Ex-Owner Tells of Cafe Threats Before Shooting

The former owner of a Santa Ana cafe testified Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court that a street gang had demanded “protection” money from her repeatedly in the months before her sister was wounded by gunfire at the North Euclid Street restaurant in 1984.

Yen Lam, the former cafe owner, is being sued by her sister, Anh Phuc Lam, who contends that Yen Lam should have warned her of gang activity in the neighborhood around the Cafe Lup. If that warning had been given, Anh Phuc Lam contends, she would have known better than to get into the line of fire during gunplay outside the cafe on Sept. 29, 1984.

Yen Lam testified Tuesday before Judge James R. Ross that she had been subjected to repeated demands for money from a street gang after opening the Cafe Lup at 414 N. Euclid St. in April, 1984.

“They told me every month I had to give them some money,” she testified with aid of an interpreter.

The cafe owner said she refused the demands but did not notify police.

On the night of the shooting, Anh Phuc Lam, a professional singer with a large following before she fled Vietnam, had performed at the cafe at the request of patrons, as she testified she did several times a month.

While she was in a bathroom, eight to 10 gunshots were fired outside the cafe. Police officers testified that the incident involved a dispute over a car believed to have been stolen by the “Fifth Street Gang,” a group of about three dozen street toughs active in the neighborhood.

Anh Phuc Lam testified, also through an interpreter, that she did not realize what was happening. When she returned to the dining room, she said, her sister asked her to shut a cafe door leading to the parking lot.

“I heard my sister’s voice calling me,” the singer testified. “She said, ‘Quick, quick--please close the door.’ She seemed to want me to do it right away.”

When the singer reached the door, she was shot in the stomach.

The cafe owner testified she was afraid. She said her request to her sister was a matter of “reflex.”

“I was in the kitchen. I heard gunfire,” Yen Lam testified. “Everything happened so fast. Then I saw my sister coming from the bathroom, and I just asked her to close the door.”

No one was arrested in the shooting, but Santa Ana homicide investigator Gary Bruce said authorities suspected the gang. Bruce said he believes that the singer was wounded by a stray bullet.

Bruce testified that the area was one of heavy street-gang activity. A market across the street had been subjected to extortion demands, and Bruce said he would not have been surprised to learn that the cafe was also a target.

Merchants in the predominantly Latino area rarely came to police.

“Most were uncooperative,” Bruce testified Tuesday. “They didn’t want to get involved with the Police Department because they didn’t want retaliation.”

The case has been split into two phases. A jury will first decide if the cafe owner had any responsibility to warn her sister, the customer, of the danger of gang activity in the area.

If the jury decides she did, it then will hear testimony on the extent of the singer’s damages. The file in the case shows several different requested damage awards. Anh Phuc Lam alleges that the shooting has damaged her singing career.

Yen Lam now works as a manicurist in Long Beach. The cafe was insured for $500,000, according to a lawyer in the case.

In a brief interview outside the courtroom, Anh Phuc Lam said she and her sister and four other relatives fled Vietnam in a boat in 1979. The two lived together until about six months after the shooting, she said.

She said she made eight records in Vietnam and still travels extensively to entertain.