Students shell-shocked, coincidences link Wayne to killings

A day after...

HONG KONG: Wayne Chiang has had quite a traumatic day. For over 12 hours on Monday, virtually all of America believed that the 23-year-old, a US citizen of Chinese descent, was the gunman who had mowed down 32 people at the Virginia Tech University, including two Indians. Picking up on blog chatter that jumped to erroneous conclusions, TV stations across the US cited his name as the suspected killer. Chiang received an avalanche of death threats on his livejournal, his family is quaking in fear, his siblings have had to had skip school…

“It’s been very chaotic, I can tell you that,” Chiang told DNA in a telephone interview from Washington DC, “What really blows my mind is the death threat.”

At the time of the killings, Chiang was 250 miles away, in Washington DC. But he was erroneously linked to the shooting by a string of eerie coincidences. “I matched the profile exactly,” he acknowledges. “I believe they gave out a five-point description of the suspect, and I matched them all. I’m of Asian descent, I graduated from Virginia Tech, I used to live in the campus building where the first shooting happened, I recently broke up with my girlfriend, and I collect guns.”

Just two days before the shooting, Chiang, an ardent advocate of the right to bear arms, had posted pictures of himself on his livejournal, posing with his armoury of semi-automatic weapons and Russian rifles. In March, he broke up with his girlfriend Janice. Since initial reports of the massacre suggested that the killer was a jilted lover of Asian descent, the needle of suspicion seemed — for some — to point to Chiang. And TV networks, drawn to the sensational story, momentarily let down their guard, and got caught up in the rush to judgement. Chiang realised that something was up when traffic to his blog surged. “Everyone’s trying to look for a scapegoat. I don’t blame them: we all did it after 9/11; it’s our way of coping.”

Only after Chiang proclaimed his innocence on his blog — “I am not the shooter,” he posted — did the chatter thin down. Sticking to his guns, literally, Chiang says he has no reason to feel apologetic about posting the controversial pictures on his web journal. “I don’t regret those pictures. I believe in my Second Amend Rights (to bear arms), and I freely express it; it is my way of expressing my patriotism as an American.”

In fact, argues Chiang, the massacre wouldn’t have happened if students at the Virginia Tech University had had the right to carry concealed weapons. “The university has prohibited the carrying of concealed weapons. Students who carry arms face expulsion. Given the description of what happened on Monday, I sincerely believe that if the students had been armed, this could have ended a lot sooner.”