Born to Kill Read Free

afternoon calm. At first, many in the crowd seemed to thinkit was fireworks, a common sound at Vietnamese and Chinese ceremonies. Then a couple of the mourners went down, struck by bullets. “Where’s the gun!?” a gang member shouted. “Who fire!?” shouted another.
    Utter pandemonium ensued, with people screaming and scurrying for cover. The leader of the grounds crew, a beefy African American, dove headfirst into Amigo’s open grave. Many of the mourners crawled behind tombstones for protection. The gunmen used an Uzi submachine gun and a .12-gauge pump-action shotgun, spraying the gathering with no specific target in mind.
    Tinh saw one of the mourners take a bullet in the hand; another was hit in the leg. A lone gang member pulled out a handgun and returned fire while fleeing through the cemetery, toppling tombstones. Later, the gang members would curse themselves for not having been properly armed, but who could have guessed rival gangsters would dare to seek retribution on such hallowed ground? Earlier, perhaps, on the already bloodstained streets of Chinatown, but not here, where even your worst enemies are supposed to have the right to peacefully bury their dead.
    The sound of gunfire echoed sporadically through the cemetery. Peering from behind a small tombstone, Tinh saw one of the gunmen getting closer and closer. He knew he had to make a run for it.
    Tinh fled past dozens of mourners lying on the ground, some who had been hit, some pretending they were dead, hoping the gunmen would pass them by. He snaked his way through rows of tombstones until he arrived at the chain-link fence, where more gang members were frantically trying to escape. Both male and female mourners clawed at the fence, tearing their clothes and lacerating their flesh on the sharp metal.
    A few made it over, running along the shoulder of the highway to safety. Dozens more collapsed in the excitement and exhaustion of the moment. It seemed as if a good half hour had passed, but it was more like sixty seconds when the gunfire finally subsided, to be replaced by the sound of approaching sirens. In all the confusion, the gunmen vanished as mysteriously as they had arrived.
    When Al Kroboth got there, the cops had already begun rounding up what was left of the mourners. A strapping six feet five inches tall,Kroboth was the cemetery’s head grounds keeper and director of security. He was also a veteran of the Vietnam War. For nearly three years Kroboth had traversed the jungles and rice fields of Indochina. He’d seen plenty of combat and eventually spent fifteen months in a cage as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese.
    Kroboth surveyed the damage: A medevac helicopter had landed in the middle of the cemetery, and the injured were being loaded on stretchers to be taken to a nearby hospital in Newark that specialized in gunshot wounds. Seven people had been hit, dozens more trampled while fleeing the barrage of gunfire or badly cut while attempting to scale the metal fence. Medical personnel and local police tended to the others—one hundred or so young Vietnamese still traumatized by the sudden fury of the attack. As the chopper drifted skyward and the remaining wounded moaned in pain, Kroboth couldn’t help but be reminded of battlefields he’d seen a long time ago, in a country most of these mourners called home.
    At the Linden police station, New Jersey cops struggled to understand what were, to them, nearly indecipherable accents and names, though most of the names were probably fictitious anyway. Of the nearly one hundred mourners brought in for questioning—including Tinh Ngo—only two carried identification. The cops scratched their heads and made phone calls, trying to find out whatever they could about a group of gangsters they hadn’t even known existed until today.
    In the days that followed, the cemetery shootout would become a popular news item, receiving fervid coverage locally and