Binghamton shooting

On April 3, 2009, a mass shooting occurred at the American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton, New York. At approximately 10:30 a.m. EDT, Jiverly Antares Wong (also known as Jiverly Voong), a 41-year-old naturalized American citizen from Vietnam, entered the facility and shot numerous people inside. Wong had taken English language classes there from January to March 2009 before dropping out.

Wong had been taking English classes at the center, beginning in January 2009 and continuing through March. His attendance was intermittent, and he stopped coming altogether. He shot the students and teacher in the classroom where he had formerly attended sessions.

Several days after the shooting, an envelope was received by the Syracuse, New York, TV station News 10 Now dated March 18, 2009, and postmarked April 3, 2009, the day of the shooting. The three stamps used for the postage were a Liberty Bell and two Purple Hearts.

Wong killed 13 people and critically wounded four. An account of each of the victims was published in The New York Times on April 6, 2009.

Wong failed to show up to work one day in July 2007, having moved to Binghamton, New York, that month, near his parents. Later, he called the company to get a copy of his W-2 earnings statement in 2008, asking that it be forwarded to a New York state address. Although early reports suggested Wong had recently lost his job at a local IBM plant in nearby Endicott, New York, IBM said they had no records showing Wong had ever worked for the company. Wong worked at a local Shop-Vac vacuum cleaner plant until it closed in November 2008.

Several sources suggested possible motives for Wong's attack, including feelings of being "degraded and disrespected" for his poor English language skills, depression over losing his job, and difficulty in finding work in New York. A few years before the killings, he had worked as an engineer at Endicott Interconnect Technologies, a high-tech electronics company. In 2004, the company laid off five percent of its workforce. A coworker from that time said of him, "He was quiet—not a violent person" and "I can't believe he would do something like this." Press TV noted that Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud claimed responsibility for the shooting, saying, "They were my men. I gave them orders in reaction to US drone attacks." However, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation discounted the claim as inconsistent with their evidence that Wong was the lone gunman.

He returned to the U.S., taking up residence in Inglewood, California, in December 1999. In California, Wong registered another gun. While living there, Wong married and later divorced Xiu Ping Jiang. The couple had no children. Wong worked for almost seven years as a delivery man for Kikka Sushi, a catering company located in Los Angeles.

Wong was born into an ethnic Chinese (Chinese Nùng) family in South Vietnam. He and his parents, Henry Voong and Mui Thong, immigrated to New York in the late 1980s; he moved to California some time later. In 1992, Wong was arrested there and convicted of a misdemeanor charge of fraud for forgery. Wong became a naturalized American citizen in November 1995; the following year, he registered a gun in Broome County, New York. Sometime after that, he left the United States to live in Ottawa, Ontario, in Canada.

Jiverly Antares Wong (born Linh Phat Vuong, Vietnamese: Vương Phật Linh; December 8, 1967 – April 3, 2009), a resident of Johnson City, New York, was identified as the perpetrator.