Harvard Students Receive Apology After Death Threat Targets Asian Women
This weekend, hundreds of Harvard students and affiliates received a terrifyingly ominous email, threatening to carryout a mass shooting at the Ivy League school and “kill you individually.” But now it looks like the sender has backtracked, apologizing for the email and blaming a family member for the email.
On Friday, students received a horrifying and racist email that read:
All students at Harvard.
My name is Stephanie Nguyen.
I live in Boston.
I will come tomorrow in Harvard University and shoot all of you each one of you all Harvard students, I will kill you individually.
I’ll be back tomorrow at 11 o’clock in your fucking university and will kill you, you sons of bitches.
Even Mark Zuckerberg of facebook I willl kill
I’m going to kill every one of you
I promise you, slit-eyes
A closer look at the list of recipients indicated that the email particularly targeted female Asian students. In some emails, the sender used the name Stephanie Nguyen in the body of the email, though the address identified the sender as Eduardo Nguyen. Minutes after students received the email at 4:44pm, some of the same students on the list received another email with the same exact text, though the email address indicated that it was sent from a Huy Dinh.
As a result of the terrifying threat, the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association and other Asian cultural groups postponed an event planned for Saturday on the Asian American experience at Harvard. In an email, the organization stated:
‘To all of our dear friends who received this afternoon’s email, we express our sincerest sympathy and support,’ organizers wrote in an email announcing the cancellation.
‘No one should have to open their inbox and see a such a threatening and racially charged message.’
The police and the FBI were informed, and after initial investigation, the Harvard University Police Department surmised that the threat may not be credible and that it came from overseas. But Saturday evening at 4:50pm, students received an odd follow-up e-mail from the same “hotmail.de” address, via Boston Globe:
“It was my little brother who has written the e-mail,” said the message, the text of which Wu provided to the Globe. “I’m not a killer, not a killer, please tell your dirketor so . . . To all Harvard students and staff I’m sorry what wrote my brother please I will bear the responsibility please call back all media.”
The latest e-mail also attributes the racial slur in the threat to the unnamed brother, and said he did not mean it. The writer continues to ask to be excused for the “inconvenience,” using a German word, which is misspelled in the text.
It’s not clear how this list of hundreds of recipients was put together, but the FBI and Cambridge police will continue to investigate the matter, and HUPD has increased its presence on campus.
Image via Getty.