Some years ago, in 2008, I made a post called "My Wing Chun Instructor..." Some of you guys may recall. It has since been pulled as the instructor in question, Mark Barquera, contacted a lawyer and had a cease and desist letter sent to me threatening litigation over my comments about what happened. As the old thread is no longer up and running and it was some time ago, I don't recall everything that was posted there, but I am sure I would stand by most of it. In this thread, I would like to follow up on it and bring back some of what happened years ago as well as what is going on right now.
Back in 2008, I wrote that my Wing Chun instructor of the time was "a dick" and that I was looking to train elsewhere in Phoenix. People asked me to comment on how he was a dick, so I obliged. I had been training with him for a while and he had a teaching style that was very aggressive. It didn't really matter if you were doing what he asked or not correctly, everything was always wrong. He would even make adjustments to my form, walk away, come back without me having moved an inch and readjust my whole form while yelling at me for having it wrong again. It was some ridiculous stuff for sure. He had the mindset that training under anybody else but him in any other style was a betrayal. I had commented about possibly finding an MMA gym to another classmate and they had mentioned it to him. This prompted Mark to call me on my phone and tell me that we would have "problems" if he found out I was training in anything else other than Wing Chun under him. I don't recall the exact route the conversation took anymore due to how long it's been, but essentially he gave me the impression that he was threatening me with possible violence for training in anything other than just his Wing Chun. This is what originally led me to my old post.
After some of this, I was talking in an old MySpace Group (I miss the old MySpace, honestly) with some other people about martial arts and Chris Chan's school in California came up. Mark Barquera claimed to be from Chris Chan's school, a Sifu under him. Below is a picture with Mark circled in what he told me was a picture from a mass promotion of Sifu by Chris Chan that he was a part of:
And a better view of Mark himself:
This is a more recent image from his Facebook account.
Anyway, a person I ran into from Chris Chan's school (I no longer recall his name and MySpace is such a pile of crap now that I can't even try to find him again) knew Mark when I asked him about him and contacted me via private message about him. He warned me that he was actually dangerous and stated that Mark was banned from the Chris Chan school for attempting to run over another student. Below is an old screen cap that I posted with the other person's name omitted from back in 2008:
Glad I kept old images saved in Photobucket from when all of this happened...
I posted the above screen capture in my original thread which is no longer up. Shortly after this, I received a phone call from a blocked number with a voicemail that sounded like a gun being fired 3 times. I no longer have record of this, but I also posted this in my original thread. My mind instantly jumped to the conclusion that this was mark firing a handgun over the phone. I did not have proof of it, but as an 18 year old kid who had been threatened by Mark I bluffed and reported back that I had the police track the number. Looking back, I have no idea how that would have even happened. Some people called BS on me and you guys were right. Looking back, I still suspect that I was correct about the voicemail.
The message about Mark possibly being dangerous seemed to be a legitimate warning to me. The accusations were pretty big, but Mark had a history of saying odd things like that aliens would be taking over the world and that the only survivors would be those that had become proficient in Wing Chun under him. He also had a tendency to slap students for doing things wrong. Not on the face, but to hit people in the arms and such and berate them using curse words and threatening violence for not doing things the way he wanted them done in class. Given my dealings with him up to that point, I made the decision not to train with him again.
I don't recall everything that went on in the original thread, but other students from his class at the time took the liberty of jumping on the thread and expressing that they didn't agree with my assessment of Mark being possibly dangerous or anything like that. Mark began showing up to my workplace of the time and shouting at my coworkers over my thread online. My coworkers became uncomfortable with the situation and I was asked by my boss to get things sorted out quickly with Mark. I gave him a call, got shouted at over the phone, was threatened again by being told that if I didn't retract everything I stated here on Bullshido he would "have trouble keeping the dogs on the leash" implying that he had some connection that would be coming after me. At this point, the other students of his class wanted nothing to do with me and just about anybody I told about his threats wrote me off as being full of it and spreading lies.
The thread was not removed as I had no way to take down a whole thread, but I explained what had happened and edited out all of my previous posts. This left the thread to other users to look into his background and see what they could dig up. After a while, the thread became inactive. I do recall doing a Google search of Mark Barquera by name a while after that and finding that the thread was one of the top results under his name, hanging right below his own Wing Chun website at the time. I want to say it was maybe a year or two later that I was sent a cease and desist letter by his lawyer threatening action if the entire thread didn't come down. At this point in time I was pretty much over the whole thing and asked the admin here to remove it for me so I could go back to my normal life.
After all of this, I was working in another retail store when I ran into him again. He didn't recognize me right away but I recognized him. This was after the thread had been taken down. The whole incident kind of sat oddly in my head. I still felt like he was unstable, but the direction the original thread went in definitely went too far in my mind as well with a lot of users here, including myself, going as far as to mock him pretty extensively. I decided to approach him myself and make a personal apology since I had the chance. After I approached him, and he at first did not recognize me, I brought the incident back up reminding him who I was and apologizing for how things got somewhat out of hand. Predictably, he pretty much blew up at me when he remembered who I was, told me I had come very close to being killed by some shadowy underground people, and then sort of just calmed down and accepted my apology. Hard to describe the overall reaction, he went from blowing up to calming completely down pretty quickly. He then told me I would never be allowed to train with him again (which I didn't want to anyway) but that he accepted my apology. After this point, I basically forgot about him.
In 2014, however, I became curious what he was up to and if he was still teaching Wing Chun so I decided to search for his Wing Chun school on Google. No results for his old school, so I looked him up as Sifu Mark Barquera. Found out about his school "Club Fu" which didn't have a whole lot of information on it. Then I simply searched "Mark Barquera Phoenix" to narrow down results to just the person in my city. The image results in the google search popped with a picture of his mugshot which was connected to this article:
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...abrk/18014605/
As it turns out, Mark was apparently using Methamphetamine and staying with somebody else when he shot a woman in the head. The article goes over the full scenario. In my mind when I found this, this confirmed that it was good of me to get the heck away from him and his class. It's still creepy to think that a lot of the other students that I tried to warn that he was violent just brushed me off and believed that he was totally normal and just some great Wing Chun teacher. I've been trying to follow what happens with his court case using the AZ Court Case Lookup ever since. Not a whole lot of information to go off of there, but I'm not sure how else to see what's happening with the trial as there's no further news on this since the shooting itself.
Over the last year and a half, I've been working for a company called Community Bridges in Phoenix. We are kind of a "Ground Zero" so to speak for drug abusers and the mentally ill to seek help when they're at a low and don't know where to go or what to do to get better. I've learned a lot about drug use and mental illness. I'm no doctor, but I can't help but see parallels between Mark's personality and that of others with mental illness and addiction to Methamphetamine. I'm reminded of his personality quite a bit in my line of work which got me thinking about posting this up. At least this way anybody that remembers that whole thread can see what eventually came of Mark Barquera. Just thought I would throw this out there, this time more objectively. For my original thread I was kind of a young douchebag and used this place as an outlet to publicly mock Mark. This time, I just want to share some of what happened as a refresher and what happened down the line.
If anybody else lurking around here remembers the original thread, feel free to share what you remember. Also, if anybody has ever met mark and wants to share their experiences with him then that will surely provide an interesting look into what was going on with his whole Wing Chun operation. He sure had an odd way of teaching and some out-there things to say during his classes. If I remember any other details from speaking with him in the past I'll add them, but most of my dealings with him were a few years ago at least.
-IMightBeWrong, formerly under the username "zaohu" for the original thread