the subjects directing hostages to place large boxes against the back door to block entry. Once the door was barricaded, the area was abandoned. A fisheye camera was installed by the team but was of limited use because of the design of the store, showing only a portion of the showroom near the door. By this time, the hostages had been tied up with speaker wire and had been arranged inside the store's glass front entrance doors in standing and kneeling positions. For more than two hours, the department's CINT tried to end the incident peacefully by negotiating with the hostage-takers. Negotiations were initially conducted from police headquarters, and a special negotiation team took over on-site after a few hours from a bank that had been evacuated. The hostage-takers demanded $4 million, forty 1,000-year-old ginseng roots, four bulletproof vests, a 50-troop military helicopter, and transportation for everyone to Thailand after a refueling stop in Alaska. Throughout the incident, the hostage-takers did not present a consistent set of demands to the negotiators. One demand that remained constant was for bulletproof vests. During early negotiations, one of the requested vests was exchanged for what was to be the release of nine hostages, although only three were released initially; the police officer who took the first vest to them stripped to his underwear to prove he was unarmed. Loi Nguyen sent a woman to retrieve the vest and threatened to shoot her children if she did not return; after she retrieved the vest, they were the first three hostages to be released. In addition to the hostage exchange, another benefit was that it allowed police to gain information on the current situation in the store. One of the released hostages revealed that the shots heard earlier had been the hostage-takers shooting at the store's security cameras and that none of the hostages had been harmed up to this point. Soon thereafter, more shots were heard, but this was the hostage-takers testing the vest. Approximately an hour later, another woman and her three children were released; an eighth hostage was released at 8:20 p.m., bearing a message that they would start to shoot the other hostages shortly. At one point during the negotiations, the leader of the hostage-takers, who called himself "Thai" (later shown to be Loi Nguyen), agreed to surrender to the police but only if they were allowed to retain their bulletproof