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A family whose lives were shattered by a mistaken police raid a year ago have been awarded a $612,498 settlement by the city of Minneapolis to make amends. -------------------------cut----------------- "It's only a mistake for them, but it changed our lives forever," Moua said Friday at a news conference held at Heffelfinger's office. "We want what's best for our children. It's a miracle we survived that night. No amount of money can fix what we went through that night." Acting on wrong information from an informant, a SWAT team broke into Vang Khang's north Minneapolis house last December expecting to find...

A domestic dispute 911 call prompted a Scott County deputy to shoot after he says the occupants hollered that they had a gun. No one was injured. By KATIE HUMPHREY, Star Tribune Last update: January 5, 2009 - 11:07 PM A Scott County deputy responding to a call of a domestic dispute burst into a house and, when the occupants yelled that they had a gun, fired several shots. The house, however, was the wrong building. The call had come from a second building on the property, in the 23000 block of Logan Way. No one was injured in the...

War hero or war criminal? Depending upon who's talking, Gen. Vang Pao is one or the other. As a Madison schoolteacher, I think the answer to that question is not as important as the debate the question has generated. Hmong residents here revere Gen. Vang. They insist that he is a great man who helped thousands of their people escape war-torn Laos to find safety and opportunity in the United States. For that reason, they believe he deserves to have a public school named in his honor. A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, on the other hand, claims that Gen. Vang...

A man jailed in the death of another squirrel hunter in northern Wisconsin was shot once in each hand before the two wrestled in the woods and he stabbed the victim with a knife he carried to cut the tails off his quarry, the suspect's fiancee told The Associated Press Tuesday. < snip > "There was a verbal confrontation first," James said in a telephone interview from her home in Marinette. "Jim told me that he had stabbed the guy. That is all I know." < snip > Vang's body was found Saturday partially concealed in the Peshtigo Harbor Wildlife...

(Each was honored for ignoring the danger and rushing to help as a St. Paul hunter attacked in 2004. Two paid with their lives.) When deer hunter Chai Soua Vang, of St. Paul, opened fire on a large party of other hunters in northern Wisconsin in 2004, some of the people he killed, wounded and endangered were trying to save the lives of their friends and family members, according to official accounts of the melee. Five members of the party were recognized Thursday -- three posthumously -- with medals from the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. The Pittsburgh-based fund carries out...

MADISON, WI (AP) -- The man serving life prison sentences for killing six deer hunters in northern Wisconsin in 2004 disagrees with his attorney that there are no grounds to appeal his convictions, according to court documents filed Friday. Chai Soua Vang, 37, mailed eight pages of handwritten documents from a prison in Iowa to the state Court of Appeals responding to his attorney's conclusion about the case, deputy clerk Sheelah Guild said. "There is no prove (sic) beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Vang intentionally killed those victims with the intent to kill," Vang wrote, repeating his trial testimony...

Nearly two years after a dispute over a deer stand that left six western Wisconsin hunters dead, a new Rice Lake park dedicated to the hunters has been completed. Hunters Memorial Park will be dedicated at 1 p.m. Monday. The park, at Whitetail Drive and Linden Avenue, was built with private donations and will be given to the city of Rice Lake. North Builders Association donated labor, one of the two lots needed and some of the building materials. It also raised funds to cover other park expenses. Aspen Creek Services donated the second lot. The cost of the park...

MADISON, WI (AP) -- A man convicted of killing six deer hunters and wounding two others in a shooting spree in northwestern Wisconsin was moved to an Iowa prison because of security concerns. Corrections officials moved Chai Soua Vang to the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison, Iowa, in January, according to state records. He had been imprisoned at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun. Officials moved him because they had safety concerns for corrections staff, inmates and others, said Dan Westfield, security chief for the Department of Corrections' division of adults institutions. Westfield compared the case to that of...

BROOK PARK, MN - A FIRE IN THIS RURAL MINNESOTA TOWN DESTROYED A HOME THAT ONCE BELONGED TO A ST. PAUL MAN RECENTLY CONVICTED OF KILLING SIX WISCONSIN DEER HUNTERS, AUTHORITIES SAID. THE FIRE REDUCED THE CEDAR-SIDED HOUSE AND ITS TWO-STORY PLAYHOUSE ONCE OWNED BY CHAI SOUA VANG TO ASHES AND RUBBLE. "IT APPEARS QUITE SUSPICIOUS," MORE FIRE CHIEF GENE ANDERSON SAID OF THE WEDNESDAY MORNING BLAZE. "THE HOUSE WAS BURNT TO THE GROUND BEFORE ANYONE FOUND IT." THE CURRENT OWNER, KYLE MALLE, BOUGHT THE HOME FROM VANG IN JULY. HE REMODELED THE STRUCTURE AND FINISHED THE BASEMENT FOR HIS...

A Minnesota truck driver serving life in prison for murdering six northern Wisconsin deer hunters last fall is no longer a suspect in the unsolved slaying of a deer hunter in Clark County four years ago, an investigator said Tuesday. Chai Soua Vang was working as a truck driver in the Twin Cities on the day James Southworth was shot, said Kerry Kirn, a detective with the Clark County Sheriff's Department. Southworth, 37, of Medford, was shot twice in the back near his tree stand on family land near Neillsville on Nov. 23, 2001, during the nine-day deer hunting season....

HAYWARD, WIS. -- Chai Soua Vang, who killed six Wisconsin deer hunters and wounded two others last fall, was sentenced this afternoon to life in prison with no possibility of release. Vang will serve six life sentences, plus five years for each, consecutively, said Judge Norman Yackel, in Sawyer County Circuit Court in Hayward. Yackel said the sentences are the harshest provided by the state and were justified by the gravity of the offense, Vang's character as well as a need to protect the community and deter future crime.

Prosecutors say they want Chai Vang to spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole when he's sentenced in Sawyer County Court today. Thirty-seven-year-old Chai Soua Vang of St. Paul was convicted on six counts of first-degree intentional homicide and three counts of attempted homicide in the killings last November on private hunting land south of Hayward. The hunters were shot on the second day of the gun deer season. Four of the victims were shot in the back and all but one were unarmed. Vang claims he heard racial taunts from the hunters prior...

http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/5705101.html

When Tong Yang goes hunting, he's looking for fun - not for trouble. Yang has spent many an evening this fall perched in a tree stand, hoping a trophy buck would come within range of his crossbow. When does pass below, as a pair did during an outing in the woods here last week, he's not interested. "Just be patient for another time," he said. "The trophy (bucks) are very smart. ... That's how they get to be a trophy buck." As Minnesota's firearms deer season draws near, Yang and many other hunters who are Hmong say they have no...

Chai Vang's sentencing in the killings of six fellow hunters is scheduled for Nov. 8. I agree with his mother's comment, "All of this could have been prevented if we could only learn to respect one another." Her plea for respect should motivate us to develop a constructive land use ethic for the North Woods. The assistant attorney general gave us a clue to needed changes in his opening remarks at the trial. He described and justified the hunters' response to Mr. Vang's trespassing as "natural." Many readers will not have any trouble with this remark. I do! Such a...

A psychiatrist says Chai Soua Vang had a history of suicidal and homicidal thoughts dating back two decades or more. Psychiatrist Robert Rawski examined Vang before the St. Paul man went on trial for the fatal shootings of six Wisconsin deer hunters. In the report -- obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel -- Rawski also says Vang believed the voice of an "evil shaman'' has spoken to him occasionally since 1995.

No physical evidence links the unsolved slaying of a deer hunter four years ago to a Minnesota man convicted of killing six northern Wisconsin deer hunters last fall, Clark County Sheriff Louis Rosandich said Friday. It will likely take a confession to solve the slaying, he said. Chai Soua Vang, a 36-year-old Minnesota truck driver, is considered a "person of interest'' in Jim Southworth's death, based on some similarities to the murders that Vang was convicted of last week in Sawyer County, Rosandich said. Clark County investigators have not talked to Vang but want to ask him where he was...

A Minnesota man convicted of killing six deer hunters in northern Wisconsin's Sawyer County last fall is considered a "person of interest'' in the investigation into an unsolved slaying of a hunter in Clark County four years ago, a detective says. Detective Kerry Kirn of the Clark County Sheriff's Department said Thursday that he plans to ask Chai Soua Vang where he was on Nov. 23, 2001, when Jim Southworth was shot twice in the back near his tree stand on family land east of Neillsville in central Wisconsin. A jury in Circuit Court in Hayward found Vang, 36, of...

The guilty verdict against a Hmong man who shot and killed six white deer hunters in northwestern Wisconsin has not eased racial tensions in the area, residents and church leaders said. At the St. Paul Hmong Alliance Church in Maplewood, Minn., church members told senior Pastor Nha Long Yang that they see it in glares from white neighbors or hear it from Hmong children who have been told by white classmates that they can no longer play together. The Hmong man, Chai Soua Vang, a 36-year-old truck driver from St. Paul, Minn., was convicted Friday by an all-white jury of...

MADISON — The foreman of a jury that found a Hmong immigrant guilty of killing six white deer hunters said Saturday the man’s testimony that he acted in self-defense was not credible. Chai Soua Vang testified last week that he feared for his life after being threatened and called racial slurs and fired only after someone else shot at him first. Jury foreman William Bremer said in a telephone interview that Vang could have walked away after the hunters angrily confronted him for trespassing on their land in some isolated northwestern Wisconsin woods. After about 32 [sic] hours of deliberations...