<sarcasm>
If only we outlawed fireplaces, natural gas, razor blades, and speaker wire, Dr. Cecilia Chang would be alive today.
</sarcasm>
Setting aside the point (that people who want to kill themselves are going to do it, with or without guns), this NYT story is interesting reading.
Dr. Chang, a dean at St. John’s University in Queens, associated with a whirlwind of characters: Catholic priests, Chinese gangsters, American lawmakers, a Taiwanese general and a fantastically corrupt city politician, to name a few. She had been married three times. One husband, she had told several people, was involved in organized crime; another told the police before succumbing to gunshot wounds that she was behind the attack.
Dr. Chang was basically a rainmaker for the university: she brought in millions of dollars in donations. Many of those donations were from what we might call “questionable” people. (One person who was awarded a honorary degree from St. John’s is currently a fugitive from justice.)
But that life, prosecutors charged in state and federal indictments, was enabled by fraud and embezzlement. Federal prosecutors accused her of forcing foreign students to perform household labor in exchange for tuition grants, stealing over $1 million from the university and taking $250,000 from a Saudi prince to organize academic conferences that never happened.
Dr. Chang took the stand at her trial. It did not go well for her, according to the NYT account, and she killed herself shortly thereafter.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2012 at 8:51 am and is filed under Clippings, Guns, Law, Sarcasm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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