One L. Goh, Oikos University Gunman, Felt He Was 'Mistreated' And "Disrespected' By Fellow Students Say Police
04/ 3/12 07:26 AM ET 
OAKLAND, Calif. — One wounded woman cowered in the bushes after the gunman opened fire on the campus of a small Christian university. One student hid in a locked classroom as the shooter banged on the door. Another heard the shots and ran to safety.
All within an hour Monday, police said, a 43-year-old former student named One L. Goh walked into Oikos University, and began a rampage that left seven people dead and three people wounded, trapped some in the building and forced others to flee for their lives.
It was an "extremely chaotic scene," police Chief Howard Jordan said.
Soon after the shooting, heavily armed officers swarmed the tiny college of fewer than 100 students in a large industrial park near the Oakland airport. For a time, police believed the gunman could still be inside. But he wasn't.
Instead, officers said he apparently drove about three miles from campus before surrendering to officers inside a supermarket.
"It's going to take us a few days to put the pieces together," said Jordan said. "We do not have a motive."
Jordan told "Good Morning America" on Tuesday that the suspect was "upset with the administration of the school" and that the suspect had been "mistreated" and "disrespected" by students.
Those connected to the school, including the founder and several students, described the gunman as a former nursing student. The chief said Goh is a South Korean national who's a former student of the university.
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ReplyDeleteVery sad, for all involved. Such attacks seem to be happening increasingly frequently in academic communities, large and small, specialized and not. Or maybe we're just hearing about more of them?
ReplyDeleteI can think of two mass killings of students that occurred in the first few decades of my lifetime (or just before), and that everybody seemed to know about: one incident at one of the big Texas universities, and one in Montreal, both involving someone shooting from a tower. There was also a much-referenced (and, I believe, true, though I don't know the details) case of a grad student poisoning a professor's tea. But that was it. Maybe other, smaller, less dramatic ones have been forgotten? Or maybe the numbers have gone up because more people are involved in higher ed, period, and a higher proportion of those with psychological problems are encouraged to pursue higher education in spite of those problems (generally a good thing, but. . .)?
A couple of decades back, there was an engineering grad student in San Jose who opened fire during a meeting with his thesis committee.
DeleteThe police were mystified that nobody had noticed any problems. He had no social life, didn't talk to anybody, spent all his time in the lab...
CC:
DeleteThe Montréal Massacre (as it's known up here) was gendered and specifically targeted against women. I've linked to a couple of posts that explain the particular significance (December 6th is now a national day remembrance and action on violence against women)
http://rabble.ca/toolkit/montreal-masacre
http://archives.cbc.ca/society/crime_justice/topics/398/
I posted something about it last year.
DeleteGuns are part of the problem, though not entirely: I remember reading a case a few years back of a grad student who went after his advisor (and other members of the department) with an ax.
ReplyDeleteHere's my current peeve, though. "University" does not seem like a good general term for a religious institution that offers 6 vocational degree programs and some ecclesiastical certificates. It's a very particular kind of school, and what happens there is not likely to generalize well to the rest of the academic world.
The current thinking seems to be that if you offer graduate degrees, you're a university. And, of course, in an international context, there's also the possibility of English/postcolonial influence, where "college" can sometimes be equivalent to our "high school" (or can be a subdivision within a university), and "university" can refer to any institution of higher ed. But there's definitely "university" creep, and this institution may be an example, especially since it is, indeed, unaccredited, and aimed at one or more niche markets. That may mean all or part of its programs are a scam (which doesn't, of course, justify shooting anyone; I believe a lawsuit is generally considered the appropriate tool when one believes one has been defrauded), or it may mean that their programs serve some very particular needs in a very particular community, and that accreditation wouldn't really be useful or appropriate.
DeleteAnd sadly, individual or mass murder within or between church institutions is hardly unknown.
I've never heard of Oikos U., but with a smidge of research I found it's one of those Korean-American Evangelical colleges like the one we talked about last year (the one which was asking for the Moon while paying a pittance.)
DeleteIt would be interesting to find out if they follow the Pensacola Christian College model of "insanely paranoid, obtrusive administration vs. cowed professors and terrorized students." I bring that "college" up whenever the Krazee Kristian Skools show up on the radar because they are the most extreme when it come to having a culture of punishment; students have been thrown out for breaking campus rules during holiday or summer breaks - when they were AT HOME. Of course, when it comes to producing law-breaking Fundamentalist clergy, Hyles-Anderson College should mentioned*, but that's a story for another day.
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Besides the ManO'Gawd Jack Hyles (who had an affair with a secretary and forced her husband to keep up apperances for a decade), we have a number of child molesters, thieves and others who were proud graduates of that unaccredited institution. Conservative Babylon has all the dirt at:
http://home.conservativebabylon.com/category/jack-hyles/