Special Agent James Choi, FBI HRT
Nationality: American (USA)
Current Assignment: Grey Cell
Languages Spoken: English (Native), Korean (Proficient), Spanish (Basic)
Age: 32

James Choi is third generation Korean-American. His parents are the hard-charging, achieve-at-all-costs, hyper-assimilated second generation types. Jimmy was pushed from an early age and he learned young how to push back. Academics were priority one, set by Jim's family, and he excelled in school, despite a mild case of ADHD, a diagnosis that his parents rejected out of hand. A very active boy, he constantly sought physical outlets for his almost boundless energy. Sports held an early attraction for him, but Jimmy's overprotective mother vetoed anything she perceived as dangerous. Football was automatically eliminated as an option, as were all other contact sports. After a playground bloody nose, so was soccer and, by extension every other team sport. Throughout middle and high school, Jim ran track, swam, and played golf and tennis, but his greatest coup was convincing his parents to allow him to take Tae Kwon Do by appealing to their ethnic pride and shared Korean heritage. Starting at age 11, Jim flourished in the martial art, achieving his black belt before graduating from high school.

College brought Jim's parents great expectations into even greater focus. His prescribed career choices were medicine and law. As an undergrad, he did his best to juggle prerequisites for both but the load was too great. Knowing that his parents preferred their son become a doctor, he chose law. Law school, however, was a let down- too much talking and not enough doing. Despite his misgivings, he performed well, and could have landed a job at a prestigious firm, but the thought of life stuck in an office was too much for Jimmy to bear. Out from under the financial obligations which tied him to the course that his parents had laid out for him, Jimmy did the almost unforgivable- he skipped out on taking the bar exam and applied to join the FBI instead. It would be nearly a year before his parents spoke to him again.

Family drama aside, Jimmy enjoyed the academy, moreso than any other scholastic setting he'd experienced, it giving him the physical component so absent from academia. He graduated near the top of his class. Citing his law school experience, the FBI initially assigned Jimmy to a desk job, 12-hour days shuffling through paperwork, trying to bust white collar criminals, few of whom did any hard time as a result of his efforts. He was not happy. He doggedly pestered his superiors for a transfer to the field and they finally acquiesced, shipping him off to the low-glamour Albuquerque regional field office. Jim went from high-rise desk to high desert, mostly working cases on the sprawling Navajo Indian reservation spanning the Four Corners area. It was there that he had his first experience with the unexplained.

Two weeks after a white suburban cheerleader from Santa Fe was reported kidnapped, the sixteen-year-old girl was found wandering a back road in the least civilized corner of the rez. After hours of interviews, the girl reluctantly, but with great belief and sincerity, claimed that she had been taken on a journey aboard an alien spacecraft. Viable suspects were quickly ruled out, and psychological evaluations and two polygraph tests confirmed that the girl wholeheartedly believed what she was saying. A ransom note found days after the girl's disappearance later turned out to be a ill-conceived high school prank. The girl's well-to-do parents "enrolled" her in a swanky outpatient psychiatric care facility, the case was closed for lack of evidence, and Jimmy moved on.

The itch for action that Jimmy had suffered from since childhood could no longer be ignored. In order to deal with increasingly violent drug traffickers operating on the reservation, the Navajo tribal police sought to develop an in-house tactical assault capability. The FBI regional tactical operations unit from Albuquerque was tasked with training the seminal tribal SWAT team. As a corollary to his tribal connections, Jimmy was asked to serve as liaison. He worked closely with the teams, participated in the training as both instructor and student, and joined the tribal SWAT unit on several of its early field operations. He quickly got a taste for adrenaline cycle of tactical ops, and with the endorsement of his branch office and its tactical chief, he applied for the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team. Without prior military or long-term special weapons and tactics experience, Jimmy was a long-shot for acceptance, but thanks to a few pulled strings and a low key, in-house diversity initiative, he was accepted and packed his bags once again for Quantico. Despite his lack of trigger time, he made it through selection and training with flying colors, earning a coveted spot on the team.

HRT life turned out to be almost everything he'd been searching for since childhood. He thrived as a field operator, nabbing bank robbers, cop-killers, and secessionist miltiamen. His FBI career nearly came to a screeching halt, however, on one ill-fated field op in Manila. An American citizen of Filipino ancestry suspected of involvement in terrorist activities was targeted for arrest and the HRT was brought in to enhance the operation's veneer of Constitutional legality. Fortunately for Jimmy, he drew one of the short straws and was assigned to the support team. The entry team shot first and, in the brief one-sided gun battle that ensued, a teenaged boy and a middle-aged woman, both blood relations of the suspect, were killed. The suspect's pre-school aged stepdaughter was badly wounded. The unit was yanked from the field, unceremoniously returned to the United States, and the entire entry team promptly cashiered. The PR shit-storm took months to die down and Jimmy was pulled from the field for the duration.

A year after returning to active duty, Jimmy's next big op would set him on the final leg of his path to joining Grey Cell. Electronic intelligence, collected and analyzed by the NSA, suggesting an imminent attack on the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was developed and the HRT called in to surveil and take down the cell. During the gunfight triggered by the arrest attempt, the three suspects were shot multiple times and killed. What happened next continues to defy conventional scientific explanation. One of the suspects, having taken four 10mm rounds center mass and declared dead on the scene by paramedics, somehow revived and let himself out of his body bag at the county coroner's office, killing, with his bare hands, one lab tech and a severely injuring two sheriff's deputies before Jimmy, who'd accompanied the corpses to maintain chain of custody for the Bureau, intervened. Two .45 hollow points between the undead man's oddly reptilian eyes put the suspect down for good. The entire incident was caught on the morgue's surveillance cameras. After hours of debriefing, Jimmy was cleared of any wrongdoing and ordered never to speak of the incident again. Six months later, Jimmy was approached to join Grey Cell. Searching for answers and aware that his career prospects in the Bureau were irreparably damaged, he accepted the offer without hesitation.

James Choi is just shy of six feet tall and well built, his years of Tae Kwon Do, weight training, and distance running producing a lean but muscular frame. He's got dark hair, worn stylishly short, but not short enough to reveal scalp. He's rather good looking, but his rather transient, demanding, and fast-paced work life has precluded any long-term romantic relationships.

PSYCH PROFILE TO FOLLOW.

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