Police: Shooter was upset over expulsion
Police: School administrator was targeted
One Goh suspected of killing 7, including Lydia Sim, after school kicked him out for behavior problems, Oakland police say,
A former nursing student suspected of fatally shooting seven people and wounding three Monday at a small Christian university in Oakland began planning his attack after school officials expelled him in January, police said.
One Goh, 43, angry with the school over the expulsion and with fellow students for teasing him about his poor English, purchased a semiautomatic handgun legally in February and plotted to kill an administrator, Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said Tuesday. Police were searching in a regional park for the gun. Goh has not been charged. Administrators of Oikos University, a small school that has fewer than 100 mostly Korean students in theology, music and nursing, expelled Goh, a South Korean immigrant who became a U.S. citizen, for behavioral problems, Jordan said.
Goh has a history of financial troubles, including failing to pay taxes, and had been evicted from an apartment.
He “couldn’t deal with the pressures of life,” Jordan said. The teasing and ridicule “made him feel isolated compared to the other students.”
Goh fits the pattern of campus shooters, who are typically older graduate or professional students, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston who has studied mass murder since 1982.
The average age of campus gunmen on Fox’s list of 17 major incidents from 1990 through 2010 is 36. “They are pursuing a career, and when they fail at it, it becomes catastrophic,” Fox said.
Almost always, a college killer has some connection to the school, said S. Daniel Carter, a independent campus security consultant in Knoxville, Tenn.
“The shootings are usually emotionally driven, and they require an emotional connection to the institution,” Carter said. “Fences and guards generally don’t prevent this sort of thing. It’s not unusual that a former student would be able to gain ready access. In almost every case, these are insiders.”
Many schools, spurred in part by the 2007 mass killing at Virginia Tech, where mentally ill student Seung Hui Cho killed 32 people and himself, have behavioral intervention teams to assess students who may pose a threat, said Alison Kiss, executive director of Security on Campus Inc., which advocates campus crime-prevention legislation.
“No matter how bizarrely a student is acting, the chance a student is going to go on a rampage is so small,” Fox said. “You can’t predict these events.”
On average, fewer than 20 of the nation’s 20 million college students are murdered each year, but about 1,000 commit suicide, and about 1,500 die of alcohol and drug abuse, Fox said.
He said, “Campuses, notwithstanding these cases, are extremely safe.”