Wayne Lo

Infobox terrorist attack
title =Simon's Rock massacre


location = Great Barrington, Massachusetts, U.S.
target = Students and faculty at Simon's Rock College of Bard
date = December 14, 1992,
type = School shooting, mass murder,
fatalities = 2
injuries = 4
perps = Wayne Lo
weapons = SKS

Wayne Lo (born November 14, 1974) is an American convicted murderer who fatally shot a student and a professor at the Bard College at Simon's Rock.

Early life

Wayne Lo was born in Tainan, Taiwan. His father was a fighter pilot in the Taiwanese air force and his mother was a music teacher. Lo has a younger brother. The family immigrated to the U.S. in 1987, settling in Billings, Montana. His parents ran a restaurant business in Billings. Lo attended Lewis and Clark Jr. High School and then Billings Central Catholic High School. Lo was a violinist and played in the Billings Symphony beginning in his freshman year of high school. He attended the Aspen Music Festival and studied under Dorothy Delay.

In 1991, Lo was accepted by Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and given the W.E.B. DuBois minority scholarship.

Shooting rampage

Lo did not adjust well to the liberal college environment of Simon's Rock. Lo held views which were deemed racist, homophobic and anti-semitic by fellow students at the college. Lo steadily became more and more excluded by his fellow students.

On December 14, 1992, Lo carried out a shooting rampage. That morning he received an ammunition order that he had placed two days earlier. He then went to Pittsfield, MA and purchased an SKS at a gun shop that afternoon. Lo commenced shooting at around 10:30 pm. The victims:

*Nacunan Saez - 37 - professor - shot dead
*Galen Gibson - 18 - student - shot dead
*Teresa Beavers - 40 - security guard - wounded
*Thomas McElderry - 19 - student - wounded
*Joshua Faber - 15 - student - wounded
*Matthew David - 18 - student - wounded

Lo surrendered to the police after his rifle jammed and he called 911, informing them that he was the shooter. He was taken into custody without incident.

Trial and conviction

Although many statements were made prior to the trial regarding Lo's bigoted and racist views, he was never charged with a hate crime and the racism accusations were never substantiated during the month-long trial. Instead, the focus turned to his mental state at the time of the shootings as Lo's defense lawyers entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

Lo's psychiatrists testified he was suffering from schizophrenia while the prosecution expert psychiatrist witnesses merely attributed Lo's actions to his narcissistic personality disorder.

The jury sided with the prosecution and delivered a guilty verdict after three days of deliberation. Lo was found guilty on all 17 counts he was charged with and sentenced to two consecutive life without possibility of parole terms plus 19-20 years [ [http://www.serialkillercalendar.com/waynelo.html Wayne Lo Interview] , Serial Killer Calendar] . He was immediately sent to prison on February 3, 1994.

Imprisonment

Lo spent 9 months at a maximum security facility at Walpole, MA and then transferred to MCI-Norfolk, a medium security prison where he remains today.

In 1998, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts rejected Lo's appeals.

In 1999, Gregory Gibson, the father of Galen Gibson, wrote and published "Gone Boy -- A Walkabout", a detailed book recounting the shooting and Gibson's search for answers in his son's death. The book spurred correspondence between Gibson and Lo, which was detailed in a "New York Times" article (April 12, 2000, front page) as well as a German TV documentary film, "Running Amok" by George Stefan Troller.

Popular culture

Lo wore a t-shirt with the name of a New York hardcore band Sick of It All at the time of his arrest. This spurred the band to issue press releases denouncing Lo's crime.

The rock band Weezer wrote a song about Lo. It appears on their Deluxe Album (2004) disk 2, track 12. The song is called "Lullaby for Wayne". The songs chorus contains the lyrics "Wayne you know it's true/There's nothing you can do/So put them guns away/Who cares what's right or wrong/So please give up the fight/Put them guns away."

Journalist Chuck Klosterman writes a passage in his book "" (pages 133-134) where Wayne Lo writes Chuck a letter from prison contemplating what questions may have been raised if Lo were arrested wearing a T-shirt with the hair-bands, "Poison" or "Warrant" instead of "Sick of It All."

References

* Gone Boy - A Walkabout (1999) Gregory Gibson, Kodansha America (ISBN 978-0385720045).
*"Running Amok" (aka Amok), 2001, Georg Stefan Troller, German TV ZDF (documentary film). imdb title|0289847|Amok
*cite news
last = Glaberson
first = William
title = Man and His Son's Slayer Unite to Ask Why
publisher = New York Times
date = 2000-04-12
url = http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/041200rampage-killers.html
accessdate = 2007-05-08

External links

* [http://www.goneboy.com/ "Gone Boy" official site]
* [http://www.skidlo.net/ SkidLo.net Wayne Lo's official website]
*de icon [http://www.kickfilm.de/de/info.php?film=Amok "Amok" official site]
*imdb title|0289847|Amok
* [http://web.archive.org/web/20070514111726/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18442224/site/newsweek Interview with Lo about the VT massacre]
* [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=ma&vol=appslip/appmarch02i&invol=1 RLI Insurance Company vs. Simon's Rock Early College & others, Massachusetts Superior Court opinion] Insurance litigation judgment includes details of the incident's circumstances (via FindLaw)

Persondata
NAME=Lo, Wayne
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=committed one the first deadly school shootings of the 1990s
DATE OF BIRTH=1974-11-14
PLACE OF BIRTH=Taiwan
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=