The Wah Mee Massacre

In the early morning hours of February nineteenth, nineteen eighty-three, three young men entered a gambling club in the basement of the Louisa Hotel on South King Street in Seattle's Chinatown. The Wah Mee was a private, members-only establishment, the kind of place that had operated quietly for decades, patronized by Chinese restaurant owners, businesspeople, and gamblers who preferred to keep to themselves. It was sophisticated, discreet, and prosperous.

The three men, Kwan Fai Mak, Benjamin Ng, and Tony Ng, had been patrons and knew the layout. They bound fourteen people with rope, robbed them of cash, and then opened fire. Thirteen people died. One man, Wai Yok Chin, a sixty-one-year-old former Navy sailor working that night as a Pai Gow dealer, survived. Bound despite his wounds, he managed to roll under a gambling table and was found alive when police arrived. He became the prosecution's key witness.

The trials stretched through nineteen eighty-three and nineteen eighty-five. Benjamin Ng was sentenced to life without parole. Kwan Fai Mak received a death sentence, though a federal court overturned it in nineteen ninety-one and resentenced him to life without parole as well. Tony Ng was convicted only of robbery and assault, served nearly thirty years, and was deported to Hong Kong in twenty fourteen.

The Wah Mee Massacre remains the deadliest mass shooting in Washington State history. For the Chinese American community in Seattle, the event was devastating in a particular way: it happened inside a space that had been theirs, a private refuge from a city that had excluded and harassed them for over a century. The grief was compounded by the knowledge that the perpetrators were from within the community itself.

The Louisa Hotel still stands on South King Street. The Wah Mee Club has been closed ever since.