Although accounts vary, the men got into a physical altercation and were removed from the club as a result. There, Nitz held Chin down while Ebens repeatedly bashed love chin chin in the head with a baseball bat.

Chin was taken to Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where he died of his injuries four days later. Ebens and Nitz pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1983, in a plea bargain from an initial charge of second-degree murder. The lenient sentence led to an uproar from Asian Americans. 3,000 license to kill” Chinese Americans. Chin was born on May 18, 1955, in Guangdong province, Mainland China. Throughout most of the 1960s, Chin grew up in Highland Park.

In 1971, after the elderly Hing was mugged, the family moved to Oak Park, Michigan. The fight escalated as Nitz shoved Chin in defense of his stepfather, and Chin countered. Nitz suffered a cut on his head from a chair that Ebens had intended to use to strike Chin. Chin and his friends left the room, while a bouncer led Ebens and Nitz to the restroom to clean up the wound. While they were there, Robert Siroskey, one of Chin’s friends, came back inside to use the restroom.

When Ebens and Nitz left the club, they encountered Chin and his friends who were waiting outside for Siroskey. Chin called Ebens a “chicken shit”, at which point Nitz retrieved a baseball bat from his car and Chin and his friends ran down the street. Chin tried to escape but was held by Nitz while Ebens repeatedly bludgeoned Chin with a baseball bat until Chin’s head cracked open. At the time, government officials, politicians, and several prominent legal organizations generally dismissed the theory that civil rights laws should be applied to the beating of Vincent Chin. Eventually, the national body of the National Lawyers Guild endorsed its efforts. Ebens was arrested and taken into custody at the scene of the crime by two off-duty police officers who had witnessed the beating.

The verdict angered the Asian American communities in the Detroit area and around the country. Chin’s civil rights, under section 245 of title 18 of the United States Code. Nitz was acquitted of both counts. After a retrial that was moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, due to the publicity the case had received in Detroit, a jury cleared Ebens of all charges in 1987. A civil suit for the unlawful death of Vincent Chin was settled out of court on March 23, 1987. This represented the projected loss of income from Vincent Chin’s engineering position, as well as Lily Chin’s loss of Vincent’s services as a laborer and driver. In November 1989, Ebens reappeared in court for a creditor’s hearing, where he detailed his finances and reportedly pledged to make good on his debt to the Chin estate.