Police: Man threatened Va. Tech-like attack

updated 10:26 p.m. ET April 3, 2008

MIAMI - A 20-year-old with a weapons cache that included four AK-47s was arrested after threatening over the Internet to undertake a Virginia Tech-style massacre, authorities said Thursday.

Oregon authorities learned of a March 25 Internet message allegedly posted by Calin Chi Wong in which he threatened to re-enact the Virginia Tech killings. Two days later, Homestead police searched the home Wong shares with his parents and found weapons stacked on shelves in plain view, Detective Antonio Aquino said.

Wong had 13 firearms in all, more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition, some that could pierce armor, and 100 rounds in a feeding clip with bullets "meant to take down aircraft or military machinery," Aquino said. He had hidden two AK-47s in his parents' closet, and his parents said the guns did not belong to them, Aquino said.

Wong was charged with making written threats to kill or do bodily injury via the computer and paid $7,500 bail. Additional charges are pending, he said.

It was not known whether he had a lawyer. A message left at a phone number listed for Wong was not immediately returned Thursday evening. The phone at his employer, China King, rang unanswered.

Homestead police first noticed Wong when he went to the department in February to complain he had been robbed of $800 over the Internet after he ordered a gun online using his father's PayPal account.

He told authorities he had called the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other agencies about the issue. Aquino said Wong finally reached a boiling point when he posted the message saying he would re-enact the Virginia Tech massacre, in which student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people last year before turning the gun on himself.

"After speaking to him and seeing his frustration, I believe that he had the potential to carry out some kind of threat," Aquino said.

Wong felt isolated and cut off, authorities noted, saying he had been buying and selling guns for about two years and word was now getting around about Wong's age. Dealers stopped selling to him, and he was being banned from certain gun-sale Web sites.

Aquino said Wong told police that making the threat made him feel good because after "he had thousands of people on the Internet paying attention to him."

Wong told police he was just upset and frustrated and never actually planned a killing spree, Aquino said.

But authorities also found a school book bag with bulletproof vests inside Wong's home, as well as two handguns.

Wong is not in college, Aquino said. He graduated from an Oregon high school and attended a college for a year before moving in with his parents in Florida, authorities said.

Wong said the weapons were an investment.

"He says it's a lucrative business," Aquino said. "He said if Hillary Clinton wins she'll put a ban on assault rifles, and these assault rifles will be worth more in value."

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