Police Say Death of 4 Was Murder-Suicide by Woman

After an extensive and often puzzling weeklong investigation, police said Wednesday that a pregnant Vietnamese woman 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,” Costa Mesa Police Capt. Thomas Lazar said of one of the city’s worst murder cases ever. “Our victims are the two children and the male adult.”

Investigators say they have not been able to determine why the woman, Hanh Thi Duong, 25, shot and killed her ex-boyfriend, Oanh Van Le, 30; her 7-year-old son, Thang Quoc Nguyen, and 4-year-old daughter, Lan Ngoc Nguyen.

The bodies of all four victims were found in Duong’s Baker Street apartment on Sept. 5.

Cuc Thi Nguyen, Duong’s 46-year-old mother, said Wednesday that she discovered the bodies and alerted a neighbor, who called police.

“My daughter and the children were the only reason for my living,” she said. “Now, it’s like I’m dead but not yet buried.”

Nguyen said her daughter had a stormy relationship with Le, who had recently moved out of the apartment.

Nguyen said Le “had been beating her (daughter) for the last several months.” Police, however, said there was no evidence that Duong had been beaten and no sign of a struggle at the crime scene.

The mother said she had asked Le to move out of her daughter’s apartment two weeks before the slayings, and that her daughter was packing to move when the killings occurred.

“I think she was in the process of moving out to get away from him. And in her moment of anger and frustration, she took the final act,” Nguyen said, speaking through an interpreter. “I think my daughter felt that life was hopeless. With all the kids, she’s pregnant, no job.”

Le’s relatives, who asked not to be named, said that he loved the woman and the children and had repeatedly gone back to Duong’s apartment and begged to be taken back but was spurned. An uncle described Le as a gentle person who “couldn’t stay mad more than five minutes.”

Police were called to the modest apartment after the mother peered through a broken window and saw her daughter’s legs as she lay on the floor.

Inside the two-bedroom apartment, police found Duong and Le on the living room floor. An undisclosed type of firearm was found between them. The bodies of the children were discovered in bedroom, each dead from a single gunshot.

Despite the couple’s problems, relatives said they were still in love.

“My daughter was still in love with him,” Nguyen said. “She did not want him to leave.”

Le’s uncle, with whom Le stayed after he moved out of Duong’s apartment, said his family was trying to get the couple to reconcile their differences.

“He said he loved the children very much and he wanted to come back and apologize to her and work it out,” the uncle said. “Our family wanted to help him go back with her.”

Nguyen, her daughter and the children left Vietnam by boat in 1985, leaving the children’s father behind. They ended up in a Malaysian refugee camp and settled in Southern California 3 1/2 years ago, Nguyen said, adding that the family had not been in touch with Duong’s husband since they left Vietnam.

Nguyen said her daughter had been on welfare but also had held odd jobs from time to time. Le worked as a drill-press operator in Brea.

At the time of her death, Nguyen said her daughter was pregnant with Le’s child. Police said she was 24 to 28 weeks pregnant.

Initially, the investigation was hampered because the victims’ relatives and friends did not 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.”

Lazar noted that his department’s first contact with Le’s family came when police found them driving his car on their way to the funeral home in Westminster.

“These were very closed-mouth people and I don’t think they shared a lot with even their own relatives,” Lazar said.

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 until Le moved out Aug. 27.

“They were moving apart,” Lazar said.

After seven days of sifting through physical evidence and confronting difficult cultural barriers, investigators were finally “confident” that the case was a murder-suicide, Lazar said.

One of the keys to arriving at that conclusion was that was the apartment was locked from the inside. In addition, there was no indication of a robbery, and the murder weapon was found on the floor between the man, who had been shot several times, and the woman, who died of a single gunshot wound, Lazar said, adding that fingerprint and ballistic tests are still being reviewed.

Before the shooting, Duong had been preparing to move in with her her mother, while Le was “going to set up house with his parents that were coming in from Hong Kong,” Lazar said.

Investigators said they do not know why Le was in Duong’s apartment on the day of the shooting.

Detectives were further “puzzled” in their investigation by a broken window in the rear of the apartment and the fact that Le had no wallet on him. Lazar said investigators were looking into the possibility that somebody entered the apartment through the window but have not been able to find any evidence to support that theory. Le’s wallet was later found his car.

Neighbors in the 1300 block of Baker Street told police that they heard noises like breaking glass and “pounding sounds” about 7:30 a.m. on the day of shooting. Police believe the noises were gunshots. Lazar declined to say how many rounds were fired or to whom the gun was registered. He also did not comment on which victims were shot first.

Lazar said investigators were withholding some information “just in case something turns up” in the future that may lead to reopening the investigation.