WI. Deer hunter slaying POLICE REPORT

Many questions answered here and new ones raised-
http://graphics.jsonline.com/graphics/news/img/nov04/statement112304edits01.pdf

 

Bunch of crap. The author reported as facts items which were not proven facts, but statements of individuals who were involved, not objective neutral third-party witnesses. That type of information should always be identified or prefaced by something like "X said ..." or "X reported that ..."

I was recently a witness to a theft in my town. Guy drove a payloader onto a tract of town-owned open space to dig out the cut stones of a pre-Revolutionary house foundation. I called the town hall, they called the police.

The report, which I saw later, (a) incorrectly identified me as the complainant; (b) failed to note the presence of the town administrative officer who showed up at the same time as the police officer (and who was the complainant); had the wrong address for the tract; listed the incident as "vandalism" rather than "theft," even though the officer saw the town's stones piled in a dump truck across the street from the site ...

There were two other substantive errors, which the town admin and I spotted within 30 seconds, but I don't recall what they were. Don't rely on police reports. They are supposed to be accurate, but they rarely are. I witnessed a motor vehicle accident once and the officer who took my statement refused to write down what I saw because he said I couldn't have seen it that way. One of the two drivers was clearly at fault, so I called the wife of the other driver and told her to have their attorney call me (her husband was in a coma). If it had been left to the police report, the wrong guy would have taken the liability for causing the accident, all because the officer didn't want to take my statement, he wanted to write my statement.

 

It is pretty hard to screw up Vang admitting to chasing unarmed people down and shooting them. He is going to spend the rest of his life in prison; even if he didn't fire the first shot. I wonder what makes a guy snap like that?

 

A Saiga SKS? What exactly would that be?

 

This is a very cut and dry case, Vang got mad and killed people.
I do however see some MAJOR issues with this at a trial. First this is the most poorly written police report I have ever seen, I would never submit something written like that for prosecution. Also after they have requested an attorney that is it, game over. I don't care if they come begging on their knees to confess. Unless there is an attorney at the table we do not talk. His confession will be thrown out in the Omnibus hearing, so I hope they did the other investigative work correctly and have not hung thier hats soley on a useless confession and poor report.

 

Don't wish to get our LEO participants mad at me, but the thought occurs to me that while this IS a poorly constructed report, it's probably about what to expect given where the event took place. This is a rural community, where the biggest crime in the last 5 years was probably someone shoplifting a comic book at the local stop & rob. A community, that is to say, not unlike mine. The police are not accustomed to murder cases and 6-month long trials in which every word, every nuance, is held up to a microscope. Minor "technical problems" in a police report don't have much impact in misdemeanor cases. In a murder case, it's a different story.

I kind of suspect that if this had taken place in a jurisdiction that sees a lot of shootings, the report would have been written differently.

 

My immediate reaction is that Vang's story reads as more true than the hunter's version.

Given that, it seems that Vang flipped into military warrior mode, rather than civilian defensive mode, and acted under military rules of engagement, which is not a valid thing to do in this situation. He should have been more concerned with escaping that with hunting people down. Instead, Vang made a series of bad choices, and a lot of people paid dearly for it.

If anything, this is a cautionary tale of what happens when civilian defensive ROE isn't understood, and anger overrides common sense.

 

Hmmmmm

A Saiga looks kind of like an SKS to reporters and cops who aren't into guns (weird huh?)
http://www.sksman.com/access/saiga.html
I'm sure it was stamped Saiga right on the side or how would they have come up with that?
If so it is designed for hunting.

My view on the whole thing- Vang is a hot head as he has had 3 domestic disturbance calls we know of. He is a US Military vet who served his new country and has been here 20 years.
The hunters probably did call him "Gook" and "Chink" and did the whole pack mentality of get the f@%$ out of here taunting etc. and easy as that Vang snapped.
Doesn't make it right but I can't see Vang going postal without being mad or feeling threatened. He was there to hunt deer, if he had gone sociopath why not just hide in a tree and shoot motorists on the highway?
CT

 

If the firearm doesn't sound scary enough for the newsprint...

Go ahead and throw a reference to the AK-47 in there for good measure:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/11/23/hunters.shot/index.html

 

Geez...lighten up on the report. I'm assuming it's just the on-scene deputies offense report. Homicide investigators will report in great detail the events. At least the suspect was read his miranda rights at his arrest. He understood those rights and HE choose to confess. They also re-read him his rights after he was in custody for the follow-up interview/confession. That will piss off the defense. He's history!

 

Text version of the report:
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/10255877.htm?1c

 

To OH25shooter;
No that appears to be the homicide investigators affirmed statement to the judge to get the warrant not just the report. As a prior post stated that is what happens in rural areas where that have never seen a major case. The cases get written up and handled like a gas drive off and they lose.

 

First,

They probably did that eh? That is right because the evil white hunter can't let a lowly Asian guy just walk off the property. These back country hicks that write bad police reports and hate the little yellow devil probably did provoke him right? Give me a break. This guy doesn't sound too bright so he figures that if he can get the cops to see that they provoked him and shot his direction, he won't get in as much trouble. What he doesn't understand is you can't hunt down unarmed people in self-defense. And if the truth is the hunters provoked the incident, he screwed up by killing most of the witnesses. Two witnesses can get their story straight better than seven.

Second, I am not a LEO so I am wondering if a probable cause report is different than a complete investigation or even a basic completed police report. My assumption is the probable cause report enables you to search a residence or take someone into custody, but is not the complete police report.

 

And the Saiga *is* an AK derivative, albeit one that's been neutered to be 'PC'.

 

I'm by no means an expert on things like this, but judging from the statement that Vang made he is in deep trouble. I think any claim to self defense he had is out the window since he freely admitted to chasing people down and shooting them, then later in his statement he goes on to say that he did not shoot 3 more of the people that showed up because they had guns. I thought the part about him being shot at first seems a little fishy also, I would think that if I was being shot at, I wouldn't take the time to kneel down and remove a scope before I started shooting back in "self defense."

 

The PDF file is not a police report. It's a criminal complaint giving the initial facts and to get the the defendant before a judge to get the legal process started and to set bail.
The full police report has to be written up and sent to the DA who will schedule a grand jury hearing within ten days. Those facts gathered in the invsestigation will be presented to the jurors who'll decide whether enough evidence exists to go to trial. If they true bill it then a formal indictment(s) will be issued for each count.

 

Great story on this

"Blame the shooter"
Wineke: Blame the Shooter, Not the Gun or Hmong, in Deaths
--00:00 am 11/24/04
--Bill Wineke
--Wisconsin State Journal
http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=19052&ntpid=4

 

stevelyn

Thanks for clearing that up for us.

 

CentralTexas

From the very same website you posted from:

http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/opinion/index.php?ntid=18927&ntpid=0

Get this weapon out of the woods
00:00 am 11/25/04


You've probably heard this before: Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

We're in lockstep with that premise. Nevertheless, we can't deny that a military weapon with rapid-fire capability sure makes it easy for people to kill lots of other people quickly, whether those victims are on the battlefield, urban streets, outside the White House or in the Wisconsin woods.

Those are all locations where gunmen wielding cheap, easily obtained SKS semiautomatic rifles have sprayed bullets at people and buildings. This weapon was used this week to kill five hunters and wound three others, one who died Monday, over just a few minutes in the woods of northwestern Wisconsin.

The SKS is not an assault rifle in the textbook sense, and it's not very high- powered compared to typical deer rifles. It is less accurate and deadly than, say, the Wisconsin hunter's trusty .30-30. Though the SKS is popular because of its low cost, humane hunters who want to kill game cleanly and quickly tend to choose weapons other than the SKS.

In fact, this gun is not a sporting weapon at all; it was conceived and first built a half-century ago as a tool to kill people, and too often, that's how it is still used today. The SKS may not be in the same firepower league as the notorious AK-47, but it is easily modified into an illegal high-capacity fully automatic.

Even in its original semiautomatic mode, the gun is an apparent favorite of cop killers and wackos. SKS rifles have been used to kill at least five police officers this year. At least eight other officers have been killed by SKS-wielding gunmen since 1998. The guy who sprayed the White House with bullets 10 years ago used the SKS.

Gun rights advocates are correct that gun restrictions alone won't solve the problem of gun violence. But limited bans on the sale and import of certain weapons do address the problem by degree, without overturning Second Amendment rights to bear arms. More stringent laws will make it harder to get these especially lethal weapons as easily.



At a bare minimum, Wisconsin should restrict the magazine capacity of these guns: How many bullets are needed to kill an animal? Even better, banning the sale and import of the foreign-made SKS and similar guns wouldn't curtail ownership of the many other more effective hunting guns. It's true that some sporting weapons are semiautomatics, but not all semiautomatics are sporting weapons.

In fact, until this September, many types of semiautomatic guns were banned under a 10-year-old federal law. The ban should be revived - and extended to cover modified and after- market weapons designed to skirt the 1994 law.

Widespread gun ownership is a fact of life in the United States. Americans already own an estimated 100 million guns of all types. Banning sale or import of one type of weapon because of its established role in murder and mayhem doesn't infringe on Second Amendment rights, nor will it in any way diminish Wisconsin's deer hunting traditions. In fact, hunters might find a return to more sporting rifles - the traditional bolt-action deer gun that gives a hunter one clean and powerful shot at a time -improves their hunt.

People kill people, but some guns make murder too easy. The killings in northern Wisconsin suggest that the federal ban on some semiautomatics should be reinstated - and broadened - to protect both the public and police.

 

Not even worth fisking, it's so horribly written.

But read the responses to the the latter Wisconsin State Journal article.

Sometimes, I'm ashamed to be a Wisconsin resident, knowing what unadulterated drivel emanates from Madison.

 

FWIW,

I heard on the TV news last night that another hunter had been shot dead in the same area about 2 years ago. Case never solved. They are looking at Vang for that, too.

 

What's the ACLU waiting for?

Did Vang have a job? We know he raised chickens and hunted. And that he'd threatened his wife's life.

 

One of the hunters took a shot at Vang after Vang fired at him. Unfortunately, the hunter missed and was killed by Vang. None of the other members of the party who initially came to the scene were armed--they just showed up to transport a victim. (They were not aware that the victim had been murdered--they just thought it was an accidental shooting.)

Vang spent 24 hours in slam before he came up with the "they called me names and threatened me and one took a shot at me" line of crap. On testimony of many locals, this is highly unlikely, as the people involved were NOT "name callers." But even if it were true, we are still dealing with at least 5 cases of first-degree murder.

Another poster has suggested (moronically) that magazines should be limited to only a few rounds. Apparently, HIS idea is that it takes several rounds to kill someone--a premise which displays clearly the poster's intellectual ability, or lack thereof.

As long as someone who is armed intends to kill another, it's likely to happen, unless the OTHER is armed and reasonably facile in using the weapon.

What we are dealing with here is someone who "lost it." He was not called names--he was just called out for trespassing. He may well have murdered another hunter two or three years ago, perhaps for a similar reason--he was simply told to get out of the area.

The lesson, if there is one here, is that there is a risk to EVERY waking moment in ALL peoples' lives--and that risk is unavoidable. Anyone can die at any time for any reason. It's an unpleasant and unavoidable fact.

 

Ninenot;

Actually, that poster, joebogey, was just copying an article that advocated magazine limits and banning certain guns. He was not the author of that article.