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Report: Vang Said 'Evil Shaman' Spoke To Him

Hayward, Wis. (AP) ― A psychiatrist's report showing that a Minnesota man convicted of murdering six deer hunters had a history of suicidal and homicidal thoughts can be considered by a judge during sentencing next month, Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager said Thursday.

Dr. Robert Rawski examined Chai Soua Vang in August and determined Vang was competent to stand trial in September and assist with his defense, according to court records. A jury found him guilty of nine felonies.

Rawski's Aug. 25 report to Sawyer County Circuit Judge Norman Yackel, made public this week, said Vang has a "chronic history of poor adjustment to stressful interpersonal situations, perceived transgressions and limitations to his freedom."

Vang, a 37-year-old St. Paul truck driver, told the doctor that in 2003 his second wife took $3,000 he had borrowed and lost it at a casino. He became "so infuriated" that he choked her and called St. Paul police to come and "pick her up or he would kill her," Rawski wrote.

Vang also told the psychiatrist that in 2001 he pointed a handgun at his first wife, whom he married when he was 14 and in the eighth grade, and he "failed to fire when his daughter stepped in the way to protect his mother," the report said.

He spent three days in jail but was not prosecuted. They divorced in 2002.

Lautenschlager said Thursday in a telephone interview from Madison that she has not decided how she will use the mental health reports involving Vang in her recommendations to the judge when Vang is sentenced Nov. 8.

"The competency evaluation really shows Mr. Vang's propensity for violent reactions to a variety of situations," the prosecutor said. "It is part of the court record."

One of Vang's attorneys, Jonathon Smith, declined comment Thursday.

Vang was found guilty last month of six counts of first-degree intentional homicide and three counts of attempted homicide in the Nov. 21 murders of the hunters in southern Sawyer County. He faces six mandatory life prison sentences.

Yackel could order the sentences to be served at the same time or one after the other. He also decides the date Vang becomes eligible for parole.

Vang, a Hmong immigrant, contended he fired in self-defense after the white hunters who found him trespassing in a tree stand used profanity and ethnic slurs against him and fired a shot at him.

Two survivors of the shooting testified that Vang opened fire first, and that he had already shot some of the hunters by the time a single shot was fired at him.

Defense attorneys asked in August for a review of Vang's mental competency because of his apparent deterioration while held in jail awaiting trial.

Rawski's report was unsealed by the judge late last week.

In his report, Rawski suggested that Vang follow doctors recommendations for treating his moderately severe major depressive disorder to "minimize his chronic risk of suicide," the report said.

Vang told the doctor that he placed his head in a toilet trying to drown himself when he was jailed last November and that he "would rather die now and that it was not worth the taxpayers money to let him live his life out in prison," the report said.

Lautenschlager said the Sawyer County Sheriff's Department was taking the necessary precautions to protect Vang given the doctor's findings but she declined to elaborate.

Sawyer County Sheriff James Meier did not immediately return a telephone message Thursday on whether special precautions were being taken to protect Vang from himself.

Rawski's report said Vang believed the voice of an "evil shaman" has spoken to him occasionally since 1995.

"Typically the voice visits him once every two to three months, only when he is particularly angry at somebody who has engaged in a perceived transgression, and tells him to hurt or kill them," Rawski wrote in his report.

According to the report:

--Vang suffers from chronic headaches and reported nightmares in which the dead hunters return "to choke him and force him to eat a cockroach. These nightmares disappear upon awakening but have substantially disrupted his sleep."

--Vang told of being verbally abused and kicked by his father after their family moved to the United States from Laos in 1980.

--Forced to marry at 14, Vang disliked the wife his parents chose for him. He got in a fight with her, and after his father tried to physically discipline him, he ran from home to the freeway and into traffic in an attempt to kill himself.

--While working as an over-the-road trucker, Vang sometimes considered using his truck to run other motorists off the road if they had berated him for going too slow or being in their way.

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