Legal Research

Online Threat To Re-Create Virginia Tech Massacre Brings Arrest

By David Badertscher, PLL

Source: Crime and Justice News, April 4, 2008.

"Calin Chi Wong's biggest mistake wasn't owning rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, or even telling Homestead police about it, says the Miami Herald. It was threatening to re-create the worst mass shooting in U.S. history in an e-mail conversation that was posted on a gun enthusiast website, 'I feel there is no choice out of this other than what Cho did,' police say Wong wrote under the moniker 'thehumanabc.' Police believe he was referring to last year's massacre at Virginia Tech University, when Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 students and then himself."

"Last week, police arrested Wong, 20, and charged him with making threats over the Internet. Police confiscated a cache of high-powered weapons and armor-piercing bullets. Wong left jail the next day on a $7,500 bond. Wong has no prior criminal history. He visited the police department Feb. 29 to say he'd been cheated out of $800 while trying to buy a firearm through online. Police were more interested in what Wong went on to say: He'd been banned from websites for fraudulent selling tactics, he'd been buying and selling weaponry over the Internet for two years, and he owned six or seven AK-47s and other firearms. Police couldn't charge him with a crime until they unexpectedly received a fax a month later from a sheriff's office that detailed an Internet chat earlier that day posted on the website AR15.com in which Wong discussed the Virginia Tech shooting of almost a year ago. Among the statements made by 'thehumanabc' was 'I'm soon to the point to reenact the whole event.' Wong's father, Sam Wong, said his son 'was going to kill people.'

Miami Herald

Full post as published by New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library on April 04, 2008 (boomark / email).