One L. Goh: the Oikos University shooting and its court outcome
On 2 April 2012, a gunman opened fire at Oikos University, a small Korean Christian college in Oakland, California. Seven people died and three were wounded. The man responsible, One L. Goh, was 43. He gave himself up to police within hours. His case took five years to reach a conclusion in Alameda County Superior Court. It ended with a no contest plea and a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
What happened on 2 April 2012
The shooting began at about 10:30am Pacific time at the university's campus in an airport business park in East Oakland, near Oakland International Airport. Goh was a former nursing student. He entered a nursing classroom while a lesson was under way and fired a.45-calibre semi-automatic handgun. He had brought several loaded magazines with him.
Six students and a receptionist were killed. Three other people were wounded. Goh then left the campus in a car belonging to one of the victims. Oakland had not seen a mass killing on this scale before, and prosecutors later described the shooting as unprecedented in Alameda County.
The victims
The seven people who died were Katleen Ping, 24, the university receptionist, and the students Doris Chibuko, 42, Lydia Sim, 21, Grace Kim, 23, Judith Seymour, 53, Sonam Choedon, 33, and Tshering Bhutia, 38. Six of the seven were women. Goh was later convicted of wounding three further people.
Surrender and charges
Several hours after the shooting, Goh walked into a Safeway supermarket in the South Shore area of Alameda, about five miles from the campus, and surrendered to police. He was arrested and charged with seven counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder.
Police said he told them he had been angry about his tuition. Prosecutors said he had left Oikos several months earlier and wanted a refund. They said he was looking for a particular administrator, who was not on campus that day. His lawyers later told the court that paranoia had led him to withdraw from his studies and become homeless in the months before the shooting.
Whether he could stand trial
The proceedings were slow because of questions about Goh's mental health. Under US law a defendant must be competent to stand trial. That means he must understand the charges and be able to help his lawyers. Goh was found to lack that capacity for most of the period after his arrest and was treated at Napa State Hospital. A judge's 2015 ruling required his mental state to be reviewed every year.
Prosecutors said Goh had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. They took this into account when deciding on the penalty. At one stage his lawyers said he wanted the death penalty. Shortly before his plea, doctors concluded that he was competent to proceed.
Plea and sentence
In spring 2017, Goh pleaded no contest to seven counts of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder. Prosecutors agreed that they would not seek the death penalty. A no contest plea has the same legal effect as a guilty plea for sentencing. The defendant does not formally admit guilt, but he accepts conviction.
On 14 July 2017, Judge Jeffrey Horner sentenced Goh, then 48, to seven consecutive terms of life imprisonment without parole, one for each person killed. The sentence also included a further 271 years to life. The Alameda County District Attorney, Nancy O'Malley, said the outcome meant Goh would never again be able to harm a member of the community. Prosecutors described the sentence as appropriate, given the loss of life, the violence and his mental illness.
Because Goh pleaded no contest, there was no trial and no jury verdict. The sentencing hearing gave relatives of the victims and some of the wounded the chance to address him in court.
Why prosecutors accepted the terms
Plea agreements of this kind are common in the American system. They give prosecutors a certain outcome and spare families a lengthy trial. In this case the defendant's long period of incompetence and his psychiatric diagnosis made a capital trial harder and less predictable. A sentence of life without parole removed the possibility of release.
Death in custody
Goh died on 20 March 2019, aged 50, while serving his sentence at California State Prison, Sacramento. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed his death a week later. Some online sources give a different prison, but corrections officials and news outlets named the Sacramento facility. The cause of death was not the subject of any public controversy in the reports reviewed.
What the case shows
The Oikos case shows how a prosecution can be shaped by questions of mental capacity as well as by the facts of the crime. It took five years from arrest to sentence, and it ended without a trial. The seven victims and the three wounded people were students and staff at a small vocational college. The case is remembered as the deadliest mass killing in Oakland's history.