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Another Vincent Chin?

Another Vincent Chin?

Last updated on: February 25, 2017 at 7:57 pm by Jane the Actuary

Another Vincent Chin? 2017-02-25T19:57:05-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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from pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/sling-hangman-hanging-knot-1222466/

So I’ve spent some time reading about Adam Purinton, accused of killing one man, and shooting two others, in a bar outside Kansas City, in an apparent hate crime. (See, for example, CNN, for the basic details.) The man who was killed and one of those shot were natives of India (the third was attempting to intervene), and, according to witnesses, before shooting, Purinton said, “Get out of my country,” which sounds pretty cut and dried.

Who was this Purinton?

Heavy.com reports,

According to his LinkedIn Page, Purinton is a desktop support specialist for GEN3RATION, an information technology company in the Kansas City area. . . .

Kansas City Star Managing Editor Greg Farmer reported that Purinton’s neighbors told him that he is a military veteran who suffers from PTSD. He added that neighbors believed he had just been diagnosed with a “serious illness.”

According to local news reports,

The FAA told 41 Action News Purinton worked as an air traffic controller until 2000. Over the last few years he been working odd jobs.

“We knew that he worked at a liquor store we were told that he was also washing dishes at Minsky’s my husband has seen him there so I know that he was doing various jobs in the area,” Puckett said.

Neighbors and Purinton’s family said the Navy veteran recently was diagnosed with blood cancer and had PTSD.

(PTSD from two years of naval service? Seems unlikely.)

Another site reports that

[Neighbor Beverly] Morris said Purinton was an air traffic controller in Olathe when they first moved into the neighborhood. Since then, she said, he’s had numerous jobs, most recently at a nearby liquor store and at an IT business.

“He went to work for several months,” she said. “Every morning he was dressed in khakis, and came in late at night. But that job apparently went away, too.”

which seems to suggest that he had lost his job at GEN3RATION. (The company’s website is down right now, so I can’t find out more about it.)

These reports also cite neighbors as saying that he always appeared to be drunk. A niece has now stepped forward and said that “He had a very bad drinking problem, and it has progressed through the years.”

I look at his bedraggled face — more that of a 70 year old than a 50 year old — and I read the snippets of information: alcoholic, bounced around from job to job, had seemingly lost the most recent one. Was his job being outsourced to India?

It was too simple an answer, in 1982, to say “hate crime” with respect to Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death by two autoworkers, one unemployed. Without in any way defending the perpetrators, and bearing in mind that I was all of 13 at the time, I still connect this up with a great deal of worry and fear and anger over jobs lost to Japanese competition. Where that comes from I can’t exactly say — conversations at home? The daily newspaper? The evening news? And I was relatively removed from it — sure, it was probably around this time that Dad was transferred from one office to another and I remember statements of “better than losing his job entirely” but we lived in a very white-collar world, removed from the factory workers who felt most threatened, removed from the blue-collar culture that would be more likely to react with anger and violence.

At the same time, of course, of all the men whose jobs were lost or threatened, only two, these two perpetrators, reacted by beating to death someone whose appearance resembled the nationality of the companies taking that market share. And I further don’t recall that anyone defended them. But it was still an extreme reaction to an up-ending of the local economy, that this case reminds me of, rightly or wrongly.

I read the comments on the news sites and their facebook pages and the common theme is “this just proves that all Trump supporters are racists just like this man!”

I read the reports and wonder, how broken must a man be to shoot someone for seemingly no reason at all?

Perhaps he spent all his time reading racist websites, fueling his hate. As of yet, no one’s reported any sort of online trail.

It reminds me further of all the incidents that gave rise to the term “going postal,” the murderous rage seemingly out of nowhere, though in this case these were not even co-workers, but strangers.

And it reminds me of the case of the North Carolina man who murdered three Muslims in 2015 — a case which still hasn’t gone to trial and about which there’s no further information on any incriminating or potentially exculpatory evidence around the question of the man’s motive.

Srinivas Kuchibhotla died senselessly. May he rest in peace.

Adam Purinton killed senselessly. May God have mercy on his soul.

Update: something else that suggests this was about jobs, not anti-Islam sentiment, is that, according to news reports,

In a brief phone interview on Friday night, Mr. [Alok] Madasani [the shot/injured victim] described the remarks made Wednesday by the man sitting near him and Mr. Kuchibhotla at the restaurant. “He asked us what visa are we currently on and whether we are staying here illegally,” Mr. Madasani said.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to ask simultaneously about visas and about being illegal, given that by definition, if you’re on a visa, you’re not illegal, but to ask about visa type does make a fair bit of sense, and it seems to me that only someone with a certain amount of knowledge — and interest in types of visas (H-1B, J visas, etc.) would be asking about this.

Also, from the comments, Ted Seeber says, “Don’t know the company specifically, but from a google search looks like the type of small, local Desktop support company that IT professionals like myself start whenever we’re unemployed. As such, his employment there may have been quite sporadic- and in direct competition with invading Indian H-1B bodyshops that work for half the price.”

Image: from pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/sling-hangman-hanging-knot-1222466/

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