PART ONE: THE WAR ON FALUN GONG

On April 25, 1999, around 5AM, a considerable crowd began clustering around Beihai Park, in central Beijing. No one carried a banner or megaphone. No one shouted slogans. It wasn’t much out of the ordinary for one of China’s largest parks in the heart of this metropolis… that is, until the group began moving westward, across Beihai bridge, toward Zhongnanhai: the central government complex of the Chinese Communist party.

By 8AM, more than 20,000 had gathered on Fuyou St, in front of the General Office of the State Counsel, in a series of silent, orderly lines. Still, not a banner or sign in sight. It remained entirely unclear what the bizarre gathering was about. By now, Luo Gan, Party Secretary of Legal and Political Affairs had no choice but to call Jiang Zemin, the General Secretary of the Party and the country’s highest authority.

As Luo explained the situation, Jiang grew increasingly worried. Whoever was behind it, it was surely a protest — the first in the history of the People’s Republic to occur at Zhongnanhai, and the largest in Beijing since the 1989 crisis which still haunted Jiang. Comprehending the situation’s severity, Jiang tersely ordered Luo to “figure it out.” So Luo tapped Zhu Rongji, China’s Premier, the country’s second-highest-ranking official, to assist in bringing an end to the mysterious standoff.

But Luo and Zhu’s first move wasn’t to call in security forces to break up the demonstration. Instead, they would negotiate. Upon meeting with Luo and Zhu, the gathering’s leaders made their purpose clear; they were practitioners of a type of qigong — or slow movement exercise — known as Falun Gong, and they demanded the release of fellow practitioners arrested during a demonstration days earlier in Tianjin, a nearby port city. Zhu and Luo were confused. They had heard of Falun Gong, but they’d known qigong as merely a form of gentle exercise meant for the elderly.

To mobilize so many people almost in an instant seemed an impossibility. More worrying, the five leaders present for the negotiations were employees of the Army’s Chief of Staff department, Beijing University, and the Ministries of Supervision, Railways, and Public Security: crucially important institutions for the regime.

Over 6 hours, Luo and Zhu ultimately defused the situation by conceding to all the group’s demands, promising to release the Tianjin practitioners, that the government had no quarrel with qigong groups such as theirs, and that all present at Zhongnanhai would be safe from prosecution. Beijing had caved. The crowd had won, and so they dispersed.

But Zhu was only number two. His promises were still subject to the approval of Jiang Zemin.

And for Jiang, the whole thing was nothing short of a disaster. Later that night he penned a letter to high party members, chastising them for their lack of awareness and demanding answers. What was this group? How did they mobilize such numbers? And who was in charge?

Almost nothing is known about what happened behind the party curtain between that day and June 7th, when Jiang convened a meeting of the Politburo standing committee and gave a speech which left no room for ambiguity. “The Central Committee Team on Falun Gong shall take immediate actions to organize resources, track down the Falun Gong organizational structure throughout China, formulate a crackdown strategy, and be fully mobilized to break and wipe out Falun Gong. We shall not wage a war without preparations.” His philosophy, since the day he took power amidst the 1989 crisis, had always been very simple: “We do not negotiate with protestors.”

Around midnight, the morning of July 20th, 88 days after the unprecedented and mysterious gathering, the government finally issued its real response. Security forces across the country were dispatched to arrest Falun Gong leading members. Protests erupted in response. Within two days, the government formally announced the ban on the practice of Falun Gong. The war between Falun Gong and Beijing, still raging to this day, had begun.

How did this happen?

I. QIGONG, REBORN

Our story starts some years before the founding of this bizarre cult, in the 1980s: for China, a time of enormous change. The father of the revolution, Mao Zedong, is dead. In his place is Deng Xiaoping, a man with little taste for his predecessor’s central planning, repression, and cult of personality which had left millions of Chinese bodies in his wake. (A, 124, 169) Deng wanted China to open up, to cultivate innovation, and that meant relaxing the government’s iron grip on the economy and society. (B, 28-32)

The social change was massive. Free from total fealty to Marxism and atheism, many found themselves adrift: unmoored from any tradition thanks to years of government repression, yet yearning for spiritual fulfillment. In turn, new religious movements proliferated, each with their own blend of modern sensibilities and attachment to the past. (C, 184; D, 34)

Nothing, however, rivaled the explosive popularity of qigong, a slow movement exercise that connected the health of the body with the health of the spirit. To Deng’s eyes, Qigong was, in a sense, an effort to modernize Chinese spirituality in a distinctively Chinese way.(E, 59-64) But it wasn’t just the nation’s spirituality that was changing. Deng’s social opening also relaxed political censorship, allowing people to speak about politics in ways that would have, just a few years earlier, resulted in arrest, disappearance, or murder by state forces. (B, 28-32) However, loosening censorship without any real democratic reform meant China’s starry-eyed youth had a taste for freedom, while the government withheld the good stuff. (B, 88-92) Then, in the spring of 1989, it happened: that event which haunted Jiang.

Tens of thousands of students descended on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, not far from Zhongnanhai, to call for democracy. For a moment, a few top party officials wavered. But as the movement grew, surpassing 100,000 people in the heart of the capital, hardliners brought in the army and opened fire. In the end, casualties reached into the thousands. Deng had little choice but to replace his protestor-sympathizing General Secretary with his polar opposite: Jiang Zemin, a man who had at this moment, just one thing in mind, “We do not negotiate with protestors.” (B, 109-139)

By 1993, Jiang had solidified his hold on power and once more tightened the party’s grip on political activity. But Jiang was no mindless tyrant—he saw a difference between political, also known as dangerous, activity and harmless social groups. He had no interest in reigniting Mao’s total war on society.

And that was obvious, because Jiang’s government continued to support the qigong craze which was still going strong. If nothing else, it seemed an effective way for senior citizens to keep in shape and out of state-funded medical care. (F, 24, 178)

But qigong wasn’t just about bodily wellness — it was about spiritual health. Apparently unbeknownst to Jiang, that placed it squarely at the center of something the government very much still intended to control: religion. Because with the blossoming of new religious movements, to paraphrase Voltaire, come both fools…and scoundrels. (G) After all, fools who follow scoundrels are fools not following the state.

One such scoundrel was about to make an enormous impact in China. His name is Li Hongzhi.

Now, according to Li’s own telling, written after his rise to prominence, his early life was about the craziest thing you’ve ever heard—mentored by masters of Eastern spirituality, by age 8 he could levitate and turn invisible, you know, the usual. (E, 82) The more…plausible story—he was a horn player in a police marching band and a low-level, pencil-pushing clerk. (E, 81)

II. ENTER, LI HONGZHI

So, mediocre man that he was, in the 1980s Li joined the fad: another drop in the qigong bucket. But as it turned out, he was pretty good at it. (E, 85) This could be Li’s time to shine…

In 1992, he held his own qigong workshop, and it was a big success! Looking for a way to burnish his credentials so he could keep the game going, Li went to the government-backed Qigong society to register himself as an official ‘master of qigong’ and his organization as an official practice which he called “Falun Gong.” (H, 75-76)

Now, it’s important to pause here—Li was registered with the Chinese government to do all of this stuff. What’s more, the government seemed to love this guy. Li conducted workshops and gave talks at state universities and even became a symbol of China’s opening up to the world, lecturing at the Chinese embassy in Paris and touring America where he was made an honorary citizen of Houston, Texas, among other places. (H, 75-77)

With all his official credentials and government relationships, Li and Falun Gong were getting even more popular. From 1992 to 1994, he hosted 56 workshops with at least 60,000 total attendees. (I) At its peak, Falun Gong had at least three million practitioners in China, though Li himself would claim much higher—absurdly higher—numbers. (F, 259-260)

Speaking of Li’s more outlandish claims, around the end of 1994, Li went and published a guide to his teachings, which read an awful lot like a religious text: and a pretty strange one to boot. Mixing Buddhism, Taoism, and qigong—no problem—but add Li’s ideas, and, “What I meant was, ‘No. Problem.’ (E, 117-123) Because what you get is a bizarre theology which promises super-powers like eternal youth, flight, invisibility, and mind control to his followers, just so long as they aren’t gay or married to someone of another race. (E, 82, 89, 107) Beeecause also heaven is racially segregated and interracial children are vehicles for aliens—who by the way created modern medicine—seeking to possess human bodies and take over the world. (J)

III. SKIRMISHES

Still, for now, most in the government didn’t bat an eye, but a few took notice. Li’s claims, especially about medicine, were dangerous. Worse still, those paying attention could tell Falun Gong was becoming an all-consuming obsession for its practitioners, a potential threat to the party’s grip on society.

But before most of the party was aware, local state-run news organizations across China picked up the scent of a good story and began running articles and TV segments critical of Falun Gong in 1996. In response, Falun Gong practitioners bombarded the outlets with letters demanding they retract their statements. (C, 192-193)

Now, the letter-writing campaign hadn’t been Li’s initiative—his adherents had done it all on their own. But Li liked what he saw. He co-opted their efforts, transforming Falun Gong’s theology to follow suit. (C, 193) From now on, responding to criticism from the government would be considered a necessary part of achieving spiritual perfection. (H, 78)

Still, despite losing their official status in the Qigong society and this attention from government outlets, no clear, coordinated opposition from the government reared its head, and the group muddied along in a legal grey area, theoretically exposed but apparently un-targeted. (H, 77-80)

But this couldn’t go on forever. Despite Li’s apolitical professions, his theology—implicitly critical of the government’s Marxism and skeptical of modern science—could be tolerated no longer. (C, 166-168)

IV. WAR

So in April of 1999, this tenuous standoff broke. A Chinese physicist named He Zuoxiu published a scathing attack on the practice of qigong. (K) In response, Falun Gong practitioners descended on Tianjin university, where He worked, for a massive protest. The police countered harshly, attacking protestors and arresting 45 of them. (H, 80-81)

For those fiercely faithful to Falun Gong, this was a crisis. They had to do something big. Another small, localized protest would be insufficient, either to secure the arrested practitioners’ release or to correct the record on qigong. They had to go to Beijing. So, on April 25th, 1999, around 5AM, a considerable crowd began clustering around Beifai Park, in central Beijing. Then they marched on Zhongnanhai.

So how did a huckster with a shabby background come to convince the CCP that he and his organization posed the greatest threat to the Party since the Tiananmen protests of 1989? Well, in some ways that’s the wrong question. It was the party’s repression that so upset society and paved the way for scoundrels like Li, the party’s paranoid need for self control that radicalized the group into political action. Falun Gong’s theology and worldview were unhinged from the beginning, but it really developed into a political force, one that demanded extraordinary devotion from its members, thanks to political repression. In other words, it was the party’s own fear that brought some 20,000 Falun Gong practitioners to Zhongnanhai on April 25th and transformed a slow movement exercise group into a fierce enemy…

A fierce enemy that wouldn’t be quashed so easily. Protest and opposition from Falun Gong was far from over.

PART TWO: THE INSANITY UNFOLDS

January 23, 2001, 9AM. In Beijing, seven visitors in town for the holiday from Kaifeng depart a friend’s apartment, where they’ve been staying for several days. For their day out, each brings a bottle of Sprite. (L) Within the hour, they arrive at their first stop: Tiananmen Square: a massive plaza in the city center once home to legendary pro-democracy demonstrations but these days more popular with cult members protesting religious persecution — regardless, one of the capital’s biggest attractions. (AA)

Unfortunately, the plaza was closed for some kind of event, but instead of contenting themselves by proceeding on their itinerary and returning the next day for the New Year’s celebrations, the group determined to hang around and peruse the area nearby, agreeing to meet again at 2:30. (L) They synchronized their watches.

Four-and-a-half hours later, one of the group’s members returned to the area and began walking toward the People’s Heroes Monument in the square’s center. But on his way there, as though he needed some rest, Wang Jindong stopped, took a seat on the ground, pulled out his Sprite,…and poured it all over himself. The gasoline fumes burned his nostrils. Then he lit himself on fire. (AA)

Nearby police rushed at him, extinguishing the flames and erecting barriers to hide him from view. He was still alive. Distracted by Wang, the police were slower to notice when suddenly four more bodies went up in flames around the square: Wang’s friends.

Before the officers could reach them, one perished, as the others stood up and began stumbling around, waving their arms in the air, panicking as the pain became unbearable. (AA) They came to protest on behalf of Falun Gong — a new religious movement banned in China since 1999. They believed their faith in master Li’s teachings would render them immune to the scorching pain. (L) They were wrong.

While in other times and places self-immolation may be a successful catalyst for political change, in a nation as atheistic as China, self-destructive superstition is less likely to gain sympathy…especially when the government responds by publicizing graphic media of the event across the country alongside articles castigating an illegal cult as a cause of mass-suicide demonstrations. (AB)

Meanwhile, Li Hongzhi, great master of Falun Gong, disowned the demonstrators. He was against suicide, he argued, and so they must be very bad followers, or the whole thing was staged by the government. (M) By so transparently throwing attempted martyrs under the bus, Li exposed himself as not just a liar but a heartless, vicious one at that. Public opinion—once sour on the repression, now began to warm to the government’s years-old campaign, which officials in turn intensified. (AC)

School programs demanding children state their allegiance to science spread across the country. Companies—both Chinese and foreign-owned—were compelled to identify Falun Gong practitioners in their workforce. Those apprehended were sent to re-education, or, if they proved tough to convert, instead shipped to labor camps to first be broken physically. (AC) Reliable estimates place the number killed in the campaign over 3,000. (N)

But all that is just the beginning.

I. ORIGINS

Before going any further, it’s worth quickly clarifying — what actually is Falun Gong? And who is Li Hongzhi?

Well, Falun Gong began in 1992 as a variant of qigong — a form of slow movement exercise extremely popular in China at the time. By 1999 it had garnered at least 3 million practitioners and even the support of the government who saw in Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, a useful cultural ambassador. However, after it took on increasingly spiritual and religious attributes, Falun Gong started to worry the CCP. Years of tension followed, until the CCP’s treatment of Falun Gong got harsher, and the movement responded by staging a massive protest outside the central government headquarters, terrifying the party. What came next was a nationwide ban, followed by an intense crackdown. (O) So it was in this context that those five people set themselves ablaze in Tiananmen Square two years later.

Luckily for Li, he’d left China a couple years before the crackdown—maybe he sensed the coming change in the political winds. (E, 126) Pretty soon, he settled in, of all places, New York—more on that in a minute. (P)

But Li wasn’t retiring in defeat—anything but. In his view, to fight back, Falun gong needed to go global. Just look at this graph; starting in 1999, when the CCP’s crackdown hit, Falun Gong events outside of China skyrocketed, as the organization sought to share its story of repression with the world. (H, 115)

And it wasn’t just events, either. In 2000 some of Li’s top lieutenants founded the Epoch Times, a newspaper meant to expose the wicked truth of the CCP’s abuses. (Q) Just a few years later, Li established Shen Yun, a ballet aiming to tell the story of how the CCP destroyed Chinese culture and, of course, Falun Gong. (R)

Now, you may be thinking, “This sounds great!” Cultural output! Freedom of the press! And, yeah, fair enough. But…there are a few kinks in this story.

Set aside for now that the Epoch Times would go on to become one of America’s most prominent far-right conspiracy rags, or that Shen Yun explicitly calls the theory of evolution “a deadly idea.” (Q; S) Because it wasn’t Li leading this crusade against the CCP. No, he was busy developing Falun Gong’s theology, so that his followers would do all this for him. Suddenly, it became a core belief of Falun Gong that the battle between them and the CCP was just one level of a multidimensional conflict between good and evil. If practitioners didn’t participate, they’d be on the side of evil itself. (H, 96-98)

And, since fighting evil by achieving global reach for your newspaper and ballet is actually kind of resource and time-intensive, it turned out that the best thing loyal Falun Gong practitioners could do was volunteer…a lot. Many Epoch Times “journalists” work for free, churning out factually dubious clickbait. (H, 42; T; U; V) And while Shen Yun’s skilled dancers are compensated, the practitioners who put on the show…are not. (W)

“Ok,” you might be thinking, “this doesn’t sound great, but it’s not that crazy for a religious group to use volunteers!” And, sure, even if Falun Gong’s demands outstrip basically every modern established religion, that’s fair enough.

II. THE PROBLEMS

Except, consider for a moment just exactly what Falun Gong preaches. The core teaching is that Li’s a supernaturally gifted teacher meant to help his followers achieve moral, spiritual, and physical perfection through this particular exercise. But you can’t just do the qigong. You actually need Li to implant a spinning wheel inside you, which allows you to collect good energy from the universe through qigong and observance of the three moral virtues: compassion, forbearance, and truthfulness. (E, 82)

Okay, a little odd but heart’s in the right place, right? Well, good news and bad news. Good news is you don’t have to travel to New York for Li to implant the wheel — he can do it from anywhere in the world using his mind powers. (J) Whew. Bad news is that Li instructs his followers to lie to outsiders about Falun Gong…So, truthfulness may be a hard one. (X) Oh, and more bad news: homosexuality and interracial marriage are evil. (AD) More specifically, they corrupt the soul and leave room for aliens to possess human bodies, which Li explains, saying, “The human body is the most perfect in the universe. It is the most perfect form. The aliens want the human body.” And don’t ask what the aliens look like. According to Li, “You don't want to have that kind of thought in your mind.” (J)

Okay, but lots of religions believe things that seem wild to outsiders, and plenty hate gay people and reject evolution. Still, bad. But let’s talk about that whole anti-evolution schtick from Shen Yun. As it happens, in their effort to corrupt and possess humanity, those sinister aliens also invented technology, science, and ideas like evolution. These things, Li says, lead man away from qigong and spiritual perfection by convincing them modern medicine can heal them, keeping their bodies and souls weak and vulnerable. Oh, and the aliens are also using modern science to clone humans so they can possess their soulless bodies. So there’s that. (J)

III. THE HUMAN TOLL

The trouble with all this is, well, the people Li’s basically killed with his teachings. Back in ‘99, Beijing justified the crackdown with an estimate that Falun Gong had caused 1,400 preventable deaths and suicides, although real, reliable numbers are almost impossible to come by thanks to the group’s secrecy and their ongoing propaganda war with Beijing. Still, consider one Colleen May of Sydney, Australia. One day she said to her daughter, “I met these lovely people in the park and they do meditation once a week and I’m going to go down and do that with them.” Soon, she stopped taking the medication for her high blood pressure. Subsequently hospitalized, Colleen pulled out her IVs and spat medicine back at the nurses, believing all along that to use it meant she wasn’t a good enough believer in Li. If only she could believe harder, he would use his powers to heal her. (AD)

At 75 years old, she died of entirely preventable illness. In her daughter’s words, “two tablets a day, and she would still be with us…I would always say mum was going to outlive me.” (Y) Even worse, Jonathan Lee, Falun Gong’s spokesperson, rejected the notion Li discourages the use of modern medicine, saying, “There’s nothing preventing me from going to hospital,” then in the same breath, “But in the meantime, thanks to Falun Gong, I don’t need to go to hospital.” (Y) In other words, Colleen was wrong to believe those things, and if she had been a better practitioner she in fact would have remained healthy. If only she had believed harder.

Consider also Janin Liu, who like the many laborers behind Shen Yun and the Epoch Times, volunteered his time to Falun Gong, working on the construction of Dragon Springs: Li’s secretive and sprawling 400-acre estate in upstate New York. While on the job in 2008, Liu fell from a structure and died. (Z)

Under normal circumstances, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would launch an investigation into such a tragedy — were proper precautions observed, and was Liu even qualified for this work. But Liu had been a volunteer worker, a Falun Gong practitioner from Toronto, and OSHA can only investigate employee deaths and injuries. Moreover, Liu’s own family, thanks to Falun Gong’s beliefs about spinning wheels and modern medicine, refused an autopsy. (Z)

IV. ANALYSIS

And this is what really gets at the core of Li Hongzhi’s character, what makes him and his movement so nefarious. Liu had been engaged in dangerous work, for no pay, building Li a massive compound, a monument to the greatness of the religion he’d built, and in the end, his total sacrifice met with no accountability for those who had used him.

Because built into Falun Gong, its doctrine, its formal structure, is Li’s exceptionalism, his superiority to everyone else—Falun Gong practitioner or otherwise. In Li’s own condescending words, “You can think of me as a human being.” (J)

Consider the Tiananmen Square incident. When five people set themselves on fire in an act of terrible, extraordinary devotion, Li was across the globe, safe from any retribution, any repression. And when he was called upon to respond, he didn’t honor the fallen believers. He didn’t even acknowledge their pain. Instead, Li just disowned them.

They had set out to prove their devotion. Yet all they achieved was to intensify the crackdown and, perhaps worse, expose their divine leader as uncaring and oblivious to their suffering.

This story isn’t meant to excuse the atrocities the CCP still regularly commits against religious minorities. In fact, the sins of the party were the focus of our previous video on the origins of Falun Gong. Instead, we mean to highlight the similarities between these mortal enemies: Li and the CCP. Each victimizes the same people: the innocent followers of Falun Gong who deserve neither to be sent to re-education camps, nor to be educated by a master who persuades them to die of preventable illness. Further, each abuses these people for the same reason: in a quest for control. Just as the government demands devotion to Marxism and social conformity, so too Li demands extraordinary devotion of his followers to him. It is this totalizing approach to religion, which insists that only the teachings of Li Hongzhi—not modern science, not a conception of natural human equality, not even a democratically legitimate government like America’s—has any authority at all, that brings people to devote their labor and their lives to Li, to light themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square, to die building the great master an enormous monument.

Sources

A. Andrew Walder, China Under Mao (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2015)

B. Frank Dikotter, China After Mao: The Rise of A Superpower (Bloomsbury: New York, 2022)

C. Junpeng Li, “The Religion of the Nonreligious and the Politics of the Apolitical: The Transformation of Falun Gong from Healing Practice to Political Movement,” in Politics and Religion 7 (2014)

D. Andrew B. Kipnis, “The Flourishing of Religion in Post-Mao China and the Anthropological Category of Religion,” in The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 12 no. 1 (2001)

E. David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China, (Oxford University Press, 2008)

F. David Palmer, Qigong Fever (Columbia University Press: 2007)

G. Voltaire, The Complete Works, Volume 11 (1968)

H. Andrew Junker, Becoming Activists in Global China: Social Movements in the Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge University Press: 2019)

I. “A Chronicle of Major Historic Events during the Introduction of Falun Dafa to the Public,” Falun Dafa, 8 October 2004 [Note: This is a Falun Gong source but at least three leading Falun Gong scholars (Tong 2002, Ownby 2008, Junker 2019) consider the estimates plausible, not least because when Falun Gong exaggerates figures, as it often does, they tend to be absurdly high.]

J. William Dowell, “Interview with Li Hongzhi,” in Time, 10 May 1999.

K. He Zuoxiu, “I Do Not Approve of Teenagers Practicing Qigong,” Youth Science and Technology Outlook, 11 April 1999.

L. Xinhua. [Note: Xinhua is a government-owned and -directed media source. As such, its reliability is limited, but thanks to government prohibitions on interviews of the individuals, it is near-impossible to find any independent sources with much detail to offer. We have relied on this as sparingly as possible.]

M. Minghui, “Press Statement: Who's Behind Tiananmen Self-immolation?”

N. Amnesty International

O. Part One of this video.

P. Jonathan S. Landreth and J.S. Greenberg, “The Way We Live Now: 8-8-99: Questions for Li Hongzhi; Eye of the Storm,” in The New York Times, 8 August 1999.

Q. Alesso Perrone and Darren Loucaides, “A key source for Covid-skeptic movements, the Epoch Times yearns for a global audience,” in Coda, 10 March 2022.

R. Nicholas Hune Brown, “The traditional Chinese dance troupe China doesn’t want you to see,” in The Guardian, 12 December 2017.

S. Jia Tolentino, “Stepping into the Uncanny, Unsettling World of Shen Yun,” in the New Yorker, 19 March 2019.

T. Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, “Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times,” for NBC, 20 August 2019.

U. Darren Loucaides and Alessio Perrone, “The media giant you’ve never heard of, and why you should pay attention,” for OpenDemocracy, 10 March 2022.

V. Ben Hurley, “Me and Li — Why I left Falun Gong after being a devoted believer for a decade,” on Medium, 22 October 2017.

W. Matthias Gafni, “Behind the blitz: Falun Gong practitioners spend millions on Shen Yun ads. How do they do it?” in the San Francisco Chronicle, 11 January 2020.

X. Heather Kavan, “Falun Gong in the media: What can we believe?,” Power and Place ANZCA08 Conference, 2008.

Y. ABC YouTube.

Z. Stephen Sacco, “Questions remain in Deerpark death,” for the Times Herald-Record, 6 May 2008.

AA. CNN

AB. New York Times

AC. Time

AD. ABC