ago at the now-defunct World Relief Organization, helping recent immigrants find a doctor and obtain food stamps. "Everyone, when they come to America, he's the one who helps," said Ty Tran, who came to the United States in 1990. Mark Preston, 48, a neighbor of the gunman in Johnson City, outside Binghamton, said people in the family keep to themselves but often tended the bushes in their yard. "They grow great vegetables and roses," he said.
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