Ngor himself was a victim of the Cambodian holocaust, and survived by hiding the fact he was an obstetrician and gynecologist, something he would have been killed for under the harsh regime and purges of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
In 1998, he wrote Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey (ASIN:0025893300) detailing his life under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
He was shot to death outside his apartment in Los Angeles, California, by members of a street gang who demanded the locket around his neck.