Ellington

On Oct. 30, 2008, an ambulance shuttled a dying man to his deathbed while police officers lingered in Red Square to collect evidence. The blackened clothes, red-plastic gas can and lighter told the story of In Soo Chun’s suicide. His backpack — the one that carried the gasoline, the one he’d refused to relinquish months ago — tells the story of his life. The Daily discovered through public records that the 61-year-old former custodian left behind a 128-page manifesto entitled Battle for the Freedom, in which he’d written of his isolation, his estranged family, the job from which he had been fired and the reason he chose to burn himself alive.

His story begins nearly two years ago. It starts and ends with a backpack.

In Soo Chun lived alone and lugged a 20-pound backpack to and from the UW every weekday, like any student. Except Chun was a custodian in his 60s, and his backpack contained court documents for lawsuits he filed with the Supreme Court.

On June 9, 2008, he slung his backpack over his shoulder, flicked his lighter for a smoke and departed from the Miranda Apartments on Northeast 43rd Street. He reported to the campus observatory building a little before 5 a.m. He’d worked the same 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift for two-and-a-half years.

His supervisor, Roman Ariri, clocked Chun in on time. Chun plodded to Padelford Hall, backpack strapped over his shoulders. He was one of the few on campus early that Monday morning and one of three custodians in Padelford.

He’d bickered with the two others, and his argument with one that morning would propel him toward suicide.

Laine Noah, Ui-Hak Chong and Chun always worked early in the morning. That way, they would finish waxing the floors with chemicals before faculty and students began to arrive.

Chun tended to the third floor, home to the math and statistics departments. He would push his custodial cart down the halls, his backpack always nestled among cleaning supplies. After waxing the floors, he’d duck inside offices and relieve professors of their recycling and trash. He would smile and say “good morning” to the staff in the math library while he stacked chairs on desks so he could corral the dirt beneath into his dustpan.

He sometimes found trouble. A graduate student had complained Chun had stalked her. Both Noah and Chong had argued with Chun.

Before working in Padelford, Chun had bickered with his Korean co-workers in Suzzallo Library; they were speaking Korean, and Chun had berated them for not speaking English while working.

The problem with the Padelford telephone

Chun had his next confrontation on June 9. It began when he spotted Noah on the third floor. Managers had earlier instructed the two custodians to keep apart.

A Custodial Services record tells the story: Noah stepped inside an empty office to use a telephone. Chun followed him. “Leave me alone,” Noah said.

“Wait, I want to talk to you,” Chun said.

“Leave me alone,” he repeated. “I need to finish unlocking the doors.”

“Why are you using this phone? There are lots of phones in the hall.”

“I’m going to call Ron.”

Chun stood in the door frame while Noah called their manager, Ron Ahina. Noah’s account involved Chun blocking the door and brandishing a mop. When Noah hung up, Chun ceded the exit, and Noah left.

That afternoon, Ahina crafted a “formal counseling plan.” He named Chun the aggressor and requested he attend a July 2 counseling session. He mailed Chun a note because Chun didn’t own a phone.

Chun walked to his apartment, where he lived alone amid dozens of boxes laden with documents. Ahina’s letter awaited him. He read it and wrote back that he would not attend if Ahina both labeled him the aggressor and mediated the counseling session. Their back-and-forth would continue, the cast swelling to include other managers, the UW ombudsman, Chun’s union, other custodians and the human-resources department.

At the heart of it all was Chun’s backpack.

The Staff of God

Chun’s manifesto provided his interpretation of the labor and management dispute.

He wrote that Ahina was wrapped up in the university’s drug and prostitution business, and that CIA agents and paramilitary operatives for the Korean government infested Custodial Services. Chun alleged various librarians, office assistants and math professors working in Padelford were Korean government spies. He believed they were fronting as university employees when, in actuality, they were Korean agents monitoring him.

The manifesto indicates Chun knew of his mental troubles.

“I was seriously suffered with a thought disorder and a brain slash and a sudden black-out and memory loss and other symptoms since 1987,” he wrote in his manifesto.

In Chun’s mind, the government had crippled him. They had implanted microchips in his head, and the CIA disabled him with radio waves. They’d afflicted him for two decades.

Why?

Because, he believed, he was the Staff of God, the pliant tool that the Bush and Clinton families used to engineer their electoral success. This plagued Chun, and he wrote of the pain in his manifesto: “I was very much suffering with the hunger and the serious dementia for the last two decades. It is more cruel than the animal world.”

But Chun arrived every morning on his best behavior.

“He’d come in and greet me,” said Sandra Martin, a Padelford math-library employee. “He was always pleasant.”

He said “good morning” to the librarians, and they replied, “Good morning, In Soo.”

No mention of brain waves or CIA agents — just polite conversation. Managers wrote that Chun met or exceeded expectations in 13 categories during a 2007 evaluation.

“He was a really good janitor and kept everything really clean,” said Cheryl Bissett, administrative coordinator of the statistics department.

Chun’s custodial closet was next to Bissett’s office. He would read the Bible during breaks. She said he sometimes would stare into space, looking very lonely.

“I told him I thought he should go to a church because other people there could help him,” she said.

But he’d left his Korean church in Shoreline years ago after he began to suspect the congregation was spying on him.

The 20-pound burden

When Chun arrived to work July 10, 2008, his supervisors Ron Ahina and Roman Ariri were waiting to tell him they’d reassigned him.

Ahina presented Chun with two choices: Lewis Hall or the North Physics Laboratory, the building downhill from the McMahon and Haggett residence halls.

Chun wrote that his supervisors dangled his keys in front of him and said, “In Soo, you go to Lewis Hall or you go home!”

Sending someone home violated university policy. Management hadn’t fired Chun with those words — termination is a multistep process — but Chun elected to go home. Later he wrote that this was the day he’d been “constructively discharged” from Custodial Services.

Again, the backpack revealed his reasoning. He couldn’t accept either assignment because neither building had an elevator.

Chun carried his 20-pound backpack everywhere. He safeguarded court papers inside it. He’d filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court alleging that the U.S. government had abused his mind for decades. The government had denied him, but he had resolved to press the case.

He latched the documents to him; the backpack had become as indispensable as keys or a wallet. In Padelford Hall, he rode the elevator to the third floor with the backpack safely atop his custodial cart.

“Lewis Hall … did not have elevators. If I worked at the Lewis Hall, then I had to carry the 20 pounds backpack on my shoulder for eight hours,” Chun wrote.

So he refused the reassignment and stalked out of the office.

An American dreamer

When Chun clocked off at 1 p.m., he would return to an empty dwelling. He’d brought his family — a wife and son — to America in 1977, leaving the teaching profession for a new life. He was a U.S. citizen by 1983, but this triumph rang hollow.

He never could get a job in the United States that afforded him the same respect as a teaching position. Teachers hold sway in Korea; their culture reveres education to a high degree.

In the United States, Chun labored without respect at menial jobs.

He and his wife divorced during the ‘80s. Chun never remarried. His only son wanted nothing to do with him, and those who knew Chun consistently described him as a “loner.”

He’d gone to several colleges and universities in Seattle, but never attained a degree.

A vow of violence

By July 15, 2008, Chun had made pleas to the UW ombudsman and his union, the Washington Federation of State Employees. His managers tried to schedule a new counseling session involving Custodial Services, the union, the ombudsman and Chun.

But Chun declined, instead requesting a vacation. His manager, Ahina, granted the request. The logic: Perhaps Chun just needed to relax.

Chun took his vacation from July 18 to Aug. 13.

In the meantime, Ahina made sure his supervisors at Facilities Services — Director Gene Woodard and Assistant Director Sattia Sear — were clued in. Irene Hrab, from the university’s human-resources department, handled Chun’s case. She suggested possible termination if Chun didn’t report to work Aug. 14.

Sure enough, Chun ignored work Aug. 14. Managers duly sent him letters asking why he didn’t report for work. They received no reply.

Nine days later, Aug. 25, Chun showed up on the university’s bimonthly payday. He said he’d been fired and wanted his last paycheck. Ahina told him he hadn’t been fired and that he should come back to work. But Chun declined.

When Chun walked into the Facilities Services office in the Northlake Building, Sear tried to tell Chun he would be fired for job abandonment if he didn’t return to work. Chun wouldn’t hear it. He said management had “constructively discharged” him the day they tried to mandate an undesirable reassignment.

He had reached an impasse with his managers. He left the Facilities Services office that afternoon convinced the school had wronged him. It would be the last time any staff member saw him alive.

He filed a request with the Washington State Employment Security Department to receive unemployment benefits. They denied him after checking with the university and finding that job abandonment qualified Chun for nothing.

After that defeat, Chun made a choice.

“If the United States government disregarded law and justice again and I don’t get the redress from the government before August 2008, then I will proclaim my freedom and my rights by immolation myself.”

In need of help

Chun had avoided help for years.

His former teacher at Seattle Pacific University (SPU) had worried.

“I thought he was quite obviously in need of some kind of help,” said Reed Davis, an SPU political-science professor who remembered Chun from a class in the ‘90s. “The problem was he was always well dressed and groomed. He was eminently polite and pleasant, but he would go through those delusional periods.”

A Hall Health doctor had once scanned Chun’s brain to prove the absence of any microchips. Chun wouldn’t believe it.

“[The doctor] told me that there are no foreign material in my brain or skull,” he had written. “I have a conviction that the microchips are traveling in my body, and they are sometimes appear on the surface of body, they are sometimes latent. If I get a more sophisticated test, it will find some microchips.”

He ignored the doctor’s advice to seek psychiatric help.

His last days: “Father, glorify me in your presence”

No UW employees had seen Chun since Aug. 25. But he didn’t fade away. The university’s Safe Campus group was busy preparing a violence prevention plan — for the UW.

“We know that he’s received news that he doesn’t like. He could come back to the workplace, and he might be angry,” said David Girts, Safe Campus director, during a 2009 interview. “We’ve all heard stories about disgruntled employees who come back and start violence.”

He paused. Then: “There’s no reason to think he would do that.”

Girts’ office, Safe Campus UW, distributed Chun’s photograph to the Facilities Services main office. They also scheduled a violence-preparedness conference for Facilities Services employees.

This, Girts said, was a routine “contingency plan.” Chun’s managers said he wasn’t dangerous, but the university wasn’t taking any chances.

Following the 2007 murder of Rebecca Greigo in Gould Hall and the Virgina Tech shootings, administrators created Girts’ office. The UW Police Department began to offer services like NightRide and NightWalk. The university had a new message: If you feel unsafe, we’ll help you out. If you’re upset, call CareLink counseling services and you’ll have five free sessions.

But Chun had been fired. He’d refused CareLink services. His union no longer represented him. His family had long ago left him, and he had forgone church attendance for years.

Nobody knew how Chun felt or what he did. His employers did know that Chun had ignored their letters for months; he might be angry with his firing, they reasoned. Indeed, UW Human Resources had received a 20-page rebuttal against his firing that Hrab, the human-resources employee, called “troubling.”

So Girts’ office called a meeting for Tuesday, Oct. 28, to address safety concerns.

But Girts’ concerns would become irrelevant two days after that. Chun signed his manifesto Thursday, Oct. 30, and reported to Red Square at 1 p.m. with his backpack, this time laden with gasoline.

The last lines of his 128-page manifesto are from John 17:1.

“Father, the time has come, Glorify your Son, that your son glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent, I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began -------.”

In Soo Chun set himself on fire in Red Square on Oct. 30, 2008, and died soon after.

News Editor Lexie Krell contributed to this story. Reach Development Editor Andrew Doughman at news@dailyuw.com.