Hate crime that wasn't called one.

Why are you even worrying about possible hate crime charges? They got the guy for first degree murder. That's about as big a crime as it gets.

Hate crimes laws carry a stiffer sentence don't they? If so why wasn't he charged for a hate crime?

If 1st degree murder is the best we could hope for in a case like this then why do we have hate crime laws in the first place?

We have hate crime laws to protect people like Mr. Vang who aren't skilled armed marksmen. Had he been a poor shot, or unarmed, he would likely be dead now.

No doubt he let his temper get the best of him, and he should not have killed these men, but we don't know what really happened out there and probably never will

LionTamerX wrote:

We have hate crime laws to protect people like Mr. Vang who aren't skilled armed marksmen. Had he been a poor shot, or unarmed, he would likely be dead now.

No doubt he let his temper get the best of him, and he should not have killed these men, but we don't know what really happened out there and probably never will

He killed six men and said he would have killed all eight. He shot some in the back. Temper get the best of him? That's rather mild, isn't it? And even if they were using racial slurs against him, he is still responsible for his own actions. And I just don't see how shooting six (and trying for eight) is in anyway justifiable.

Baldimo, NO ONE should kill anyone, least of all because of race.

never said it was justifiable MoAn, I'm just saying that he was one man against eight. It seems highly unlikely that he would have picked a fight with a bunch of white men in rural Wisconsin on his own.
Use a little common sense.

I think it is a tragedy. I think the legal system served us well in this case.

he Hmong immigrant killed 6 hunters on a crisp Wisconsin day, but why?

By Colleen Mastony
Tribune staff reporter
Published September 7, 2005

They met by chance, amid the towering pines and sugar maples of northern Wisconsin.

The two men--one white, the other Laotian--came from vastly different worlds, but each found peace and a sense of purpose hunting in the woods.

Terry Willers was a construction contractor who settled in a town less than 30 miles from where he grew up. He hunted every year with the same tightknit group on land he co-owned with a friend.

Chai Vang had escaped from war-ravaged Laos as a child and settled in St. Paul, where he earned a reputation as a hard worker and served as a shaman, a spiritual leader in his community.

Had the two met anywhere else, they likely would have passed each other without much more than a glance. In the woods, though, everything was different.

For centuries, people have fought to control the rugged wilderness that blankets Sawyer County. In recent years, tensions have flared between the Hmong, whose culture has no tradition of property rights, and the white locals who cherish the right to own--and defend--their land.

Those who live in the North Woods call deer season "holy week," or "the sacred nine days." The echo of gunshots over the hills sounds as normal as a heartbeat, a regular, reassuring thump signaling all is well. But on this day, rifle fire was followed by screams of people running for their lives.

About noon on a cold Sunday in November, when Vang crossed into forestland that belonged to Willers, he touched off a series of events that would leave six people dead and two others wounded.

Some of what happened remains clear and uncontested.

Willers spotted Vang sitting in a tree stand and told him to leave. Then Willers radioed others in his hunting party, who sped to the scene on all-terrain vehicles and confronted Vang.

But that's where the clarity ends. Each side tells a different story, and each says the other fired first.

A trial is set to begin Thursday for Vang, who has pleaded not guilty to six counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder.

He has said the hunters surrounded him and hurled racial slurs, calling him "chink" and "gook." Someone then shot at him, he says, and he fired back, chasing some of the hunters through the trees and shooting them in the back.

"Some of them, I say I feel sorry for," Vang said in a telephone interview from jail. "Some of them, I say they deserved [it] because they don't know how to talk to me like they should be, shoot me the way they do."

But the men who survived have told police that Vang was walking away from the hunters when he turned and opened fire.

"I don't remember any racial slurs," said one survivor, Lauren Hesebeck. "What if there were? Does that give you the right to shoot people?"

The paths that led to the explosive encounter crossed many years and places, from a refugee camp in Thailand after the Vietnam War to a patch of Wisconsin wilderness where two friends dreamed of building a cabin.

These stories show how the two groups came together in the woods, but they also raise difficult questions.

Why would an ambitious immigrant, a healer, suddenly turn into a methodical killer?

Did the alienation Vang experienced in America play a role in the shootings? Was the clash of cultures a factor?