Binghamton: The Mass Shooting You Probably Never Heard About

13 dead. 4 wounded. At 10:30 am on April 3, 2009, 42-year-old Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant from Johnson City, N.Y., invaded an immigration services center in nearby Binghamton and opened fire. He killed 13 and critically wounded four others, before turning the gun on himself.

In terms of fatalities, the shooting in Binghamton is one of the deadliest on record. But when we engage in compiling and updating lists of mass shootings in the United States, Binghamton is notably absent from many of those lists.

At the time of the Binghamton shooting, the United States was less than two years removed from the horror that took place at Virginia Tech University and approaching the 10-year anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School. We were really starting to become complacent with the frequency of mass shootings and the news and media were dominated by headlines related to the Great Recession, new revelations with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and the federal indictment of recently removed Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for attempts to sell President Obama’s vacant senate seat.

But even with all that going on why would a shooting that left 14 dead, including the shooter, making it one of the deadliest in United States history, ultimately be placed on the back burner for other news stories? If you ask former Binghamton mayor Matt Ryan, it may have something to do with the fact the victims were not American.”

Columbine had teenage victims. Virginia Tech had burgeoning adults. Newtown had small children. Orlando has LGBT Latinos. But Binghamton had immigrants and it’s no secret that the subject of immigration is a divisive topic, even though the vast majority of American citizens are either immigrants or are here because of immigrants.

The 13 dead (not including the shooter) were:

  • Roberta King, 72, who was an American citizen who worked at the immigration center,
  • Maria K. Zobniw, 60, who was also an American citizen who worked at the immigration center,
  • Marc Henry Bernard, 44, a student who emigrated from Haiti with his wife,
  • Maria Sonia Bernard, 46, Marc Bernard’s wife,
  • Li Guo, 47, a visiting scholar from China,
  • Hong Xiu “Amy” Mao Marsland, 35, a student who emigrated from China,
  • Lan Ho, 39, a student who emigrated from Vietnam,
  • Hai Hong Zhong, 54, a student who emigrated from China,
  • Almir Olimpio Alves, 43, a visiting scholar from Brazil,
  • Jiang Ling, 22, a student who emigrated from China,
  • Parveen Ali, 26, a student who emigrated from Pakistan,
  • Layla Khalil, 53, a student who emigrated from Iraq, and
  • Dolores Yigal, 53, a student who emigrated from the Philippines.

Four others were critically wounded, including 61-year-old Shirley DeLucia, the center’s receptionist. She was hit, but feigned death so she could contact police. 42-year-old Long Huynh, Lan Ho’s husband, tried to shield his wife with his own body. He was struck several times, but the bullet that shattered his elbow ricocheted and hit his wife, killing her.

All life lost in these mass shooting events is worth remembering. While the current stop on the mass shootings tour is in Orlando, it is important not to just remember the victims from Pulse, but to remember everyone with whom they share their fate. To look at these mass shootings from a lens highlighting only the current event, we risk viewing these mass shootings as isolated incidents, which they are not. They are all part of a larger epidemic of violence in the United States.

Every victim of these mass shootings — from the University of Texas to the USPS to Columbine to Virginia Tech to Binghamton and Newtown and Orlando, and all the others — are not products of their own events and all exist as statistics in a decades-long problem that cannot be willed away or ignored any longer.

It’s way past time to start doing something about this.

Featured image by Yohey1028 and is in the public domain.

h/t Raw Story

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