BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — The community center was filled with people from countries as far off as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, all working to become more a part of their new home — learning English, taking a class to gain U.S. citizenship. The gunman may have walked a similar path to become an American decades ago.
He parked his car against the back door, stormed through the front and shot two receptionists, apparently without saying a word.
Then he fired on a citizenship class while terrified people, their only escape route blocked, scrambled into a boiler room and a storage room and prayed he wouldn’t follow.
“I heard the shots, every shot. I heard no screams, just silence, shooting,” said Zhanar Tokhtabayeva, a 30-year-old Kazakh who was in an English class when her teacher screamed for everyone to hide. “I was thinking that my life was finished.”
The gunman killed 13 people before apparently killing himself Friday morning at the American Civic Association building in Binghamton. Four people were critically wounded.
One of the receptionists survived; shot in the abdomen, she played dead before crawling under a desk and calling 911. Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said she stayed on the phone for 90 minutes, “feeding us information constantly.”
“She’s a hero in her own right,” he said.
Investigators said they had yet to establish a motive for the massacre, which was at least the fifth deadly mass shooting in the U.S. in the past month.
Police said they arrived at the scene within two minutes. The gunman was believed to be a Vietnamese immigrant.
He was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in an office, a satchel containing ammunition slung around his neck, authorities said.
Police found two handguns — a 9mm and a .45-caliber — and a hunting knife.
Thirty-seven people in all made it out of the building, including 26 who hid in the boiler room in the basement, cowering there for three hours while police methodically searched the building.
The suspected gunman carried ID with the name of 42-year-old Jiverly Voong of nearby Johnson City, N.Y., but that was believed to be an alias, said a law enforcement official.
A second law enforcement official said the two handguns were registered to Jiverly Wong, another name the man used.
A woman who answered the phone at a listing for Henry D. Voong said she was Jiverly Voong’s sister but would not give her name. She said her brother had been in the country for 28 years and had citizenship.
“The police just called me and said he got shot,” she said.
