Suitor Is Guilty in Killing
A 19-year-old man has pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the stabbing death of the young woman he had been forbidden to marry. He was sentenced last Thursday to 11 years in prison by Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan.
Kiem Do killed Hang Thi Thay Dinh, 18, in Garden Grove on Oct. 26, four days after the couple and Dinh’s family arrived in America.
Do was an outcast to many Vietnamese because he was the illegitimate son of an American soldier and a Vietnamese woman. But because he is an Amerasian, he was eligible to enter the United States. By claiming Dinh’s family as his own, he made them eligible as well.
Police said Do expected to marry Dinh after the couple arrived in America from a temporary refugee camp in the Philippines, their first stop after leaving Vietnam. But Dinh’s father forced the couple to break up.
As friends visited with Dinh’s parents inside her uncle’s home in Garden Grove, they heard the young woman scream: “Mother, he stabbed me. Mother, I am dying.”
Do could be eligible for parole after serving half his sentence, officials said.
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