North Carolina Shooting — Possibly Bias Related

Shooter said he had a preference for APA women

By May Chow
AsianWeek Staff Writer

What caused 49-year-old Richard Borelli Anderson to pump two bullets into the head and knee of his classmate, 31-year-old Lili Wang, on Oct. 12, is still a question that remains unanswered in the quiet town of Raleigh, N.C.

The North Carolina State University graduate student left a note on a greeting card addressed to his mother saying that he was infatuated with his classmate and had decided to end both their lives, campus police said.

At about 5:15 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 12, Wang was playing tennis on a court on the school campus, when Anderson approached her with a 10mm glock handgun and fired four shots. He then turned the gun to his head. His body was discovered five feet away from Wang.

But many in the Asian Pacific American community are saying this may be seen as a hate crime against Wang. Andrew Chin, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said he believes this may have been a racially motivated crime.

“There is some resistance into thinking that this was a hate crime,” Chin said. “You have the canonical hate crimes, like the case of Vincent Chin and other crimes against APA men. But if you view the chain of events and link the events together, including what may appeared to have been unwanted advances on a married woman, which lead to the murder, this may be a form of racial discrimination against an APA woman.”

Lili Wang. Photo courtesy of Yufei Qian.

But John Daily, deputy director of the NCSU Police Department, said from a police standpoint the matter is closed.

“There is no evidence to suggest that the offender, Richard Anderson, acted on any bias against Lili Wang because of her race,” Daily said. “And this has come after an investigation by our department, the State Bureau of Investigation and the Deputy Attorney’s Office of Wake County.”

Daily added that Wang’s family could file other suits with the county, including a wrongful death suit.

Wang, a master’s degree candidate in her second year in NCSU's College of Engineering, lived in northwest Raleigh and worked as a software engineer on the Lotus Notes program at IBM in the Research Triangle Park. She was married to Yufei Qian, who works in California. Wang immigrated to the United States in 1997 from Beijing, China.

Friends said Wang met Anderson, a computer science graduate student, in a software engineering class, and it appeared that the two only knew each other inside of the classroom. Faculty members said they never even saw signs that the two were acquainted. Wang’s friends and co-workers said she never spoke of Anderson, and everyone knew that she and her husband were happily married.

According to NCSU Police Chief Tom Younce, Anderson indicated in the letter that there was a personal disagreement between Wang and himself. But Younce added that they have no evidence that the two had a romantic relationship or a quarrel.

Classmates said the two disagreed on the format of their class midterm exam. A week before the shooting incident, Anderson had posted an online response, which Wang thought was rude, to Wang’s request to bring in notes for the exam.

Qian, 30, was on a plane en route to North Carolina to see his wife the evening of Wang’s death.

“At this time, my family and I have nothing to say,” Qian said. But he posted a message to Andrew Chin and his wife, Judy, thanking the two for their support.

“If there were only one man in the world that seeks justice for Lili Wang, that man would be me,” Qian said. “However, as everyone’s aware, currently there’s no criminal charge against the killer because he is already dead.”

Chin believes Wang did nothing to bring this about, other than being APA. Chin hopes to reach out to the APA community and law enforcement agencies about how this could possibly be a case of discrimination with tragic consequences.

“I got involved with this case because I see this as a great tragedy,” Chin said. “We can’t let this happen again.”

Anderson applied for five handgun permits a week before he shot Wang; he received his permit on Saturday, the day he shot Wang and turned the gun to himself. But police did not say whether or not Anderson used the permit to purchase the gun he used in the shooting. According to the Wake County sheriff’s officer, Anderson had never been of any felony charges.