Officer Kills Suspect in ‘Asians Robbing Asians’ Case

A Monterey Park police officer fatally shot one of four suspects after they fled late Wednesday from a house where an 11-year-old boy and his 16-year-old sister were held at gunpoint while their residence was being ransacked.

Before being discovered by the intruders--who police described as part of a growing number of Vietnamese preying upon others of Vietnamese descent--the girl had used a portable phone to call the 911 emergency number.

The case, Monterey Park police said, draws attention to Asian immigrants victimizing others of Asian ancestry who, for cultural reasons, sometimes mistrust police and fear calling authorities for help.

The victims and suspects all are Vietnamese who had arrived in the United States within the past few years, police said, as was the dead man, a 19-year-old from Chatsworth.

Police Capt. Joseph Santoro termed the case a victory in the department’s continuing campaign to encourage Monterey Park residents, many of them new immigrants from Asia, to call police for help.

“One of our biggest challenges is to get (new Asian immigrants) to understand that police are here to protect them,” Santoro said.

“When (Asian) people come to this country, they bring a whole mystique about crime in their native country,” Santoro said. “They fear the criminal element. And they have an equal suspicion of police. . . . Police are perceived as corrupt.”

On Wednesday, within three minutes of getting the 911 call at 10:59 p.m., patrol cars arrived at the house on Keller Street. One suspect dived through a window to escape and three others followed. The brother and sister ran to safety out the front door.

Police chased three of the suspects for several blocks. A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department helicopter, using a special infrared detection device, tracked them to a brushy hillside above the back yards of a residential neighborhood.

An officer killed one suspect with two shotgun blasts, police said, after the man disobeyed orders to freeze, moving abruptly as if to fire a gun. Nearby, police found a revolver that the suspects allegedly had used.

Police captured a 14-year-old boy and a 19-year-old Los Angeles man, Ly De Nhi, and booked them on suspicion of murder and robbery, police said. A fourth suspect was still at large.

No one else was injured. Police withheld the dead man’s identity pending notification of relatives. Police also would not release the name of the officer who shot the man, saying that the investigation of the killing is continuing. Santoro called the death unfortunate but said the shooting was justified.

The two arrested suspects, police said, both are ethnic Chinese originally from Vietnam.

“Vietnamese criminals tend to victimize their own people. This is a clear example,” Santoro said. “They think they can intimidate Vietnamese easier than non-Vietnamese.”

Social service agencies, as well as police in the San Gabriel Valley, Santoro said, often encounter new Asian immigrants who express hesitancy to report crimes.

To bridge cultural gaps in Monterey Park, Santoro said, the city has made efforts to hire police who speak different Asian languages. Twenty percent of the city’s police officers are of Asian ancestry.

In Wednesday’s case, the 16-year-old girl did not hesitate to call police as soon as she heard the sound of a bedroom window being broken. “Both of these children were very courageous,” Santoro said.