The shooters: Catching up with the men who committed the crime, including one gunman who has been released from prison and now lives quietly in San Francisco.
No one thought Melvin Yu would ever again walk the streets of San Francisco — not even him.
But one of the triggermen in the Golden Dragon massacre in Chinatown, which happened 40 years ago Monday, was paroled from state prison in 2015. And though the federal government took custody of him and tried to deport him to China, federal immigration officials said his native country has not provided travel documents.
So he was released in October 2015, spared by an anomaly in immigration policy. He is back in San Francisco, living a quiet life after expressing regret about his actions as a teenager, turning to religion and seeking redemption during his long stretch behind bars.
“I’m trying to get my life together,” Yu, now 57, said in a brief telephone interview with The Chronicle, his first since being released. “All I can say is I’m trying to make amends and do good. I have a second chance at life.
“It will take me a few lifetimes to make amends,” he said, “but I’m trying to do my best.”
It may seem surprising that a person accused of a mass killing would ever be released. But the Golden Dragon shooters were just 17 when, while pursuing revenge for their Joe Boys gang, they slaughtered five bystanders and wounded 11 others in the crowded restaurant. Even if they committed the same crime today, their ages would make them ineligible for the death penalty.
All these years later, the fates of some of the men involved in the massacre — the three shooters and the one who planned it — are still being sorted out.
One of the men, Curtis Tam, was released in October 1991, the result of a lighter second-degree murder sentence that a judge handed down after he testified against the others. Tam was a lastminute addition to the hit squad, and he said he had fired his sawed-off shotgun only into the restaurant’s furniture, pretending to be aiming at people.
Retired city police Sgt. Daniel Foley, who helped solve the case, said Tam, by cooperating, was “the one person in that whole crowd that had a conscience.”
Another shooter, Peter Ng, who admitted opening fire with a shotgun and a revolver, was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder. He can seek parole in 2020 after being denied release for the eighth time in 2015.
Tom Yu — no relation to Melvin Yu — had stayed back at a friend’s home in Pacifica during the killing, but he also was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder as the attack’s chief plotter. He was 18 at the time of the rampage. In June, a state board found him suitable for parole after nine rejections, and a final decision could reach the governor’s desk in mid-September, officials said.
When Melvin Yu sought his release, he opened up about his life before, during and after one of San Francisco’s most infamous crimes.
He told the parole
board that after he came to the United States in 1973 at age 13, he had difficulty adjusting to the country’s culture and language, and struggled in school. In high school he fell in with Chinatown’s Joe Boys, who clashed with the Hop Sing and Wah Ching gangs.
“I want them to accept me, and I was living a life you know, for the gang,” Yu testified, according to a transcript. “It’s selfish on my part because I want to, you know, prove that, you know, I could be a gangster.”
Before the massacre,
the Joe Boys were fixated on revenge, following a Fourth of July gunbattle that left a member of their crew dead — and Yu with a bullet wound to the arm. In the early morning of Sept. 4, 1977, the group got a call from a Chinatown lookout, saying members of the Wah Ching and Hop Sing were eating at the Golden Dragon. Carrying a semiautomatic rifle, Yu entered the restaurant first, stopped in the main dining room, and sprayed the crowd.
“I go in there, so I had to start shooting first,” Yu said, “because I don’t want the other gang members shooting at us.”
As the assailants darted back out the door and into a getaway car, the Golden Dragon was a scene of chaos and death. Slain were waiter Fong
Wong, 48, and guests Denise Louie, 21, Paul Wada, 25, Donald Kwan, 20, and 18-year-old Calvin Fong. None among the dead and wounded was a gang member.
“It was a horrible crime,” Foley said. “They didn’t really know who all their enemies were by sight. They showed a total disregard and just opened fire on everybody.”
Melvin Yu admitted as much in his parole hearing, saying, “My crime — the heinous crime that I did, I know I’ll never get out of prison, which is fine with me.” He said if he was released, he expected to be deported, and would live with a cousin in Hong Kong.
But he was granted parole during a 2014
hearing, and immigration officials who initially took custody of him freed him the next year. They had little other choice.
China is one of several nations identified by the U.S. as “recalcitrant,” known for delaying or refusing the repatriation of citizens for various reasons. And given that Yu wasn’t likely to be removed anytime soon, he was released under a Supreme Court ruling that prevents the government from indefinitely holding people for deportation.
A spokeswoman for the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco said it had no record of a deportation request for Melvin Yu.
Bill Hing, a University of San Francisco professor and immigration attorney, said Yu’s case isn’t uncommon. He has even urged countries not to issue travel documents to immigrants he has represented — a lastditch strategy to protect them.
“I believe that China is making a judgment that they don’t want the person because he had a violent history, and his violence is the product of the socioeconomic situation of growing up in the United States,” Hing said.
So Yu is back in San Francisco. He told The Chronicle he did not want to speak at length or “relive the incident,” but that he is sorry.
“I just want to move on,” he said.