The Hmong people are an indigenous group in East Asia and Southeast Asia. In China, the Hmong people are classified as a sub-group of the Miao people. The modern Hmong reside mainly in Southwest China and countries in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. There is also a large diasporic community in the United States of more than 300,000. The Hmong diaspora has smaller communities in Australia and South America.
Vang Pao was a major general in the Royal Lao Army and later a leader of the Hmong American community in the United States.
Matricide is the act of killing one's own mother.
Chai Soua Vang, more commonly known as Chai Vang, is an American man who was convicted of first degree intentional homicide, having pleaded self-defense after allegedly being fired upon. Vang, a six-year veteran of the California National Guard, shot eight people while he was trespassing upon a hunting group in northern Wisconsin on November 21, 2004; six were killed and two were wounded.
Hmong Americans are Americans of Hmong ancestry. Many Hmong Americans immigrated to the United States as refugees in the late 1970s. Over half of the Hmong population from Laos left the country, or attempted to leave, in 1975, at the culmination of the Laotian Civil War.
Negligent homicide is a criminal charge brought against a person who, through criminal negligence, allows another person to die. Other times, an intentional killing may be negotiated down to this lesser charge as a compromised resolution of a murder case, as might occur in the context of the intentional shooting of an unarmed man after a traffic altercation. Negligent homicide can be distinguished from involuntary manslaughter by its mens rea requirement: negligent homicide requires criminal negligence, while manslaughter requires recklessness.
Ka Vang is a Hmong-American writer in the United States. Vang was born on a CIA military base, Long Cheng, Laos, at the end of the Vietnam War, and immigrated to the United States in 1980. A fiction writer, poet, playwright, and former journalist, Vang has devoted much of her professional life to capturing Hmong folktales on paper. She is a recipient of the Archibald Bush Artist Fellowship and several other artistic and leadership awards. She is the author of the children's book, Shoua and the Northern Lights Dragon, a finalist for the 23rd Annual Midwest Book Awards in 2012.
The Deltona massacre was a residential murder which occurred on August 6, 2004, in a home on Telford Lane in Deltona, Florida, United States. Four men broke into the home and bludgeoned six victims to death. The four attackers, apparently inspired by the film Wonderland, tortured and killed four men, two women, and a dog inside the home, making it the deadliest mass murder in Volusia County history. Their primary motive for the murders was revenge on Erin Belanger, who had evicted a squatter, Troy Victorino, from her grandmother's then-vacant house, with the secondary motive of recovering an Xbox game console and some clothing that Victorino had left behind. Victorino was able to further motivate his accomplices by pointing out that the attack would likely allow them to kill another person they were mad at, but that person happened not to be at the house that night.
The alleged 2007 Laotian coup d'état plan was a conspiracy allegation by the United States Department of Justice that Lt. Col. Harrison Jack (Ret.) and former Royal Lao Army Major General Vang Pao, among others conspired in June 2007 to obtain large amounts of heavy weapons and ammunition to overthrow the Communist government of Laos in violation of the Neutrality Act. The charges were ultimately dropped and the case helped serve to further highlight, instead, major human rights violations by the Lao government against the Hmong ethnic minority, Laotian refugees, and political dissidents.
The murder of Glenn Kopitske occurred in Wisconsin on July 31, 2003, when 37-year-old Kopitske was killed by 17-year-old Gary Hirte. Hirte initially admitted to killing Kopitske "to see if he could get away with it"; however, he later claimed to have experienced temporary insanity that resulted from his rage after a supposed homosexual encounter with Kopitske.
Vang Pobzeb was a Hmong American dedicated to Lao and Hmong human rights. For over 25 years, he was an outspoken critic of the Marxist governments of the Pathet Lao in Laos and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) and their human rights violations, religious freedom violations, and persecution of the Lao and Hmong people.
Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl is an American serial killer found guilty of committing four murders and acquitted on three other murder charges related to the "Shotgun Killer" spree in Indiana from October 30, 1990, to December 18, 1990.
On the morning of September 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), ostensibly responding to a call from an officer under fire, shot and killed two civilians at the Danziger Bridge: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other civilians were wounded. All the victims were African-American. None were armed or had committed any crime. Madison, a mentally disabled man, was shot in the back. The shootings caused public anger and further eroded the community's trust in the NOPD and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina overall.
Jesus C. Gonzalez is an American man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, known for a gun rights civil lawsuit, as well as being convicted of a reckless homicide shooting.
Menace of Destruction (MOD), formerly known as Masters of Destruction, is a Hmong street gang created in 1988. Today, it is active in California, Midwestern United States and many places with large Hmong communities. It is known for murders, fights, shootings, and weapon and drug trafficking.
Ashlee Anne Rose Martinson is an American woman convicted of the 2015 murders of her mother and stepfather, which she committed the day after her 17th birthday. Martinson's case received international attention. Martinson later pleaded guilty to two counts of second degree intentional homicide and was sentenced to 23 years in prison.
On March 22, 2018, Alex Woodworth was stabbed 16 times in the head, neck, groin and torso in Ezra McCandless' car in Spring Brook, Wisconsin. McCandless was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2020 for the murder.
Ee Lee was an American woman who was raped and murdered by two black teenagers in a racially-motivated daylight attack in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The two perpetrators, Kamare Lewis and Kevin Spencer, pleaded guilty to first-degree reckless homicide and second-degree sexual assault in 2023. Later that year, Lewis was sentenced to 26 years in prison, while Spencer was sentenced to 32 years in prison.
Daniel Oliver Jones is an American serial killer who raped and stabbed four young women to death in Kansas City, Missouri, between 1998 and 2001. He was arrested shortly after the final murder, and DNA evidence linked him to the previous crimes, after which he confessed and was given multiple life sentences.
