Letter foretold rampage that killed 19 in Japan
A young Japanese man went on a slashing rampage on Tuesday, killing 19 people at a facility for the mentally disabled from which he had been fired, police said.
The attack came months after he gave a letter to a member of parliament outlining his plan and saying that all disabled people should be put to death.
When he was done, Satoshi Uematsu, 26, had killed or injured nearly a third of the almost 150 patients at the facility in a matter of 40 minutes, in the deadliest mass killing in Japan in decades, authorities said. Twenty-five were wounded, 20 of them seriously.
Security camera footage played on TV news pro- grams showed a man driving up in a black car and carrying several knives to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Sagamihara, 50 kilometers west of Tokyo.
The man broke in by shattering a window at 2:10 am, according to a prefectural health official, and then he set about slashing patients’ throats.
It was not immediately known whether the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless.
Uematsu calmly turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said.
Tsukui Yamayuri-en, which means mountain lily garden, is a facility that Uematsu knew well, since he had worked there from 2012 until he was let go in February.
He knew that staffing would be down to just a handful in the early morning, Japanese media reported.
Not much was known about his background, but Uematsu once dreamed of becoming a teacher. In two group photos posted on Facebook, he looks happy, smiling widely with other young men.
In a 2013 post, he says: “It was so much fun today. Thank you, all. Now I am 23, but please be friends forever.”