Priest Calls Youths in Store Siege Obedient : Crime: Family members at a loss to explain actions of three brothers and a friend.

To their parents and their priest, the three brothers were obedient boys.

Every Sunday, Loi, Pham and Long Nguyen went to the Vietnamese Catholic Martyr Church. Often, they helped out at the church’s special events. They liked to fish in the Sacramento River, and on Thursday, they asked their parents for permission to go fishing.

Instead, the three youths and a friend went to an electronics store where they held 40 people hostage for more than eight hours and triggered a shoot-out with sheriff’s deputies that ended in the deaths of six people, including the two younger brothers and their friend, Cuong Tran, 17, of Elk Grove.

“Usually, the boys obeyed their parents a lot,” Father Joseph Hoan Nguyen said Saturday. “They’d come to church every Sunday. Sometimes they would help, because their parents are very good, religious people in our church.”

Television viewers saw a different side of the brothers Thursday night as the young men faced their deaths.

As the Sacramento County Sheriff’s SWAT team rushed the Good Guys store, the gunmen coolly shot their hostages, killing three and wounding another 11 before they were finally gunned down by deputies, authorities say. Loi Khac Nguyen, 21, the eldest brother and alleged leader of the group, was wounded and remained in critical condition Saturday.

Sao Thi Nguyen, the mother of the three brothers, said Saturday the family was devastated by the tragedy. “(We) can’t even eat, can’t even swallow our food,” she said in Vietnamese. “There’s just sadness. We’re just trying to hold the family together.”

The brothers lived with their parents, another brother and two sisters in a run-down apartment building about half a mile from the Good Guys store.

Pham Khac Nguyen, 19, and Long Khac Nguyen, 17, had both had difficulty in school, and their older brother had dropped out. During the hostage crisis, Loi had told negotiators to call him “Thailand,” leading authorities at first to believe the gunmen were Thai. Some hostages said afterward the gunmen talked of their difficulty in getting jobs and their desire to go to Southeast Asia to fight the “Viet Cong.”

Several hours after the siege began, sheriff’s deputies notified Nguyen family members that the three brothers had seized the store. Their mother rushed to the scene in the hope of persuading her sons to give themselves up. But, she said, sheriff’s deputies would not let her speak to them.

“If they had let me talk to my son (Pham), I could have talked him out of it, to lay down their weapons,” she told the Sacramento Bee. “They wouldn’t shoot me.”

But Sacramento County Sheriff Glen Craig said the gunmen told negotiators by telephone that they did not want to speak to their mother.

Two 9-millimeter pistols used in the siege were purchased by Loi Nguyen at a West Sacramento store last month for about $300 each. As required by law, he gave his name, filled out a form and waited 15 days before receiving the weapons.

Authorities said all four of the gunmen belonged to a gang called the “Oriental Boys.” But a check of Loi Nguyen’s record at the time he purchased the guns turned up no criminal record.

“He was perfectly normal, just a nice kid,” recalled George Alger, firearms department manager at the Big R Country West hardware store where Nguyen purchased the weapons.

Alger said he was surprised to learn that the gunmen’s weapons had been bought at his store and felt badly that people were killed and wounded.

The three hostages killed were a customer, Fernando Gutierrez, and two employees, Kris Sohne and John Lee Fritz. Hostage Quinlan Schluter, who had been in critical condition with gunshot wounds to the head, neck and chest, was reported in stable condition.

Family members were at a loss to explain the youths’ purpose in seizing the store and taking the hostages.

But one Vietnamese-American acquaintance placed part of the blame on cultural differences and the difficulty Vietnamese immigrants have in rearing their children in the United States.

“In this country, there is too much freedom,” he said. “We cannot tell the kids what to do. They were nice guys but they grew up in this country. They watched the TV. They learned a lot of bad things.”

Times staff writers Ralph Frammolino and Lily Dizon contributed to this story.