U.S.-Vietnamese Family Has Sad Reunion Around a Casket : Tragedy: One victim of the Stanton apartment shooting unknowingly brings his relatives together at his funeral.

John Gloudemans, 18, sat staring Thursday at the casket holding the half-brother he had not known existed until this week.

Gloudemans, a student at Cypress College, had opened a newspaper Tuesday to see a 1960s-era picture of his mother, with a story about a young man who had been shot to death in Stanton. The young man had immigrated to the United States from Vietnam a year ago in a vain search for his mother, the woman in the picture.

That day, Gloudemans phoned Barstow to tell his mother, Mai Nguyen Stevenson, 44, that her parents and Stevenson’s three sons--whom she had not seen since she left Vietnam in 1972--had arrived in Orange County and had tried to find her.

But Gloudemans also had to tell his mother that their search had turned tragic because her eldest son, 22-year-old Chien Xuan Nguyen, had been shot to death over the weekend. A bittersweet reunion took place Wednesday, and family and friends gathered Thursday for Nguyen’s memorial service.

“I was really just mad” when he first heard the news, Gloudemans recalled. “I never had a family member die, and then to see that someone had shot him.”

Nguyen, who came here with two half-brothers and their maternal grandparents under a U.S. program for Amerasians and settled in Stanton, wanted to find his mother and his American father. His chance to reunite with his parents died with him Saturday.

Chien Nguyen was one of 15 Vietnamese youths, including several other Amerasians, gathered in the Stanton apartment of a friend at about 9 p.m., according to Hop Nguyen, a 23-year-old who was there and who is not related to the deceased. They had been drinking, he said, and were cooking chicken rice soup and frying fish for a late supper, when there was a knock at the door.

“Three guys came in, yelled, ‘Where’s the Amerasian?’ and opened fire,” Hop Nguyen related. “I just ran out of there and found a phone to dial 911.”

The bullets hit three people before the three assailants fled. Chien Nguyen died instantly from a head wound, 20-year-old Ba Van Tran of Westminster was declared brain-dead Sunday and Son Van Tran, 38, who lived in the apartment, was treated for gunshot wounds and released. He and Ba Van Tran are not related.

The Sheriff’s Department on Wednesday arrested three suspects, all residents of Fullerton, in connection with the shootings. Khanh Phuoc Mai and Hung Van Mai, both 34, and Dan Huu Mai, 35, are being held in Orange County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail each. Investigators do not know if the three are related.

The gunmen might have been avenging a scuffle at a party held last week at Chien Nguyen’s apartment, said Hop Nguyen, who just arrived in the United States three months ago. He and others said that one of the attackers had been chastised for flirting with the wife of Son Van Tran. But Tran said the scuffle was over money.

Mary Payne Nguyen, Amerasian services coordinator for St. Anselm’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Center in Garden Grove, said the shooting underscored the need for a social center for newly arrived Amerasians.

“They have nowhere to go. They don’t know any English. They have no money. So they get together and they drink. Especially the boys. Amerasian boys drink a lot,” she said.

More funding is needed to help the youths adjust, said Mary Payne Nguyen, an Anglo woman who married a Vietnamese. “We need transitional housing. We need caseworkers. I have no caseworkers. It’s all handled by me on an emergency-first basis.”

Her agency is serving about 500 Amerasians, Nguyen said. Nearly 15 of them came to the memorial service held at Pierce Bros., Daly, Bartel & Spencer Mortuary.

In death, Chien Nguyen succeeded in reuniting his mother with her parents--81-year-old Mung Van Nguyen and Ky Thi Ly, 78--and the two other sons whom she had left behind.

Though family members said the deceased and his two half-brothers were born Amerasians, Stevenson insisted that Chien Nguyen’s father was a Vietnamese man who had died about two months after the boy was born. An American serviceman had fathered the other two boys, she said. They separated, and Stevenson left Vietnam with another American soldier, Mark Gloudemans.

The couple divorced in 1980 after two sons were born, John Gloudemans and 12-year-old Adam Gloudemans. She remarried about a year ago, she said.

At the service, Chien Nguyen’s surviving siblings wore white cloths around their heads, as Vietnamese tradition for mourning dictates.

Suong Thi Do, the victim’s 21-year-old wife, broke down when it was her turn to look at her husband for the last time. Later, Do said the couple had met last May and were married about a month later.

“I am the saddest for Chien’s wife,” Stevenson said. “She is three months’ pregnant and her husband has left her when she is still so young.”

She has invited Do and all her newly found family members to come live with her in Barstow. Her elderly parents and daughter-in-law have agreed, but the other two sons said they will wait until after the service to decide.