5 killed, 3 injured in dispute over deer stand

A dispute among deer hunters over a tree stand in northwestern Wisconsin erupted Sunday in a series of shootings that left five people dead and three others injured, officials said.

Jake Hodgkinson, a deputy at the county jail, identified the suspect as Chai Vang but would give no additional details. Several news organizations in Minneapolis-St. Paul reported the suspect was 36-years-old and from St. Paul.

The incident happened when two hunters were returning to their rural cabin on private land in Sawyer County and saw the suspect in one of their tree stands, County Chief Deputy Tim Zeigle said. A confrontation and shooting followed.

Both men were wounded and one of them radioed back to the cabin. Other hunters responded and were shot, he said. Some of the victims may have shot back at the suspect, Zeigle said.

The suspect was ``sniping'' at the victims with a SKS assault-style rifle, Zeigle said. He was ``chasing after them and killing them,'' he said.

The dead included four males, including a teenage boy, and a woman, Zeigle said. The man who radioed for help was not fatally wounded. Some of the victims were shot more than once.

Authorities found two bodies near each other and the other three were scattered around the area, which is near Town of Meteor in southwestern Sawyer County. Two people who stayed in the cabin emerged safely after the shootings.

The suspect, who did not have a compass, got lost in the woods and two other hunters, not knowing the man was being sought in the shootings, helped him find his way out, Zeigle said. When he emerged from the woods, a Department of Natural Resources officer recognized the deer license on his back, given to police by a victim, Zeigle said.

One of the injured hunters was in critical condition at St. Joseph's Hospital. Another was listed in serious condition and the third was in fair condition, both at Lakeview Medical Center.

Wisconsin's statewide deer gun hunting season started Saturday and lasts for nine days.

Bill Wagner, 72, of Oshkosh, was about two miles away near Deer Lake with a party of about 20 other hunters. He said the incident was ``very upsetting.''

After they got word of a shooting, he and others went to round up the rest of the party. He said they heard sirens, planes and helicopters and noticed the surrounding roads blocked off.

``When you're hunting you don't expect somebody to try to shoot you and murder you,'' he said. ``You have no idea who is coming up to you.''

``We're all old, dyed-in-wool hunters,'' he said. ``We wouldn't go home because of this but we will keep it in our minds. We're not forgetting it.''

Cover Story - Volume 20, Isssue 2, January 7, 1999 - ©1999 API. All rights reserved.

http://www.shepherd-express.com/shepherd/20/02/headlines/cover_story.html

The Hmong's New War

They fought for America. Now they feel America is fighting them with its policies against the poor.

BY LINDA MCCANTS PENDLETON

Quietly brought into the U.S. since 1975, many Hmong Vietnam War veterans and their families find themselves unable to survive cultural shock, racism, isolation, poverty and what some Hmong now call the new war in America: W-2.

Mai Chu Yang, Chai Vang Thao, Nhia Jou Lor, Ker Lor, and a group of Hmong refugees, gathered at the Hmong American Friendship Association, 3824 W. Vliet St. in November to open up their feelings on what they feel is a major injustice.

"And some are losing" this war, said Lo Neng Kiatoukaysy, director of the Hmong American Friendship Association, a support service center for Indochinese families in Milwaukee funded by agencies such as United Way.

"Some are dying. Some have committed suicide," he added.

The initial welfare reform legislation, called the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996, especially hurt the Hmong, said Dick Hamilton, a Department of Workforce Development refugee services official.

Hmong families tend to be large and welfare cash benefits stopped being adjusted to family size, but granted on a flat-fee basis. The Act also threatened Supplemental Security Income funds for legal non-citizens such as many Hmong refugees, but Congress restored SSI in August 1997. In addition, food stamps for Hmong refugees were initially cut off by the federal act, but restored by the state in August 1998, thanks in part to lobbying efforts made by Sen. Gwen Moore.

Rules for the Wisconsin Works program seem to change so often that even the people running it don't always know what's going on, Kiatoukaysy said. "At Maximus, I saw two case workers arguing among themselves" over policy, he said.

Kiatoukaysy, a first-generation Hmong-American, and other English-speaking volunteers serve as interpreters for families applying for W-2 benefits. "These families need more bilingual programs" for learning English, obtaining job skills and earning GEDs, he said.

Kiatoukaysy serves on the steering committee for the W-2 agency Maximus, but said he doesn't understand exactly what his role is. "I'd like to contribute, but [the meetings are] more like listening sessions" to the agency's vice president George Leutermann.

Many refugees were able to do well in the United States, but many others struggle to integrate, adjust and survive in a strange world. Until recently, they had never held an ink pen, many girls married at the age of 10, men customarily took several wives, they preserved Hmong history through quilting and storytelling, their economy survived on the opium trade, and the 20th century had passed them by.

About 40,000 Hmong fought alongside American troops in Laos during the "secret war" in the Vietnam War. So substantial were adult casualties that near the war's end, child soldiers (many barely 10 years old) were used to help Americans fight.

Recruited by the CIA to assist the U.S. in its ideological holy war against Communism, the Hmong rescued downed American fighter pilots, provided intelligence on the North Vietnamese and blocked the North Vietnamese Army's access to South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos.

They lost lives, limbs and their Laotian mountaintop homeland. After U.S. troops evacuated the region in 1973, some Hmong continued to resist the newly installed Communist regime. Others escaped, attempting to survive the passage to, and later life in, the sometimes hostile Thai refugee camps.

One example of that journey is in the tale that a number of elders tell: While fleeing Laos, many parents fed their babies opium to keep them silent so that they could sneak past Thai border guards without assault.

As recently as 1991, the communist Pathet Lao government had publicly threatened any returning Hmong with extermination. By 1995, the Hmong estimated that 5,000 were arrested or murdered by the Pathet Lao regime. When the Thai government demanded that Hmong people leave Thai refugee camps, rather than return to Laos, many opted to accept the CIA's hushed invitation to come to the United States.

Mai Chu Yang and her husband, Chai Vang Thao, accepted the U.S. invitation in July 1989. Mai Chu was the kind of person the old-timers back home considered a good Hmong girl. This means that when she became 10 or 11 (she doesn't know her actual birthdate), or near the time of menstruation, she obediently married Chai Vang Thao at the Hmong New Year celebration. She then moved in with his family and began what would be a long succession of pregnancies.

The more children she could bare the better to plant, hoe, harvest, cook, clean, feed chickens, fetch water, pound rice, and quilt while Chai Vang fought alongside Americans in the Vietnam War. After 1975 the family was forced to leave for Thai refugee camps.

The family's 1989 move to the U.S. from Thailand would put them into a bizarre 20th century with strange rules, technology, television, language both written and oral, and something called democracy where you could speak out without fearing torture. Strange indeed.

Mai Chu and Chai Vang survived on AFDC cash benefits and odd jobs until September 1997. After that, Mai Chu, then in the third trimester of her tenth pregnancy, was told by W-2 case workers that she was job-ready.

Yet Mai Chu spoke almost no English, and until she took refuge in the U.S. in 1989, had never held a pen. She had had no formal education, no job training, and she had a disabled 5-year-old daughter, Pakou, at home.

Pakou was diagnosed with complex cyanotic congenital heart disease and needed round-the-clock care with an assortment of medications and special foods. Mai Chu and Chai Vang constantly check Pakou's fingers. When they turn blue, this means she needs oxygen from the huge green tank in the family's living room. Connected to the tank is 20- to 30-foot tubing so Pakou can sit in different rooms in the apartment and play with her siblings while wearing the oxygen tube. For outings, there's the travel tank that she can wear in a backpack. She has had heart surgery once. Her parents say she needs at least one more procedure--maybe when she's 15.

Feeling ill from a miscarriage suffered almost immediately before this pregnancy (she recently miscarried at four months), Mai Chu appealed to her case workers and physician to stay home. There she could better care for herself, the unborn child, Pakou and the other seven children. But caseworkers at Goodwill Employment Solutions and Lao Family--subcontracted by Employment Solutions--told her to either work or have her benefits cut off.

She went to work at a neighborhood grocery store, earning $673--the maximum cash benefit regardless of family size--and $141 in food stamps.

But soon after that, the baby Mai Chu carried stopped moving. She went to a clinic where Dr. Mario L. Uy's staff detected a faint heartbeat. They sent her to Sinai Samaritan Hospital.

But hours later, at the hospital, she gave birth to a dead child.

Now Mai Chu carries around Polaroid snapshots of the daughter who never cried. In one picture, the baby wears a white skullcap and is wrapped in a hand-crocheted pink comforter. In another, she is bare, her skin mottled and grayish. Here, she is curled up on her side atop a gaily printed receiving blanket. The pictures are wrapped in a document inked with the child's hand- and footprints and the date of birth and death: 11/7/97.

Mai Chu folds and refolds the paper and lapses into silence while her husband, Chai Vang Thao, 43 or 44 (he's not sure), speaks.

"W-2 is inhumane," said Chai Vang through an interpreter. "It causes a lot of hardships. In the same way as the Vietnam War, we are fighting another war that we will lose."

While Mai Chu was at work, Chai Vang faced the tough choice of being punctual for work at 2:30 p.m., or picking up his kids from school at 3 p.m. Either he missed the staff meetings at Compo or he didn't pick his kids up from school. He doesn't understand how anyone could ask the couple to make such choices. With the W-2 system, "the family breaks down because both parents have to either work or be cut off." And they can neither adequately care for themselves nor their children.

Finally, in an attempt to find more humane employment, Chai Vang quit his job at Compo as a machine operator in March 1997. Later that year, after W-2 went into effect, Chai Vang felt he was penalized for having found employment on his own (in odd jobs). "When I started working, W-2 cut off medical benefits for some of my children," he said.

"We're not better off under W-2," said Thao. "Wisconsin has the leading welfare reform [program], but it is failing and a lot of poor people are suffering."

"AFDC was a better transition tool because it allowed refugees to go to school, learn English, get on their feet and still care for their families," he continued.

Neither Yang nor Thao now work.

They receive about $500 monthly in Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits for Pakou, and $800 in food stamps. Out of this, they pay $350 monthly to rent their three-bedroom apartment where the family of 10 and a grandparent live. Then they pay additional food costs for Pakou's special dietary needs, utilities, car insurance, medical care, clothing, etc., for their family of 11.

Goodwill Employment Solutions did not respond to inquiries. However, Mai Chu said that on Dec. 28, the W-2 agency's caseworkers admitted to "system errors" and apologized. Perhaps this was after Legal Action of Wisconsin Attorney Sheila O'Leary's recent written and telephoned inquiries to the agency, pointing out that W-2 recipients are exempt from community service or other jobs in lieu of caring for a disabled child or spouse.

Mai Chu will receive cash benefits of $673 starting in January. The months when Mai Chu erroneously received no cash payments will not be paid. There is no back pay even when W-2 agencies are in error.

However, Mai Chu says that her case worker warned that she has only six months of cash benefits left. Like many others facing the end of the W-2 two-year clock, Mai Chu says she doesn't know what she'll do after that. It is unlikely that Pakou will be well in six months. Nor is it likely that Mai Chu will learn English, earn a GED, gain sufficient jobs skills and learn to drive before that time.

Lt. Nhia Jou Lor doesn't speak much English either. He gestures with trembling, misshapen hands that are missing a few fingertips. Hand grenades blew them off in the war. He also has a bullet embedded in his back--too near his spinal column to be removed--in addition to leg wounds suffered from stepping too close to a landmine. The seizures, headaches, and poor memory that Nhia Jou now suffers could come from any of these injuries.

Or they might be the result of contact with Operation Ranch Hand's "yellow rain" that fell upon the region from 1961 to about 1971. Nhia Jou and his wife, Ker Lor, remember the "powder from heaven, the poison rain that covered everything" in Laos.

It burned; it blistered skin; it scorched throats after people ate contaminated food, damaging kidneys and other major organs. The herbicide of which two-thirds was Agent Orange, seemed to be everywhere. For decades its effects would slowly take a deadly toll on the health of refugees, many of whom struggled to make a new life in America.

Nonetheless, Nhia Jou demonstrates enormous pride in having served the U.S. military. At his home an American flag flies above the sagging front porch and half torn-off gate of his rented home on North 31st Street.

Inside, wearing his military dress jacket, Nhia Jou shows off a framed citation for "Faithful and Brave Service" awarded on April 14, 1997 for "his joint efforts with United States Air Force Air Commandos against a common enemy in the nation of Laos."

He offers another award for inspection, "The Defenders of Freedom Citation," this one from the U.S. Congress House of Representatives, dated July 2, 1996. The final message from Rep. Jim Ramstad of Minnesota reads: "I commend you for your bravery and loyalty to the United States of America."

Standing in the Lor's $250-per-month, two-bedroom apartment where seven people live, including three of the couple's 13 children, Nhia Jou then says through an interpreter: "We didn't get any check at all this month." He seems utterly baffled about why they are being "punished" by the United States.

The Lors had 13 children ranging in ages from 2 to 27. Three died--two daughters and one son--from illness or starvation en route to Thai refugee camps. The passage was treacherous, Ker explains. She was shot in the back by Thai border guards while crossing the Mekong River. The couple's other children, now adults, have since departed from the nest. Since their arrival in October 1986, and until September 1997, the family survived on ADFC cash benefits for the remaining three children at home and Nhia Jor's SSI payments of $600.

Now the Lors say W-2 cash benefits have been cut, and Maximus has sanctioned Ker--even though the state allows recipients to provide care for a disabled spouse. The Lors feel betrayed by the United States and by Lao Family Community center, which is subcontracted by Maximus to handle Hmong and Laotian W-2 recipients.

Nhia Jou says he doesn't understand why the W-2 agency forces them to work. "[Case workers at Lao Family said] we've been here so long, we should be working and not lazy. When we showed them proof [of Nhia Jor's medical condition], they said we lied, even though the papers had doctors' signatures and dates."

"The case workers need to make quotas," said Nhia Jou. "They stopped caring about people."

Xia Chou Xiong from Lao Family has not returned calls for comment. A spokesperson for Maximus denied that Ker and Nhia Jou had ever been sanctioned. She said that Ker was receiving benefits of $628 for caring for her husband and taking basic education classes, and that Nhia Lor was receiving $630 in SSI benefits.

The Lors deny getting checks. Until this is resolved, they face the possibility of living on $180 in food stamps per month, and whatever they can borrow from friends and relatives. They will also continue to use the food panty provided by the Hmong American Friendship Association.

"Our people are struggling with W-2," said the association's Kiatoukaysy. "And we're trying to find a way to work together with our communities and W-2 agencies so that we all can help them."

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