"Questions about Hmong teen's death galvanize tightly knit community.

After a ceremony last week to honor and remember his teenage son, who
was fatally shot last September by four Warren police officers, Pang
Blia Xiong rested his head in his hands and tried to answer questions
about his family.

Yes, his three other children are back in school. Yes, his family is
overwhelmed by the community support. No, they will never return to
live in the house where 27 police bullets struck their son in his
basement bedroom.

"If somebody kills one of your children, it's not right to go back
there," Xiong said through a translator.

The Xiong family is part of the Detroit area's Hmong population, an
ethnic group from northern Laos and Vietnam. Some Hmong fought
alongside U.S. troops in the Vietnam War or otherwise worked for U.S.
interests in the region during the conflict. For that, after the U.S.
military left, many of the Hmong landed in Laotian camps in the 1970s
and 1980s before coming to the United States as refugees.

The Asian Hmong are a rural people and their arrival in Detroit is
often their first urban experience with modern conveniences and
institutions. Living primarily on Detroit's northeast side and in
Warren, southeast Michigan's Hmong (pronounced "mung") community is
known for its insular nature, close family ties and low profile.

But with the shooting death of 18-year-old Chonburi Xiong in
September, the family's pending $5 million federal civil rights and
gross negligence lawsuit and a growing number of supporters concerned
about the shooting's justification, the Hmong community is drawing new
attention and raising old questions about police behavior and racial
injustice.

Wayne County Commissioner Tim Killeen attended Saturday's event, his
first formal interaction with the Hmong community, thought to number a
few thousand.

"I'm trying to get a better definition of what some of the issues
are," says Killeen, who is in his first term on the commission.
"They're part of my district."

The biggest issue for the community right now is the follow-up to the
shooting. An internal police investigation and a review by the Macomb
County Prosecutor's Office cleared the officers and pronounced the
shooting justified, but that hasn't given much satisfaction to Xiong's
family and peers.

"There are questions that are unanswered and unexplained," says Chong
Lor, a teen who emceed Saturday's ceremony.

Nearly 200 people attended the event at Our Lady of Good Counsel
Church on Detroit's east side. The afternoon ceremony included poetry,
music, a statement from the Xiong family and information from the
civil rights groups, including recommendations for interacting with
police and improving understanding of ethnic and racial groups.

"We're all in this together. Any injustice to one is an injustice to
all of us. We continually have to stand together to fight and
eradicate these kinds of injustices," says Ruthie Stevenson, president
of the NAACP Macomb County branch.

27 shots

According to police reports, family members and their attorneys, the
Xiong family called Warren police on Saturday, Sept. 16, after the
parents denied Chonburi Xiong use of the family car and he fired a gun
in the home. He left before officers arrived.

It wasn't the first time Warren cops went to the Xiong house for
domestic issues, but both family and police refused to elaborate on
details of earlier incidents.

Sometime overnight, the teen returned to the home on Martin Road near
Hoover Road. Police on patrol saw the car at the house and stopped
there.

them to enter the home. The family disputes that account.

"They entered the house without a search warrant or arrest warrant,
snuck down the basement and ambushed him," says Vince Colella, the
Southfield attorney representing the Xiong family in the federal suit.
It's also claimed that cops entered the home without first receiving
permission.

John J. Gillooly, the lead attorney for the city and the officers,
describes it differently. When the family allowed the officers to
enter the house, he says, they knew to look in the basement for Xiong
since they had been there the previous day on reports he had "shot up
the house." The officers wanted to retrieve his weapon and when they
reached the basement, Xiong pointed it at them.

"To suggest that these officers walked into the home and simply fired
their weapons 27 times for absolutely no reason is a disservice, is
irresponsible, and is without any merit whatsoever," he says.

All of the officers' shots came within a matter of seconds since their
guns are semiautomatic, Gillooly says.

"One thing was certain: This guy pointed a loaded weapon at these
police officers. The 27 times means nothing. The only thing the
officers needed was the justification to shoot one time. The 27
bullets don't matter," he says. "There's no doubt it was an
unfortunate incident."

When the headlines hit about the shooting, Xiong's peers were shaken.
A private blog message about it began circulating among teens and
adult mentors involved with the Detroit Asian Youth Project, a
nonprofit, largely volunteer group. Formed two years ago, the project
works with Hmong teens in Detroit to build leadership skills and
community awareness.

"We were on it," says Lan Pham, a mentor. "We all thought, 'We've got
to do something and gather around it.'"

In the beginning "it was people wanting to get information and see
what they could do," Pham says. It evolved into the idea of a
memorial. In December, about 10 people attended the first planning
meetings. By the evening before the event, 30 organizers gathered.
They met in church basements, recruited community leaders, found
adults willing to help, a restaurant willing to donate food, a church
to host the event and put together Saturday's service. They sent out
press releases and posted fliers in Hmong businesses.

"There's tons of youth connecting with the older generation for this,"
says Stephanie Chang, one of the DAY Project founders.

Throughout the service - held in English and Hmong - speakers wondered
why the shooting happened, if justice is served and how the Hmong
community will move forward. It makes the incident, in some ways,
reminiscent of the Vincent Chin killing 25 years ago.

Chin, who was Chinese, was beaten to death by two white auto workers
who mistakenly thought he was Japanese. At the time, resentment was
widespread toward Japanese automakers as they gained shares of the Big
Three's market and Detroit's economy slumped.

Following the judge's sentence of probation for Chin's attackers,
Detroit's Asian community mobilized for the first time and pressed for
a federal civil rights suit. Former Metro Times columnist Helen Zia
included a chapter about it in her book, Asian American Dreams, and
has spoken frequently about it.

"It took a huge community outcry to find out what happened, to get
interviews of the eyewitnesses at the scene in the Vincent Chin case,"
she tells Metro Times. "It may take that kind of outcry here too."

At the time of Chin's death, Detroit's Asian American community was
not well-known, similar to the current situation with the more
recently arrived Hmong, Zia says. But because of the grassroots
community effort then, the Chin case became more high-profile and was
used as a rallying cry by Asian-Americans nationally to raise
awareness of discrimination and civil rights violations.

"That's something: That out of a tragedy some of the dialogue has
moved forward in changing things for all people in a positive way,"
she says.

For his part, Chonburi Xiong's father, Pang Blia, says the family is
grateful for the community's response and believes the incident should
inspire everyone to take a stand against injustices.

"As parents, we truly believe our son's death could have been avoided
if police had taken the proper measures. We find it hard to believe
the shooting was ruled justified. No matter how hard the struggle may
be, we will continue to seek justice for our son," he says."

Sandra Svoboda is a Metro Times staff writer. Contact her at
313-202-8015 or ssvoboda@metrotimes.com.