Mother, Son Terrorized : ‘If You Scream, We’ll Kill You’

Four robbers armed with handguns and knives burst into a Santa Ana home Thursday morning and held a family hostage, beating and threatening to kill the son and binding the mother with electrical cord.

Both hostages escaped when the son punched out a window with his fist just as police arrived. Two suspects were arrested as they tried to flee the house in the 1600 block of South Fairview Street. Two others escaped before police, believing the suspects were still inside, could cordon off the area and evacuate nearby homes.

“I’m glad I’m still alive,” Dan Nguyen said. “They kept telling my mother, ‘We’re going to cut your son’s throat if you don’t tell us where the jewelry and money is.’ ”

Nguyen, 24, said he was awakened about 7 a.m. by his mother’s screams in another part of the house. When he opened his eyes, a stranger was standing in the bedroom.

“I saw he didn’t have a gun, so I tackled him,” Nguyen said. As he wrestled the man to the floor, a second man walked into the room and pointed a pistol at his temple, he said. They then bound his arms and legs with rope and wrapped three blankets around his head, he told police.

But Nguyen’s father, Khiem Nguyen, 65, had run out a side door when the robbers burst in. He called police.

The robbers, meanwhile, bound Nguyen’s mother, Thuoc Hoang, 60, with an electrical extension cord. “They held a knife to my mom’s throat and said, ‘If you scream, we’ll kill you,’ ” Nguyen said.

The intruders, talking to each other in Vietnamese, pounded his head and demanded to know where the family kept cash and jewelry, he said.

“Every five minutes they’d come back, ask for the jewelry and threaten to kill me,” he said. “These guys looked like professionals. They were walking around waving a gun like they do this every day.”

The robbers took two suitcases full of valuables from the house during the 30-minute ordeal, Nguyen said, and stashed them in the trunk of a yellow car parked out front.

Nguyen said his hands were covered by the blankets, and he was able to wriggle out of the bindings without being detected. At about the same time, the robbers heard noises outside and left him alone with his mother in a room.

The noises were made by arriving police officers. As two of the suspects stepped into the back yard to investigate, officers arrested them.

Officers Spotted

Nguyen saw the police through the window, untied his mother and punched the glass. He and police officers lifted his mother out of the bedroom.

Arrested on suspicion of armed robbery, burglary, kidnaping and assault with a deadly weapon were Hien Van Nguyen, 25, of Westminster, and Thong Tran, 25, of Texas, said Santa Ana Police Lt. Robert Chavez. The other two suspects escaped, possibly in the car they had parked in front of the house, Chavez said. Police didn’t know the extent of the loss.

Police later found a handgun in the bathroom and another in the living room, Chavez said.

Nguyen said neither of his parents, who are retired, speak English. A 21-year-old brother already had left for classes at UC Irvine when the robbers arrived.

Nguyen, a teacher’s aide at Bolsa Grande High School in Garden Grove, described the robbery as a nightmare come true for the tightknit family, which had fled Saigon in 1975 when the country was overrun by the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong guerrillas.

Over the past several years, the family began hearing of a new threat. His mother and father, Nguyen said, often talked about the frightening robberies being committed by young Vietnamese thugs.

“It happens a lot in the Vietnamese community,” said Nguyen, who suffered a deep gash on his right chin from the broken glass in the window. “But it was one of those things you thought could never happen to you.”

In Orange County, which has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the state at about 65,000, authorities say they have investigated dozens of similar robberies involving bands of armed Vietnamese youths who storm into Vietnamese residents’ homes, hold families at gunpoint and escape with jewelry and cash.

The robbers prey on fellow immigrants because of the Vietnamese tradition of keeping valuables at home and because of the immigrants’ lingering distrust of police.

“It’s something we have experienced, but it’s not a chronic problem in Santa Ana,” Chavez said, adding that the crimes have been more prevalent in other cities.

Although Santa Ana police declined to speculate further on Thursday’s robbery, events before and during the assault followed a pattern that the Nguyen family had heard from other Vietnamese immigrants.

“We’re going to court and prosecute them,” an enraged Nguyen said. “These guys have got to learn a lesson that they can’t do this to other families.”