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Brandon Jones of Tyler, Texas remembers drawing Batman comics Collectively with his buddy, John Cheng, again As quickly as they have been in elementary school together.

“In fourth grade, heroes are every thing,” said Jones, including that he and Cheng turned quick pals, their househpreviouss dwelling Inside the identical neighborhood.

“We have been biggest pals till the day he died,” added Jones, stopping again tears.

Cheng was an accomplished medical doctor who practiced in Orange County. However he furtherly had An excellent love of martial arts and practiced kung fu.

Derrick Wright, a social worker for unhoused veterans and a martial arts teacher in St. Louis, said Cheng was his teacher for Greater than a decade in Riverside, the place Cheng was doing his medical residency. Cheng, Based mostly on Wright, was a Grand Grasp diploma in conventional martial arts.

“[He] was On A daily basis prepared To level out and assist completely different people and see completely different people succeed,” said Wright, including that it was Cheng who gave him a mortgage so he might put a down cost on a house.

Wright said he has fond reminiscences of going Collectively with his good friend to Disneyland on a whim to rejoice their Thirtieth birthdays, and attending Cheng’s Marriage ceremony.

Dr. John Cheng was fatally shot all by way of an assault on a lunch banquet at a church in Laguna Woods.

On Cheng’s heroism On the Laguna Woods church, Wright said: “I’m Joyful with him as a Outcome of that’s precisely what somebody like him would have carried out.”

For a quantity of people in Cheng’s “kung fu househprevious,” it was no shock To Take heed to sheriff’s officers say that Cheng had charged the gunman after he opened hearth in a Laguna Woods banquet hall on Sunday, sacrificing his life for a quantity of completely differents. Cheng was fatally shot and 5 completely different people, with ages Starting from 66 to 92, have been wounded. Cheng is survived by his spouse and two youngsters.

“With out the actions of Dr. Cheng, It is Little question thOn there Can be pretty A pair of further victims On this crime,” Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes tprevious a press convention on Monday.

“I can see John [considering], ‘I gotta cease this man’,” Jones said. “John by no means wavered. Anyone that is Aware of him will say he by no means wavered.”

In an e-mail, Johnna Gherardini, a medical colleague who labored with Cheng at South Coast Medical Group, described him as a “pure protector and healer.”

“His heroism saved so Many people NOT solely at that church, but all by way of his profession,” Gherardini wrote.

Dr. Cheng, or Sifu Cheng as L.A.-based filmmaker Christian Everhard remembers him, was by a quantity of accounts a caring martial arts teacher who touched the stays of lots of.

Everhard said he first met Cheng about 20 years in the past when he started his journey in martial arts. It was his “kung fu brcompletely differents and sisters” who first gave Everhard the information of the capturing.

“In kung fu, there’s a lineage from teacher to scholar,” said Everhard, remembering his previous good friend. “And he has so many scholars that his spirit will stay on with any scholar that he’s touched.”

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Source: https://laist.com/news/he-never-wavered-friends-students-of-doctor-killed-in-laguna-woods-shooting-remember-their-beloved-martial-arts-teacher