One L. Goh



One L. Goh (sometimes reported as One Goh Ko or One Ko Goh) is a South Korean mass murderer responsible for the mass shooting at Oikos University, a Korean Christian college in Oakland, California, on April 2, 2012. Seven people were killed and three others suffered injuries.

The Oikos University shooting is currently ranked the fourth-deadliest university shooting in United States history, and the ninth-deadliest U.S. school massacre overall.

Background
A native of South Korea, he followed his parents and two older brothers to the United States at a young age and later was naturalized as a U.S. citizen. When Goh arrived to the United States, he first resided in Springfield, a community in Fairfax County, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., and then moved to Hayes, in rural Southeast Virginia, where he had minor traffic citations and debts. In February 2002 he changed his name from Su Nam Ko because he felt his birth name sounded "like a girl's name."

Goh later moved from Virginia to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he took up residence in Castro Valley and Oakland. His mother Oak-Chul Kim also lived in Oakland, while his brother Su-Wan Ko, an administrative non-commissioned officer in the United States Army, and another brother Su-Kwon remained in Virginia. On March 8, 2011, Su-Wan was killed in an automobile accident in Virginia while on assignment for the George C. Marshall Center. Later that year, his mother returned to Seoul, South Korea, where she died as well. While a student at Oikos University, Goh had disciplinary problems, and was asked to leave the school a few months prior to the shooting.

The shooting
At approximately 10:30 AM, Goh arrived at the university's campus and began firing with a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun. He then proceeded to a nursing classroom, entering while a class was taking place and ordering everyone inside to line up against the wall, reportedly telling them that he was going to "kill them all." All of the fatalities from the shooting - both lethal and non-lethal - occurred here.

Goh continued to fire shots as he fled the campus, driving away in a car belonging to one of the victims. Hours later, he surrendered to authorities at a Safeway supermarket in the nearby South Shore area of Alameda, about five miles away from the scene of the shooting.

Motive
Howard Jordan, the chief of the Oakland Police Department, said that Goh was angry at the administration after being expelled from the university, as well as having his request for a pro-rated tuition fee reversal on his $6,000 payment denied by Ellen Cervellan, one of the school's administrators. School officials later said he had not been expelled. Jordan said Goh went to Oikos with "the intent of locating [an] administrator", but when learning she was not there, he opened fire at random people. Jordan said Goh "was also upset that students in the past, when he attended the school, mistreated him, disrespected him, and things of that nature."

Aftermath
The full court hearings would drag out for nearly five years, due to Goh's lawyers believing that he may not be competent to stand trial and multiple competency evaluations taking place to determine if this was indeed the case. It was discovered that Goh suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. On August 26, 2014, an Alameda County grand jury indicted Goh on seven counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder but as of September 9, 2014, he was still assessed as mentally incompetent for trial. During a hearing on December 2, 2015, Goh expressed his wish for the death penalty, though the attorneys on both sides are unsure whether he feels genuine guilt or still suffers from delusions.

In May 2017, Goh pleaded no contest in the shooting. On July 14, 2017, Goh was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences plus 271 years in prison, all without any possibility of parole.