Wednesday’s shooting at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard that left three dead comes 20 years and one month after the state’s deadliest mass shooting.
On Nov. 2, 1999, an angry and troubled Xerox copy machine repairman named Byran Uyesugi used a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun to kill seven of his co-workers at Xerox’s warehouse and training center on Nimitz Highway.
Uyesugi, then 40, was later convicted of killing
Jason Balatico, 33; Ford Kanehira, 41; Ron Kataoka, 50; Ron Kawamae, 54; Melvin Lee, 58; Peter Mark, 46; and John Sakamoto, 36.
Uyesugi was sentenced to a 235-year prison term, sent to the Hawaii State Hospital and later transferred to Arizona’s Saguaro Correctional Center. His life sentence came with no possibility of parole.
Crime scene investigators recovered 20 shell casings from the crime scene, suggesting that Uyesugi reloaded during the killings.
Honolulu police later cornered Uyesugi at the Hawaii Nature Center in Makiki Heights, where he sat in the driver’s seat of a Xerox van for four hours until he surrendered peacefully at the urging of his brother.
During the standoff his father, Hiroyuki Uyesugi, was asked by a reporter whether he wanted to try to talk to his son.
“No, I want to give him another gun so he can kill himself,” he said.
The building where the murders took place was later taken over by a flooring business, and Xerox moved its warehouse and training center to Kakaako.