NEWS: Revenge may have been the motive in a Monday shooting that left two men injured outside a deli in normally serene Chappaqua.
Hengjun Chao is accused of opening fire outside Lange’s Little Store & Delicatessen at 7 a.m., injuring two men, police said. Dr. Dennis Charney, the dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was one of the men injured, according to court records and a statement by a Mount Sinai official. Charney fired Chao as an assistant professor and researcher at Mount Sinai in 2010, court records show.
Chao, 49, of Tuckahoe, faces an attempted murder charge. He is being held at Westchester County jail until his next court date Sept. 7. Charney was being treated at an area hospital for non life-threatening injuries Monday evening. The other unidentified shooting victim, a bystander, was treated for injuries and released.
After being fired for research misconduct, Chao lost a federal lawsuit against the Manhattan medical school, co-workers and administrators, including Charney, court records show.
Chao contended he tried to blow the whistle on a colleague for falsifying medical research, but ended up being fired as retaliation, court records show.
Court records show that Chao accused Mount Sinai and administrators of wrongful termination, defamation and discrimination. The lawsuit was seeking at least $171,500 in lost wages and potentially millions of dollars more in other damages.
The medical school launched an investigation of Chao after he accused the colleague of wrongdoing. School investigators contended Chao falsified his own research and he was fired because of the findings, court records show.
Chao contended he was fired in part because of his Chinese heritage. He was born in China, and graduated from Hunan Medical University and Peking Union Medical College before coming to the United States in 1997, court records show.
He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1997 to 2002, when he was hired by Mount Sinai as a researcher, court records show.
Court documents described Chao’s firing as the culmination of a heated battle between Mount Sinai professors in the high-stakes world of medical research.
The medical school’s internal investigation of Chao’s accusations resulted in thousands of pages of testimony by doctors, administrators and lab staff, court records show, and the investigation report concluded that Chao manipulated medical research data.
Chao, who researched blood diseases and cancer, cited his colleagues’ testimony as the reason for the defamation and discrimination claims in the lawsuit. He noted one colleague described him as authoritative because of his Chinese background and “cultural” differences, and others called him remarkably ignorant and sloppy to ruin his reputation, court records show.
