DA: Customer With Duck-Sauce Grudge Killed Deliveryman

A customer of a Chinese restaurant in New York City who argued with the manager over extra packets of duck sauce ultimately responded by murdering the restaurant’s longtime deliveryman, authorities say. Glenn Hirsch, 51, was arrested Wednesday and is accused of following and fatally shooting 45-year-old Zhiwen Yan, "who had no part in his petty spat," reports the New York Daily News. Great Wall restaurant manager Kai Yang previously told the Daily News that Hirsch grabbed all of the duck sauce from a self-serve station when he picked up an order in November, only to return to demand a refund, claiming "you didn't give me enough duck sauce."

"A petty dispute over a takeout order became an obsessive point of contention for the defendant, who began to stalk and harass employees at the restaurant for months," Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz says, per the New York Times. Yang says Hirsch confronted him and another employee with a gun, damaged employees' cars and the restaurant's locks, and yelled racial slurs. "He hates Asian people," Yang tells the Daily News. "He said he wanted to kill all of us." Yan in particular had alerted police to Hirsch, Yang adds. Officers were still investigating when Yan, a father of three who'd worked at the Great Wall for more than a decade, was shot in the chest April 30 while riding on his delivery scooter.

Surveillance video showed Hirsch driving past the restaurant seven times before following the deliveryman, prosecutors say, per the Times. Authorities later found eight guns in the home of Hirsch's estranged wife, "where he fled to after the shooting," per CBS News. They believe she was holding the guns for her husband, who doesn't have a license allowing legal ownership, per the Daily News. Hirsch, who was reportedly arrested 10 times between 1995 and 2012, pleaded not guilty to murder, criminal possession of a weapon, criminal mischief, menacing, and stalking on Thursday. Though Yan's widow Eva Zhao has expressed relief at the arrest, a lawyer for the family says there should be hate crime charges as well. (More murder stories.)