4 Deaths Declared a Murder-Suicide Case

After a weeklong investigation, police said Wednesday it was a pregnant woman who fatally shot her two young children and ex-boyfriend and then turned the gun on herself.

“We’re classifying this case as a murder-suicide,” Capt. Thomas Lazar said of one of the city’s worst murder cases. “Our victims are the two children and the male adult.”

Investigators say they have not determined a motive.

“We may never know,” Lazar said.

The four bodies were found Sept. 5 when police were called to an apartment by a family friend who had arrived to help the mother and her children move to another area. Getting no answer to his shouts, the friend peered through a broken window and saw only the woman’s legs as she lay on the floor.

Inside the two-bedroom apartment police found the woman, Hanh Thi Duong, 25, and her ex-boyfriend, Oanh Van Le, 30, on the living room floor. An undisclosed type of firearm was found between them. In a bedroom, Duong’s 7-year-old son, Thang Quoc Nguyen, and 4-year-old daughter, Lan Ngoc Nguyen, were found dead, each from a single gunshot.

Initially, police were hampered because of the unwillingness of the victims’ relatives and friends to contact police with information.

“We haven’t been able to run down these people real easily,” Lazar said. “We’ve run into some cultural problems. . . . They did not come in and volunteer any information to us.”

When relatives were finally interviewed, they told police that Duong and Le had an “on and off again” relationship and were living together in the apartment before Le moved out Aug. 27.