Thirteen people died in Seattle's Chinatown-International District on Saturday, February 19, 1983, and a fourteenth man lived. They were members of the city's Chinese American community, people who were known in the neighborhood and who knew the men responsible. It remains the deadliest mass killing in Washington State history. Kwan Fai Mak, who went by Willie, was arrested within hours with a second man, Benjamin Ng. A third, Wai Chiu "Tony" Ng, crossed into Canada and was not found for more than a year and a half.
In October 1983 a King County jury convicted Mak of 13 counts of aggravated first-degree murder and of first-degree assault, and the same jury, answering the one question Washington law put to it, sent him toward execution. The Washington Supreme Court upheld the verdict and the sentence in 1986 by a vote of seven to two. Five years later a federal district court set the death sentence aside, finding that the two young lawyers appointed to defend him had given the jury nothing at all about the man they were asked to condemn, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed in July 1992. Mak was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the sentence his co-defendant Benjamin Ng had received at the end of the first trial. In February 2023 he was still serving that sentence in Washington State.
Mak's family came to the United States in 1975 from Kwangtung Province, in southern mainland China, and settled in Seattle. He had spent part of his youth in Hong Kong before the move, and the family arrived when he was an adolescent, an age at which, an expert later told a federal court, young Chinese immigrants to North America often struggled most with the clash between the culture they had left and the one they had entered. He attended Cleveland High School in Seattle for a short time, left without finishing, and later earned a GED.
In the years that followed he lived in South Seattle and took whatever work came: kitchen jobs in Chinese restaurants, a stretch at a steelyard, and work in the after-hours gambling clubs of the Chinatown-International District. By early 1983 he owed serious gambling debts. He was 23.
Within his family he was, by the testimony that would surface eight years later, a beloved and dutiful son and a favorite uncle. None of that reached the jury that decided whether he should live.
Benjamin Ng was 20 in February 1983. He had left high school without graduating and, like Mak, had worked in Chinatown restaurants and gambling clubs.
Wai Chiu Ng, known as Tony, was 25 and was no relation to Benjamin. He had come to Seattle from Hong Kong in the early 1970s and had no criminal record. He would later say that he owed Mak about $1,000 and that he had been pressured into taking part.
Thirteen people died that night. They were men and women of the Chinese American community, many of whom lived closer to Beacon Hill than to the district itself, and they were well known to one another and to the neighborhood. A police captain said the same day that he believed the victims had known their killers.
One man survived. The information he gave police led them, within hours, to Mak and Benjamin Ng. He would later identify all three men, and he testified at each of their trials, living under heavy police protection while the cases were heard. He died in 1993.
The Seattle Police Department arrested Mak and Benjamin Ng several hours after the killings. A third person was questioned that day and released without charge. Police said they believed robbery was the motive, said they had found no evidence of gang involvement, and said they were looking for another suspect. King County's chief deputy prosecutor announced that charges would be filed the following Tuesday. Both men were charged with multiple counts of murder and robbery.
Finding the third man took far longer. Tony Ng left the United States and spent about 20 months in Calgary, Alberta, working in a factory. On October 4, 1984, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested him in Calgary, acting at the request of the FBI. He was returned to Seattle for trial on the condition that the state would not seek his execution.
Benjamin Ng went to trial first, in August 1983. The surviving witness testified against him. He was convicted of aggravated murder for all 13 deaths and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The jury did not return a death sentence.
Mak's own defense began late. His first lawyers withdrew, and the court-appointed attorneys who replaced them were not assigned until May 1983. Both were three or four years out of law school. Neither had ever defended a capital case. For roughly five months each of them worked close to 90 hours a week, and nearly all of that effort went into a single theory for the guilt phase: that another man, not Mak, had planned the killings with Benjamin Ng, and that Mak had been drawn in without understanding what was intended. The trial judge excluded that evidence.
The trial ran from September 20 to October 5, 1983. The survivor testified. The jurors came to see Mak as the leader of the three, and they convicted him of 13 counts of aggravated first-degree murder and of first-degree assault.
The penalty phase began within hours of the verdict. Mak's lawyers had made almost no preparation for it. They had never asked his family to attend the trial. They called no relative to speak for him and no one to describe his life in Hong Kong or Seattle. What they offered in mitigation was expert testimony on the reliability of eyewitness identification and a copy of the verdict that had spared Benjamin Ng. They tried again to put before the jury the evidence that another man had planned the crime, now as a reason to doubt that Mak had been in command, and the judge again kept it out as irrelevant to sentencing.
The prosecution's case for death rested on Mak himself: it portrayed him as a man without fundamental values and, in closing, as the one of the three who had been in charge.
Under Washington's statute the jury had one question to answer: having in mind the crime of which the defendant had been found guilty, were the jurors convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that there were not sufficient mitigating circumstances to merit leniency? A "yes" meant death. A "no," or a failure to agree, meant life without parole. The instructions stressed again and again that all twelve jurors had to agree, and one of them told the jury that it could not answer "no" unless every juror agreed. The jurors answered "yes," and Mak was sentenced to death.
The Washington Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence on April 24, 1986, in State v. Mak. The vote was seven to two. The majority agreed with the trial judge that the evidence pointing to another man as the planner had been properly kept from the jury. The two dissenting justices took the opposite view at the penalty phase: the excluded evidence, the dissent said, could have "raised doubts about Mak's alleged autonomy and control in the crime." Mak then filed a personal restraint petition, Washington's collateral challenge, and the same court denied it.
Mak next petitioned the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington for a writ of habeas corpus. A magistrate recommended rejecting all but three of his claims. The district court reviewed the prosecution's files privately for withheld evidence and found no violation of the state's duty to disclose. It held an evidentiary hearing on the performance of his trial lawyers. Family members testified that no one had asked them to come to court. One of the trial attorneys testified that he had made no conscious decision to leave out evidence that would have shown Mak as a person, and that he had not believed such evidence would have opened the door to damaging rebuttal. A second defense lawyer testified that there had been no reason not to call both family members and an expert.
The expert the jury never heard was an authority on the difficulties of Chinese young people who move from Hong Kong to North America in adolescence. He was prepared to explain those assimilation problems and how they might have shaped Mak.
In 1991 the district court denied relief on the convictions and granted it on the sentence. Mak v. Blodgett, 754 F. Supp. 1490, held that he had been denied the effective assistance of counsel at the penalty phase. The court found the lawyers' failures understandable in light of their inexperience and the little time they had been given, and found them constitutionally deficient all the same. The state appealed, and Mak cross-appealed the rejection of his challenges to the convictions.
A panel of the Ninth Circuit decided both appeals on July 16, 1992, in a per curiam opinion. On the convictions it ruled against Mak, disposing of his guilt-phase claims in a separate unpublished memorandum: the exclusion of the third-party evidence at the guilt phase, limits on cross-examination, hearsay, newly discovered evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, jury unanimity and the disclosure claims all failed.
On the sentence it ruled against the state. The court described the picture the prosecution had drawn of a man without fundamental values and found that the defense had presented "no humanizing evidence whatsoever to offset that picture." Family members could have described a loving son and uncle; the cultural-conflict expert could have placed his conduct in the setting of an adolescent uprooted from Hong Kong. The state argued that the guilt-phase evidence was overwhelmingly damaging and the proffered mitigation insubstantial, so that nothing would have changed. The panel disagreed. Because Washington required a unanimous jury for death, a single juror persuaded by the missing evidence could have prevented the sentence, and the district court had been right to ask whether there was a reasonable probability that at least one juror would have voted for leniency.
The panel did not rest on counsel's failures alone. It held that the exclusion at the penalty phase of the evidence that another man had planned the crime was "an error of constitutional magnitude," because that evidence bore directly on Mak's relative culpability and on the prosecution's claim that he had been in charge. It held as well that the sixth jury instruction "misstated the law" by telling jurors that all twelve had to agree before they could answer "no," and that the instructions and verdict form together wrongly stressed unanimity as the only way to avoid a death sentence. Taken together, the court held, the errors had prejudiced Mak. It rejected the state's arguments that the district court had focused improperly on one juror, had lowered the standard of proof, or had compared Mak's sentence improperly with Benjamin Ng's.
The disposition was brief. Mak's cross-appeal was affirmed against him. The state's appeal was "AFFIRMED and REMANDED" for "entry of an appropriate order for resentencing in accordance with this opinion." The death sentence was gone; the convictions stood.
The case went back to King County for a new sentencing. Death was never reimposed. Mak was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on the murder convictions, the same punishment Benjamin Ng was already serving. Both men were serving life without parole in December 2013, and both were still serving life sentences in February 2023, forty years after the killings.
Tony Ng was tried in April 1985. His defense was duress: he testified that Mak had threatened him and his family if he refused, and that he had not known that killing was part of the plan. The jury acquitted him of murder and convicted him of 13 counts of first-degree robbery and one count of second-degree assault. He appealed, arguing that if duress had defeated the murder charges it should have defeated the others too, and lost.
Because his crimes predated July 1, 1984, his release fell to Washington's Indeterminate Sentence Review Board, which decided parole for offenses committed before that date. His terms ran consecutively, count by count, and he served them partly in Arizona and, from 2003, in Washington State. The board denied him parole five times. In December 2009 it held a public meeting in Seattle to hear from the community. In early 2010 the board unanimously found him parolable to his final robbery term, which carried a minimum of 65 months, noting his "positive institutional conduct and an excellent work history while in prison."
On October 24, 2013, the board ruled that he would be released after serving 43 months of that last term. It found him "a fit subject for release and is fully rehabilitated." He had never become a United States citizen, and an immigration detainer stood against him. He was transferred to federal immigration custody and, in 2014, deported to Hong Kong.
Mak was tried under Washington's aggravated murder statute, chapter 10.95 of the Revised Code of Washington. For aggravated first-degree murder the presumptive sentence was life imprisonment without parole. Death was possible only through a separate special sentencing proceeding before the same jury, governed by RCW 10.95.060(4), which posed a single question: "Having in mind the crime of which the defendant has been found guilty, are you convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that there are not sufficient mitigating circumstances to merit leniency?" The statute required that the jury "must so find unanimously." Mak's verdict form gave three answers: "YES," which required death; "NO," which meant life without parole; and "UNABLE TO UNANIMOUSLY AGREE," which also meant life without parole.
That structure is what made the Ninth Circuit's reasoning turn on one juror. Since any single juror could block a death sentence, the question under the federal standard for ineffective assistance, whether there was "a probability sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome," was whether the evidence left out might have moved even one of the twelve. It is also why an instruction telling jurors they had to agree unanimously before answering "no" went to the heart of the proceeding: it reversed the burden the statute placed on a vote for death.
Mak's place among the three men was contested from the first trial to the last appeal. The prosecution called him the man in charge, and the jurors who convicted him saw him as the ringleader. His defense contended that another man had planned the killings with Benjamin Ng and that Mak had not understood what was intended. That evidence was circumstantial, and it was kept from Mak's jury at both phases. The Washington Supreme Court's majority and a federal magistrate considered it too remote; the dissent in that court and the Ninth Circuit considered it relevant to whether Mak had controlled the crime. No court found that the other man planned the killings, and he was not charged in connection with them.
Tony Ng's account of duress, that Mak threatened him and his family and that he did not know killing was intended, was his own testimony. His jury acquitted him of murder; it did not acquit him of the robbery and assault counts, and his appeal on that point failed.
1975: Mak's family moves to Seattle from Kwangtung Province, China.
February 19, 1983: Thirteen people die in Seattle's Chinatown-International District; one man survives. Mak and Benjamin Ng are arrested within hours.
May 1983: New court-appointed counsel are assigned to Mak.
August 1983: Benjamin Ng is convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to life without parole.
September 20 to October 5, 1983: Mak's trial; he is convicted of 13 counts of aggravated first-degree murder and first-degree assault and sentenced to death.
October 4, 1984: Tony Ng is arrested in Calgary, Alberta, and is later returned to Seattle.
April 1985: Tony Ng is acquitted of murder and convicted of 13 counts of first-degree robbery and one count of second-degree assault.
April 24, 1986: The Washington Supreme Court affirms Mak's convictions and death sentence, seven to two.
1991: The federal district court in Seattle sets aside Mak's death sentence for ineffective assistance of counsel at the penalty phase and denies relief on the convictions.
July 16, 1992: The Ninth Circuit affirms and remands for resentencing.
Later: Mak is resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
1993: The surviving witness dies.
October 24, 2013: The Indeterminate Sentence Review Board orders Tony Ng's release, subject to deportation.
2014: Tony Ng is deported to Hong Kong.
February 2023: Mak and Benjamin Ng are still serving life sentences.