Jiverly Wong, the 41-year-old Binghamton, N.Y., gunman

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — In an all-American city that has seen better days, they are true strangers from lands as far apart as Laos, Mexico, Somalia and the former Soviet republics.

The American Civic Association was the place they turned to for help navigating their journey. But their bridge to a better life is now a monument of immigrant sorrow, the site of a shooting rampage that killed 14 people, including the gunman.

Perhaps most implausible of all is that the killer was one of their own — as well as a son of one of their own. The gunman’s father was known for his own work with immigrants in the area.

“That this tragedy should have happened in our community, to our friends who only wanted to advance their knowledge and love of America, is almost unbearable,” the association’s board president, Angela Leach, said Saturday.

The volunteer-based civic group, a member agency of the United Way of Broome County, was founded in 1939 by 11 immigrants. It helps roughly 60 to 100 people a day with finding housing, food, clothing, medical care and jobs, as well as offering English classes, interpreters, personal counseling and more.

“It’s like having a mini-United Nations in your community,” said Mark Kachadourian, a Binghamton attorney who has been on the association board since 2001. He became involved with the group after it helped his wife, a Canadian, get U.S. citizenship.

Some victims of Friday’s shooting left violent homelands only to be slain in a quiet, industrial city at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chenango rivers.

Layla Khalil, an Iraqi woman in her 50s, came to the United States after surviving three car bombings in Iraq, said Imam Kasim Kopuz, leader of the Islamic Organization of the Southern Tier.

“To think that would happen here,” Kopuz said.

She had three children, including a son who is a doctoral student at the Sorbonne in Paris, a daughter who is a Fulbright scholar at Binghamton University and a son in high school. The daughter declined an interview because she was planning her mother’s funeral.

Binghamton has always been a lure for immigrants since 2005, according to city statistics. They are a cosmopolitan mix of Kurds, Chinese, Filipinos, Africans, Iraqis — but only a fraction of the city’s predominantly white population of 43,000. The center is a stepping stone for recent arrivals, many of them with poor or nonexistent English-speaking skills. Dolores Yigal, a recent touchdown from the Philippines who died in the rampage, was learning English there as she dreamed of getting a job working with children, said her husband, Omri Yigal. “She wanted to learn English so she could find work,” he said.

Police arrived at Omri Yigal’s house on Saturday night to tell him his wife was among the dead. “They said she probably went quickly, so she didn’t suffer, I pray,” he said in a shaky voice.

Before shooting, signs of frustration

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Jiverly Wong was upset over losing his job at a vacuum plant, didn’t like people picking on him for his limited English and once angrily told a co-worker, “America sucks.” A night before the shooting, Wong told a friend he had been laid off and was living on $200 per week in unemployment benefits.

It remains unclear, though, exactly why the Vietnamese immigrant strapped on a bulletproof vest, barged in on a citizenship class and killed 13 people and himself.

Jiverly Wong had apparently been preparing for a gun battle with police but changed course and decided to turn the gun on himself, Chief Joseph Zikuski said Saturday. “He had a lot of ammunition on him, so thank God before more lives were lost, he decided to do that,” Zikuski said.

Wong’s tactics — including the body armor and copious ammunition — fit him into a category of killers called “pseudo-commandos,” said Park Dietz, a criminologist and forensic psychiatrist at UCLA who analyzed the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado in 1999.

Barricading the back- doors to trap his prey “was his way of ensuring that he could maximize his kill rate,” Dietz said. “This was all about anger, paranoia and desperation.”

Wong was born in Vietnam to an ethnically Chinese family. He moved to the States in the early 1990s and soon afterward became a citizen, friends and relatives said.

— From wire reports