Is it Trendy to Commit Murder-Suicide?
April 3, 2009 – It was a rainy, gray day today in Binghamton, New York, and likely not a day that many people in that town of 50,000 will soon forget. 
The 5th mass shooting in the U.S. over the last month unfolded in the American Civil Association building at 10:00 a.m. and it resulted in the deaths of 14 people. Is this not becoming predictable? We know what happens. In the end, the shooter dies. The shooter clearly knows that, which is why this kind of violence is the nastiest form of suicide. It’s also the most unpleasant trend, far worse than oversized sunglasses.
Jiverly Antares Wong (alias Jiverly Voong), a 41 year old Vietnamese immigrant who had been layed off from his job the previous day, drove into town in his older model Toyota Camry armed with an 9 mm and .45 caliber Beretta. Wearing a dark green jacket and dark sunglasses, Jiverly obstructed the rear exit to the American Civil Association building with his car so people inside could not escape. He slung an ammunition sack around his neck, tucked a hunting knife into the waistband of his pants, walked around to the front of the building, stepping through the glass doors, and made one helluva bad decision. First he gunned down a couple of receptionists. One of the them played dead while bleeding from a gunshot wound to the stomach, then she managed to call 911 and stay on the phone with the police for 90 minutes. Meanwhile, people ran in terror for their lives, attempting to escape the building or hide elsewhere, in the boiler room or storage areas. Jiverly shot five of them. Then he walked through one the classrooms where students were busy taking a test and shot more. Those people who managed to hide listened to intermittent gunfire while waiting, hoping, praying their lives would not end. Thirty seven people eventually made it out. Jiverly shot himself in the head. He had lived in this country for 28 years and was a U.S. citizen.
According to an EMS speaking on anonymity, local, state, and federal police surrounded the building, with guns drawn. They waited outside for an hour before entering the building. The FBI showed up to implement hostage negotiation and collect evidence at the scene. Buildings in the surrounding area were evacuated or went into lockdown, including nearby Binghamton High School. Helicopters circled in the sky above. Family members of the victims and hostages waited for word of the fate of their loved ones. Some never heard and were sent home to wait for a call.
Whenever something like this happens, I cannot help but rewind to the last 24 hours and ponder how yesterday at this time, everything was just fine. Knowing that the crime occurred at 10:00 a.m., I think back to what I was doing at that moment, thousands of miles away, naively minding my own business. Life seemed perfectly fine. Little did I know that bullets were tearing people apart in Binghamton.
What goes on in the mind of someone who commits suicide? Even without committing murder before a suicide, suicide is still murder, namely murder of the self. I have thought about this often since last November, when an acquaintance of mine ended his life on some local train tracks. It was just past his 30th birthday and everyone I knew thought of him as the nicest guy. I could not have agreed more. He really was always considerate, well-mannered, well-kept, and quite productive. I could have never predicted that he would end his life. What profoundly perplexed me in the months following his death is not that he had sufficient will to kill himself but that he had sufficient malice toward himself to do it. If you are going to kill yourself, you must step outside of yourself as though your body is an object worthy of being destroyed, and then you must act upon your body in an intentionally violent way. What about involving others? My acquaintance laid on the train tracks until a train hit him with seeming total disregard for the train conductor that attempted to stop the train. How many more degrees out of touch is it to turn and kill others before killing oneself? I will not answer that (I cannot) but I will offer my speculation that it may be less than we realize.
Like his four psychopathic compatriots involved in killing sprees in the U.S. during this past month, Jiverly was a man. These killing sprees appear gender relevant. Irregardless, a man like this must have blamed everyone else for his misery, even if he had never met them in his life. He must have firmly convinced himself that people deserved to die because fate was unfair to Jiverly, so fate would have to be unfair to as many others as he could shoot in one episode. Jiverly loved guns, talked about guns, and regularly went to target practice while telling co-workers he wanted to assassinate the President. He said that he hated America. His wife and kids had left him and he felt victimized. His mentality had to have been consistently focused on what others failed to give him in his life. Certainly, he was a depressed man harboring dark secrets in his psyche, unable to free himself from the enormous burden of his own hatred. Perhaps he wondered what it might be like to be a mass murderer for one day. When his urge to commit suicide grew into a writhing monster inside of himself, he let a dark, twisted dream come true as he rode the final wave of death.