On a summer day that should have been filled with celebration, Won-Joon Yoon, a 26-year-old male Korean graduate student, became a victim of a senseless act of hatred. It was July 4, 1999, in Bloomington, Indiana, and Yoon was on his way to the Korean United Methodist Church when his life was abruptly ended by a gunman in a drive-by shooting. This tragic event was not an isolated incident but the culmination of a horrifying spree of violence that had spread across two states.
The
perpetrator was identified as Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, a 21-year-old former Indiana University student and a follower of the white supremacist group then known as the World Church of the Creator. Fueled by racial hatred, Smith had embarked on a three-day shooting rampage targeting racial and ethnic minorities. His violent spree began on July 2nd, two days after the leader of his neo-Nazi group, Matthew Hale, was denied a license to practice law in Illinois. Smith's targets included Orthodox Jews, African Americans, and Asian Americans.
Over the course of that holiday weekend, Smith's campaign of terror left a trail of death and injury. Before arriving in Bloomington, he had shot and wounded nine Orthodox Jews in Chicago and killed Ricky Byrdsong, a former Northwestern University basketball coach who was African American, in Skokie, Illinois. He also wounded an African American minister in Decatur. The attack on Yoon in Bloomington was the final act in his deadly rampage.
There would be no arrest or trial for the murder of Won-Joon Yoon. Later on the same day he killed Yoon, as police closed in on him in southern Illinois, Benjamin Smith took his own life. After a high-speed chase, he shot himself and crashed his car, ending the manhunt and his reign of terror. In the aftermath, the communities targeted by Smith were left to mourn and grapple with the devastating impact of his hate-fueled violence.
