MIAMI — A 20-year-old with a weapons cache that included four AK-47s was arrested after threatening over the Internet to undertake a Virginia Tech-style massacre, authorities said Thursday.
Oregon authorities learned of a March 25 Internet message that police allege Calin Chi Wong posted in which he threatened to re-enact the Virginia Tech killings. Two days later, Homestead Police searched the home Wong shares with his parents and found the weapons stacked on shelves in plain view, Detective Antonio Aquino said.
Wong had 13 firearms in all, more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition, some that could pierce armor, and 100 rounds in a feeding clip with bullets “meant to take down aircraft or military machinery,” Aquino said.
He had hidden two AK-47s in his parents’ closet, and his parents said the guns did not belong to them, Aquino said.
Wong was charged with making written threats to kill or do bodily injury via the computer and bonded out for $7,500. Additional charges are pending, he said.
It was not known whether Wong had a lawyer. A message left at a phone number listed for Wong was not immediately returned Thursday evening. The phone at his employer, China King, rang unanswered.
Homestead Police first noticed Wong when he went to the department in February to complain he had been robbed of $800 over the Internet after he ordered a gun online using his father’s PayPal account.
He told authorities he had called the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other agencies about the issue.
Aquino said Wong reached a boiling point when he posted the message saying he would re-enact the Virginia Tech massacre, in which student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people last year before turning the gun on himself.
“After speaking to him and seeing his frustration, I believe that he had the potential to carry out some kind of threat,” Aquino said.
Wong felt isolated and cut off, authorities noted, saying he had been buying and selling guns for about two years, and word was getting around about Wong’s age. Dealers stopped selling to him, and he was being banned from certain gun-sale Web sites.
“I’m soon to the point to re-enact the whole event,” Wong wrote under the name “thehumanabc,” referring to the shootings past April at Virginia Tech. “This may not seem like a threat to you, but I’m sure others don’t want to see it occur again. It should be a wake up call for all haters out there,” according to an arrest report.
Aquino said Wong told police that making the threat made him feel good because “he had thousands of people on the Internet paying attention to him.”
But Wong also said he was just upset and frustrated and never actually planned a killing spree, Aquino said.
However, authorities also found a school book bag lined with bulletproof vests inside Wong’s home, as well as two handguns.
Wong is not in college, Aquino said. He graduated from an Oregon high school and attended a college for a year before moving with his parents to Florida, authorities said.
Wong said the weapons were an investment.
“He says it’s a lucrative business,” Aquino said. “He said if Hillary Clinton wins, she’ll put a ban on assault rifles and these assault rifles will be worth more in value.”
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EXPERT GROUP DISCOVERS 5 REASONS WHY COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ARE NOT SAFE
The SERAPH Research Team, consisting of education and law enforcement experts, has discovered five reasons for unsafe college campuses.
The SERAPH Research Team provides a bi-yearly school-safety report for Congress and in 2006 prepared an assessment of the “The Virginia Tech Review Panel Report”.
In its analysis of security concerns at colleges and universities across the country, SERAPH has determined:
1. Since the Columbine massacre in 1999, police departments across the United States have been training in “active shooter” response. This has been a well-established practice for use in public [K-12] schools.
However, our survey of college and university security directors and police chiefs shows that few have had this training. Two reasons were given: Administrators often do not want to pay for the training or in some cases bar campus security/police from participating in training to avoid what they perceived to be a “militaristic campus atmosphere”.
2. College administrators have no training in security or police operations and as a result micromanage security operations on their campuses. This is problematic because of the obvious delay it causes in response time. In addition, when a college or university has a police department, administrative micromanagement can violate state law regarding obstruction of justice.
3. A proper security audit is vitally important to campus security. However, our survey of security directors / police chiefs indicates that most college administrators will not allow these assessments to be done out of fear of liability exposure and the chance the audit would require changes in management systems.
4. Threat assessment as a science has existed in the United States since the early 1940s. Predication and prevention of violence is a critical aspect of campus security and one that, in SERAPH’s experience, seriously is lacking on higher-education campuses. All Resident Assistants, security / police and department administrators should be trained to identify violent behavior in students, staff and visitors.
A lack of systematic monitoring of people on campus contributes to crime.
5. An emergency plan is only as good as the data in it and the ability of key personnel to use it effectively.
Training is important for the effective management of an emergency by key personnel. You cannot ask untrained people to do what trained people do.
SERAPH Research Team: http://www.seraph.net/about_seraph.html