Posted on 11/26/2004 3:52:26 PM PST by Ladysmith
HAYWARD, Wis. — Investigators returned Wednesday to the scene of Sunday's deer hunter killings, hoping to sort out two versions of how six people died.
The state attorney general's office took over the case, meanwhile, restricting information from the Sawyer County sheriff and getting one of the survivors to cancel a news conference.
Charges were not expected to be filed in the case until Monday at the earliest.
Sheriff Jim Meier said investigators interviewed survivors of the shootings again and also questioned other members of the hunting party who hadn't been interviewed previously. They were trying to sort out variations between the accounts of one wounded hunters and suspect Chai Soua Vang of St. Paul.
Meier also said investigators returned to the shooting scene 90 miles northeast of the Twin Cities to look for more forensic evidence, but he wouldn't divulge the results of any of those efforts or of autopsies done on the victims.
Security concerns have prompted court officials to hold Chai Soua Vang's court appearance next week in the Sawyer County Jail instead of the county courthouse.
Meanwhile, authorities in nearby Clark County said they would like to question Chai Soua Vang to see if he knows anything about the unsolved shooting death of another deer hunter in 2001.
A Clark County sheriff's deputy said last weekend's shootings had vague similarities to the death three years ago of Jim Southworth, 37, of Medford, Wis. Southworth's body was found on family land Nov. 24, 2001, a day after he had gone deer hunting by himself.
"We're not considering Mr. Vang a suspect. We're considering him a possible witness," said Chief Deputy Jim Backus of the Clark County Sheriff's Department in Neillsville.
Several possible similarities mark Southworth's death and Sunday's shootings near the town of Meteor in Sawyer County:
• Clark County investigators theorize that Southworth, who ran a cheese company in Gilman, had a confrontation with another hunter who trespassed on his family's land — the same circumstance that allegedly sparked last weekend's shootings.
• Southworth was shot twice in the back. Some of the victims in Sunday's shootings had also been shot in the back.
• Witnesses in the Clark County case said they saw three Asian males standing near a pickup in the vicinity about the time Southworth is believed to have been shot. Chai Soua Vang owns a midsize pickup, and authorities said he had gone to Sawyer County last weekend with some friends to hunt but had become lost on his own.
On Wednesday, Rusk County Sheriff's Department investigators found and interviewed three of Chai Soua Vang's friends who came with him last weekend from the Twin Cities. Officials said not all of them were hunters, but authorities refused to comment further.
Bartz said that although Chai Soua Vang held a nonresident hunting license in Wisconsin in 2001, authorities were having to manually check thousands of records to see if he reported shooting any deer in Clark County that year.
Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager said Wednesday that the state's Department of Justice would file charges against Chai Soua Vang on Monday "at the earliest."
Lautenschlager's office took over the case after Sawyer County District Attorney Thomas E. Van Roy requested a special prosecutor.
Chai Soua Vang, 36, is being held in the Sawyer County Jail in Hayward on $2.5 million bond.
All the victims were from the Rice Lake area. The dead were: Robert Crotteau, 42; his son Joseph Crotteau, 20; Allan Laski, 43; Mark Roidt, 28; Dennis Drew, 55; and Jessica Willers, 27.
Willers' father, Terry Willers, 47, was wounded but discharged late Wednesday from St. Joseph's Hospital in Marshfield. Lauren Hesebeck, 48, was also wounded but was released from the Rice Lake hospital Monday.
Hesebeck has been interviewed by investigators. He retained a media "coordinator," who had scheduled a news conference Wednesday to give his first public account of the shootings. But the event was canceled without explanation.
It appears investigators are now trying to reconcile two versions of the shooting, and they have renewed their search for physical evidence that might tend to support or disprove one or the other.
According to Hesebeck, Willers and the other hunters confronted Chai Soua Vang after he had trespassed on their property. He was told to leave, began walking away and then turned and fired on the hunters, some of whom were unarmed.
In a statement to a sheriff's deputy the morning after the shootings, Chai Soua Vang claimed that after he was told to leave, he was surrounded by several hunters who began yelling racial slurs at him.
Chai Soua Vang was born in Laos, is a naturalized U.S. citizen and served a stint in the California National Guard.
Chai Soua Vang claimed Willers fired the first shot. In the statement, he said he returned fire, but he also conceded that he shot victims in the back and that some victims were unarmed.
On Wednesday, hunters in Wisconsin's north woods continued to react with dismay about the weekend's shootings. Some said they doubted the suspect's account. People in the area grow up hunting and they are familiar with each other, the woods and the rules of hunting, said John Kristensen of Birchwood, a hunter for some 40 years.
He said he can't believe a local hunter would ever fire first at another human. It's not in their nature, he said.
Meanwhile, in a tribute to Sunday's victims, city crews in Rice Lake decorated utility poles throughout downtown with big hunter's-blaze-orange bows, along with traditional Christmas decorations.
And in Minnesota, Kanabec County Sheriff Steve Schulz confirmed that Chai Soua Vang owns 40 acres of hunting property in Brook Park, Minn., near Hinckley. He said sheriff's officials went to the cabin Wednesday to investigate at the request of Wisconsin authorities but found nothing.
He added that Chai Soua Vang had not been cited for trespassing or any other violations in the county. KSTP-TV said he purchased it in October 2003.
In central Wisconsin's Green Lake County, the sheriff's office reported Wednesday that Chai Soua Vang and another man were ticketed for trespassing in April 2002 while hunting there during the wild-turkey season.
A report said that the two were spotted trespassing at Badger Mining in Berlin, and an employee called the sheriff's office. The men, who had a permit to hunt on adjacent land, pleaded guilty and got $244 citations, but a Web site for state court records indicates Chai Soua Vang's citation wasn't paid.
Will do.
Thanks. My Dad's family's from Barron County.
Thank you! That site can be helpful sometimes!
I find the cop speak insulting. There's six dead guys and therefore more than a little reasonable suspicion, and even more than a little probable cause, that Vang has committed a crime, and yet they tell us he's not a suspect? Who do they think they're kidding? Who do they think is that stupid?
MY comment was referring to the OTHER killing, not the six. It's a GIVEN that he killed the six...
Okay, then, I misunderstood your comment. But I am still baffled by the police remark that he isn't considered a suspect, but merely a witness.
You're on.
I'm not sure if this is where I first heard Vang was with others and that they were found. But here is one article that made a note of it.
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