Westminster Man Shot by Would-Be Robbers : Crime: The assailants may have been waiting for a relative of the victim to return from a card casino.

A Westminster man was shot in the chest early Friday during an attack by would-be robbers outside the home of his relatives, police said.

Thinh Van Nguyen, 32, was taken to UCI Medical Center in Orange, where he was listed in serious condition, hospital spokeswoman Elaine Beno said.

Nguyen, a resident in the 14700 block of Bushard Street, went down the street to the relatives’ apartment about 2:30 a.m. after one of them telephoned him about people in the front yard, Sgt. Jack R. Davidson said.

When he arrived, Nguyen confronted several men in front of the apartment building and got into a scuffle. One of the men shot Nguyen with a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun, Davidson said. The assailants then ran away. No arrests have been made.

Dep Thi Tran, 41, a cousin of the victim, said the attackers were probably waiting to ambush her as she returned from a card club.

Tran said she goes to gamble regularly. She said a group of men had tried to rob her two weeks ago, but she and her husband were able to rush inside their apartment and call 911--though not before one of the would-be bandits hit her husband on the head with a handgun, she said.

“We put up a light out front . . . and another light inside here,” Tran said in Vietnamese. “(Thursday) night, they must have taken out that light bulb. My husband got suspicious because the light inside the house lit up but the one outside didn’t. My husband called my cousin (Nguyen).”

Tran said she came home from the card house in the pre-dawn hours Friday, found ambulances and police cars out front, and thought robbers finally were able to get inside the apartment and had harmed her family. She said she learned of the attack on her cousin from police.

The family later visited Nguyen at the hospital.

“He’s on the verge of death and couldn’t talk to me,” Tran said, her voice cracking. “It was because of trying to protect us that he got shot.”

People coming home from card clubs are sometimes targeted by robbers who follow them, according to police in Orange County.

A Mission Viejo man was arrested March 27 on suspicion of robbing $2,000 from a casino worker at knifepoint as she was returning to her house in Huntington Beach. On March 4, a Newport Beach couple came home with $4,000 in winnings and also were robbed. No one was arrested in the latter attack.