Five Dead in Pittsburgh Shooting Spree
Hate crime suspected
By Todd Spangler & Tim Molloy/AP

A white man opened fire in several suburban Pittsburgh communities April 28, killing five people and critically wounding a sixth in what police called a racially motivated shooting spree. The man was apprehended and charged.

The shootings took place within a 20-mile range through suburbs surrounding Pittsburgh during about an hour span Friday afternoon. The gunman fatally shot a person of Indian descent at an Indian grocery store, two employees at a Chinese restaurant and a black man at a martial arts school. A Jewish woman who lived next door to the suspect’s parents was found dead in her home.

The suspect, Richard Baumhammers, 34, smirked at onlookers as he was led into a magistrate’s office in Beaver Falls on Friday night wearing a bulletproof vest. Baumhammers, a lawyer from Mount Lebanon, was charged with criminal homicide and reckless endangerment in the martial arts school shooting. He was being held without bail.

The shooting spree was the second of its kind in the region since March, when a black man allegedly yelled racial epithets and killed three white men.

“Not again. Those are the first words that come to mind. Not again,” Gov. Tom Ridge said Friday night in Pebble Beach, Calif., where he was speaking to a Republican group. “Across Pennsylvania, and particularly in southwestern Pennsylvania, we are struggling to make sense of what appears to be yet another brutal racist rampage.”

Witnesses described the shooter as appearing calm as he climbed into a Jeep to drive from place to place.

Police received first word of the shootings shortly before 2 p.m., when a small fire set in a back bedroom of a home triggered an alarm that alerted officers. When they responded, they found Anita Gordon, 63, shot twice inside her house.

“She was an angel,” said her husband, Sanford, adding that Baumhammers’ family lived next door since the suspect was a child. “(They were) pillars of the community.”

While they were at the Gordons’ house, police got a call of shots fired at Beth El Congregations, a synagogue less than a mile away where Gordon was a member. The synagogue’s glass doors were shot out, the word “Jew” was painted on the front and swastikas were painted on its outside walls.

Police then received reports of two Indian men being shot at an Indian grocery store in Carnegie. A 30-year-old man was killed and a 25-year-old man was wounded.

Kent Kretzler, who owns a travel agency next to the grocery, said he saw Baumhammers walk out of the store wearing a sport coat and tucking his gun into his holster or waistband. He calmly walked 40 yards to his car, he said.

“He got in and sat for maybe five or ten seconds without doing anything, and just very calm and collectedly pulled out as if pulling out after buying a bag of groceries,” he said.

“There was nothing there to make you think he had done anything wrong,” he added.

Shots were fired shortly afterward at another synagogue in Carnegie. Fifteen minutes later, police received a call reporting two employees had been shot at a Chinese restaurant in a McKees Rocks shopping plaza. Killed were Thao Pham, 30, a deliveryman of Vietnamese descent, and Ji-Ye Sun, 34, the manager of the Ya Fei Chinese Cuisine restaurant who was of Chinese origin.

Police received a call of a man shot at a karate school in a Monaca shopping plaza about 3 p.m. A 25-year-old black man, Gary Lee, was shot and killed, police said. Baumhammers was arrested 15 minutes later.

A witness at the martial arts school had called police and gave a description of Baumhammers’ sport utility vehicle; officers caught up with him as he was crossing a bridge into Aliquippa and pulled him over.

Paul Wolf, acting Allegheny County Police superintendent, said Baumhammers had a gun and several rounds of ammunition with him when he was stopped. He did not offer any resistance when he was arrested, he said.

“We are taking a tack of ethnic intimidation—a hate crime,” Wolf said.

Baumhammers was armed with a .357-caliber handgun, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Saturday.

An arraignment was pending on the other slayings, which occurred in adjacent Allegheny County.

Baumhammers passed the Georgia bar exam in 1993 and belonged to the Georgia Bar Association. He was listed as a legal reference for immigration matters on the Web page for an attorney in Latvia. His parents, Inese and Andrejs, are both dentists and his father taught at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Post-Gazette said the family had emigrated from Latvia after World War II. Their neighbor, Gordon, said Bauhammers had spent time in Latvia recently.

In the March shooting spree, a black man, Ronald Taylor, allegedly killed three white men and wounded two others. Taylor, 39, is accused of fatally shooting a maintenance man at his apartment building in Wilkinsburg, setting his apartment on fire, then shooting four people—two fatally—at fast-food restaurants.

Taylor, who has since been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was charged with homicide and remains at a state mental hospital. He was charged with ethnic intimidation.

A dream destroyed

Ji-ye Sun believed in the dream of a better life in the United States. He left China years ago to study music in Pennsylvania on a student visa, with hopes to stay.

He waited tables, working his way up through restaurant jobs. Seven years ago, he met a woman and got married. He earned a promotion to manager of the Ya Fei Chinese Restaurant, and became an investor in the business. He had made it: At age 34, he was a success.

“He was very proud of the accomplishment,” said his stepdaughter, Chi-Lan Wee.

But last week on April 28 a gunman robbed Sun and his family of his American dream, fatally shooting him and another employee of the Ya Fei as they worked.

Authorities charged an immigration attorney who police said may have targeted immigrants or members of ethnic minorities.

Richard Baumhammers, 34, was arrested April 28 in the shootings of Sun and the other restaurant worker, as well as four others: a Jewish woman killed at her home, two Indian men at an Indian grocery, and one black man at a karate studio.

All died except for one of the men at the grocery. He was in critical condition Saturday.

Considering Allegheny County’s minute Asian and Indian population, it was almost impossible to believe that Baumhammers could have shot two Indians and two Asians at random, Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht said.

“Anybody who wants to guess whether it would be a hate-related crime, I guess these would be people who would look at the Empire State Building to determine if it was a skyscraper,” Wecht said.

A search of several legal databases turned up no reference to any case in which Baumhammers was counsel, and he was not listed in recent attorney directories.

Wee, Sun’s stepdaughter, said she had wondered whether Baumhammers could have represented Sun at some point as he became an American citizen. But she decided the possibility was remote at best because her stepfather had never had any legal trouble, she said.

“There was never any conflict,” she said. Sun had come to the country on a student visa, and was allowed to stay because he married her mother, May-Ling Kung, an American citizen, Wee said.

Sun had celebrated his success by trying to help everyone around him, Wee said. He had helped her financially, and was putting her younger brother, Chi-Craig, through school.

“I didn’t even have to ask him,” she said. “My mom and him, they supported each other very much.

“He just wanted the people around him to be happy, whether they were successful or not.”