Heartfelt tributes poured in from all over the globe whenOscar-winningThe Killing Fieldsactor Haing Ngorwas fatally shot outside his Los Angeles apartment in 1996.
Director Oliver Stone called the 55-year-old“a man of great strength and courage,”theLos Angeles Timeswrote after Ngor’s death.
Ngor’s niece, Sophia Ngor Demetri, who escaped the Cambodian genocide with him in 1979, surviving on rats and termites as they crawled across the border to Vietnam to the safety of a Red Cross refugee camp, lost the only family she had left.
Ngor’s life — and suspicious killing — are examined in the next episode ofPeople Magazine Investigates, airing at 10 p.m. on Monday on Investigation Discovery. An exclusive clip is above.
Dr. Haing S. Ngor.Dirck Halstead/Liaison/Getty
Wanting to create a master race, in 1975, the Communist leader and the Khmer Rouge began killing up to 2 million innocent people in their deadly “Year Zero” campaign to create a socially engineered, classless, agrarian society.
Anyone who was educated, spoke another language, lived in the city or worked for the Cambodian government was considered expendable.
Those who weren’t immediately executed, like Ngor, a physician who pretended to be a taxi driver, were sent to detention camps where they died from being starved, worked to death and tortured.
Ngor’s beloved wife died in his arms at the concentration camp where they were imprisoned; there was nothing he could do to save her.
In the film,Ngor played Pran, the intrepid journalist, translator, and guide who risked his life to help Schanberg while he covered the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in Cambodia.
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In 1985, when Ngor won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Pran,he went on to use his fame not for his own gain, but to tell the world about the continuing human rights violations in Cambodia.
“The Killing Fieldsis just the tip of the iceberg,” he said at the time.
“The war is over,” he said. “But the battle is going on.”
But in 1996, Ngor was gunned down in a Los Angeles alley outside his apartment.
The incident initially seemed like a random robbery. But the gunman or gunmen left behind Ngor’s Mercedes, as well as $2,900 of cash in his jacket and $800 in his pants pocket.
“I was scared for him because he spoke freely about Cambodia,” Ngor Demetri says in thePeople Magazine Investigatesepisode.
“It wasn’t safe but he didn’t care,” she says. “He justwanted to help the people in his country. But the Khmer Rouge was still around so I’m always worried about him.”
People Magazine Investigates: Killing Fields in the City of Angelsairs Monday, Dec. 2 at 10 p.m. ET on Investigation Discovery.
source: people.com
