Yoshihiro Hattori (服部 剛丈, Hattori Yoshihiro, November 22, 1975 – October 17, 1992, often referred to as Yoshi Hattori^[4]) was a Japanese student on an exchange program to the United States who was shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The shooting happened when Hattori, on his way to a Halloween party, went to the wrong house by mistake. Property owner Rodney Peairs (/piːrz/)^[5] fatally shot Hattori, erroneously thinking that he was trespassing with criminal intent. The killing and Peairs' trials received worldwide attention, initiating discussion about race relations and attitudes toward Asians in the United States.^[1][2][3]

Peairs was acquitted of manslaughter at a criminal trial, but at a civil trial he was found liable for Hattori's death. The court awarded Hattori's parents US$650,000 ($1,336,192 today) against Peairs in damages.

Yoshihiro Hattori was born in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, the second of the three children of Masaichi Hattori, an engineer, and his wife Mieko Hattori.^[6] He was 16 years old when he went to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States, in August 1992 as part of the American Field Service (AFS) student exchange program; he had also received a scholarship from the Morita Foundation for his trip. Hattori was hosted as a homestay student in Baton Rouge by Richard and Holley Haymaker (a college professor and a physician, respectively) and their teenage son, Webb.^[7]

Two months into his stay in the U.S., Hattori and his homestay brother Webb Haymaker received an invitation to a Halloween party on October 17, 1992, organized for Japanese exchange students. Hattori went dressed in a white tuxedo in imitation of John Travolta's character in the film Saturday Night Fever. At about 8 p.m., Haymaker and Hattori drove to the neighborhood in East Baton Rouge Parish where the party was being held. The two youths mistook the residence of Rodney Peairs, a 30-year-old supermarket butcher,^[8] and his wife Bonnie Peairs, for their intended destination due to the similarity of the address and the Halloween decorations on the outside of the house.^[9][10]

Hattori and Haymaker walked to the house's front door and rang the doorbell. Nobody came to the front door, but Bonnie Peairs opened the side door leading to the carport and saw Haymaker standing a few yards away. Haymaker was wearing a neck brace due to a recent injury and bandages as part of a Halloween costume. He attempted to address Bonnie Peairs, but she later testified that she panicked when Hattori appeared from around the corner and moved briskly towards her. She slammed the door and told her husband Rodney to get his gun.^[5]

Outside, Haymaker concluded that he and Hattori had come to the wrong house. They were preparing to return to their car when Rodney Peairs opened the carport door, armed with a .44 Magnum revolver. Hattori stepped back towards Peairs, saying, "We're here for the party." Peairs pointed the gun at him and yelled, "Freeze!" Haymaker had caught sight of the firearm and shouted a warning after Hattori,^[11] but Hattori had limited English and was not wearing his contact lenses that evening; it is possible that he did not understand Peairs' command to "freeze"^[12] and did not see the weapon,^[5] or might even have thought that this was part of a Halloween prank.^[13] Hattori was also holding a camera which Peairs mistook for a weapon.^[12] When Hattori continued moving towards Peairs, Peairs fired his gun at him from a distance of about 5 feet (1.5 m) away, hitting him in the chest, and then retreated back inside the house. Haymaker ran to the home next door for help, returning with a neighbor to find Hattori badly wounded and lying on his back. The Peairses did not come out of their house until the police arrived about forty minutes after the shooting. Bonnie Peairs shouted to a neighbor to "go away" when the neighbor called for help.^[5]

The shot pierced the upper and lower lobes of Hattori's left lung and exited through the area of the seventh rib; he died in an ambulance minutes later from blood loss.^[10]

After the trial, Peairs told the press that he would never again own a gun.^[21] A 2013 source reported that he had lost his home and his supermarket job following the shooting and was living in a trailer park.^[19]

The Japanese public were shocked by the killing and by Peairs's acquittal.^[22] Hattori's parents and his American host parents, the Haymakers, went on to become active campaigners for gun law reform in the U.S.^[23][24] In November 1993 they met with President Bill Clinton, who was presented with a petition signed by 1.7 million Japanese citizens urging stronger gun control. A petition signed by 120,000 American citizens was also presented to Congress.^[25] The Hattoris and the Haymakers lent their support to the Brady Bill (originally introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991), which mandated background checks and a five-day waiting period for the purchase of firearms in the U.S.^[26] It was signed into law by President Clinton on November 30, 1993, as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.^[27] According to Walter Mondale, then U.S. ambassador to Japan, who presented Hattori's parents with a copy of the Act on December 3, 1993,^[28] Hattori's death "had a very definite impact on passage of the Brady bill."^{[29][lower-alpha 2]} The Hattori and Haymaker families remained active in gun control activism. In March 2018, following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the Hattoris participated in the March For Our Lives and spoke with survivors.^[31]

Following the killing, some argued that had Hattori been white, Bonnie Peairs may have not reacted the way she did. The Haymakers stated in an interview following the trial that had Hattori been white, they believed he would have never been killed, noting that Bonnie Peairs said that she first noticed that Hattori was "darker colored" than her. Some in Baton Rouge had said that Bonnie Peairs was frightened because she believed that Hattori was a light-skinned black man. Bonnie Peairs rejected notions that her reaction had been racially motivated, stating that, "... it was his fast movement toward that door that scared me so bad, not the color of his skin."^[1][2][3]

In 1997, filmmaker Christine Choy released a documentary film about Hattori's death called The Shot Heard Round The World.^[32]

Dick Haymaker established two endowed scholarships designed to honor Yoshi: the Yoshihiro Hattori Memorial Scholarship provides financial aid to students from Japan, and the Yoshihiro Hattori Memorial Fund, for Off-Campus Study is available for those who plan to study in Japan. The Hattori family donated some of the $100,000 they received to gun reform groups and launched the Yoshi Foundation, an exchange program for American high school students to spend a year in Japan where they can experience life without gun violence.

Webb Haymaker died by suicide in March 2022 at the age of 46.^[33] According to his loved ones, he was haunted by survivor’s guilt, and for many years, "deeply, outwardly affected".^[20]

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