One Wong gone wrong

Al Baker (but it's still unknown to Rico if he's the same Alan Baker from Rico's childhood on Nantucket) writes of the latest massacre in The New York Times: In a brief, taunting note that he left for the police at his home, the gunman who carried out one of New York’s deadliest mass shootings offered no clues to what motivated his killing spree, a law enforcement official said. But the note, found after the massacre on Friday at an immigration services center in Binghamton, suggested that other notes or letters might pop up. On Monday, one did.
A Syracuse television station reported that a rambling, two-page letter from the killer, Jiverly Wong, 41, had arrived at the station, packed with personal items that have led authorities to believe that it was authentic: Mr. Wong’s New York driver’s license; three photographs, along with negatives, of him holding guns; and his pistol permit.
“I am Jiverly Wong shooting the people,” said the letter. It was written in capital letters in broken English, dated 18 March, postmarked from Binghamton on Friday with a return address of “J. Wong.” It was opened about noon on Monday by Ron Lombard, the general manager and news director at News 10 Now, a cable news channel.
The letter and the other items have been turned over to investigators, Mr. Lombard said. It will be analyzed for forensic clues, and profilers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation will compare the handwriting with other known samples of Mr. Wong’s writing.
In the letter, anger is directed toward unnamed police officers in California, where Mr. Wong once lived, and in Johnson City, New York, his most recent residence. But the writings do not articulate a specific motive for taking out his anger on a group of immigrants who were struggling to forge the kind of path he himself did decades ago.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wong’s sister, in a television interview on Monday, described her brother’s rocky transition to America two decades ago as well as recent hard times that had apparently tilted him further into desperation. “I can see that he was very depressed from losing his job and he was very frustrated with his English-speaking skills,” the woman, identified only as Nga, said on the Today show. “He didn’t share any of his thoughts and feelings, and he kept all of his frustration inside and didn’t want to share with anybody else in the family.”
Investigators are seeking anyone who knew Mr. Wong, who burst into the offices of the American Civic Association and gunned down his victims before killing himself. His body, clad in a bullet-resistant vest and with a hunting knife tucked into his waistband, was discovered lying on one victim, and his two handguns, a 9mmGlock and a .45-caliber Beretta, were lying nearby.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was developing, said investigators would continue to retrace his movements in cyberspace. They were examining the victims’ biographies to see whether any had links to Mr. Wong.
Mr. Wong, born in Vietnam in December of 1967, came to the United States in 1990 with his family under refugee status. He was naturalized in 1995. While in California in the early 1990s, Mr. Wong was arrested two times, the official said, once in September of 1992 for bouncing a check. The details of the first arrest, in August of 1991, were not clear. In California, a divorce file under his name shows that Mr. Wong was married for five years, starting in December 1999, and had no children. He separated in May of 2005.