Dream Turns to Tragedy : Haunted by a Son’s Brutal Death, a Vietnamese Immigrant Family Struggles to Understand Racial Hatred in a ‘Great Country’ Like America

In his 13 years in America, Dat Nguyen has often looked racism in the eye, but he has learned not to stare.

The 54-year-old family physician has sat in traffic, for example, when someone in a nearby car suddenly squints or uses his hands to pull back the skin around his eyes in a mocking gesture. Nguyen has disciplined himself to look away, not to react.

“I don’t like to give them the satisfaction of getting angry,” he explains.

Not long ago, when Nguyen and his wife, Thang, were stopped at a red light, a boy on a bicycle rode up, threw a cup of coffee in Thang’s face and yelled a racial slur.

“He was about 12 years old,” recalls Thang.

So the Nguyens knew the beast of racial bigotry lived in the country that took them in after they fled Vietnam. And despite the polite orderliness that surrounded them in Coral Springs, in the suburbs northwest of Ft. Lauderdale, they knew it lurked nearby. Often they warned their two sons about it--not that the boys ever seemed to take much notice.

And then one day last year the beast reached out and claimed the Nguyens’ firstborn.

A word was spoken at a party, a slap followed an insult and within minutes 19-year-old Luyen Phan Nguyen was being punched and kicked to death by a mob of young men, police said. Amid shouted racial slurs Lu Nguyen, a college student who wanted to become a doctor like his father, was chased down “like a wounded deer,” witnesses told police, and battered into unconsciousness.

The Nguyens had just returned home from dinner that Saturday night when a young woman they had never seen before came to their front door and reported, “Your son has been beaten up. He’s really hurt, and he’s in the hospital.”

When the couple finally got to Lu’s side, Dat Nguyen said he knew it was too late.

“When I went in, he was on the respirator,” he says. “I pulled his eyes open. His pupils were fixed and dilated. I told her, ‘There is no hope.’ But she was not convinced.”

Says Thang Nguyen: “Even now, I don’t accept it. If he had died in a car accident, it would have been easier to accept. If my son were a dog, I think maybe he’d still be alive. People would have said, ‘Don’t hurt the dog.’ ”

“Yes,” adds Dat Nguyen, his voice shaking with hurt, “that is what is so cruel. That’s what squeezes my heart. People watched this, watched him trying to get up, and no one tried to help him. No one said, ‘Stop.’ If he were a dog, maybe yes.”

*

The story of the Nguyen family is replete with both the best and worst of America, a drama of hardship and loss, good fortune, unexpected love, faith and ultimate sorrow.

First, there was the long and costly war that ravaged their homeland, taking tens of thousands of Vietnamese and American lives. From the bitterness that followed the U.S. retreat in 1975 came turmoil and repression. After weeks of hiding, Dat Nguyen, a medic with the South Vietnamese army, was sent to a re-education camp and was separated from his family for 2 1/2 years.

After his release, the Nguyens fled Vietnam by boat, spent a year in Malaysia and then eventually came to the United States, the country they had learned to know and love only through American friends in Saigon. They felt welcome here. Now, speaking out for the first time since their son’s death five months ago, they say that their lives have changed forever but that their faith has not.

“America is a great country, where you could work hard and your children can go to college,” says Thang Nguyen. “I still think that, even after what happened to my son.”

What happened to Lu Nguyen is the central event in a criminal case that is being monitored closely by civil rights groups across the nation concerned about a rising tide of violence against Asians. The savage beating made front-page headlines across the nation and was widely reported in Japan and other parts of Asia.

“This was clearly a racially motivated attack that points up how fragile the relations between people are,” says Kee Eng, general counsel of the Asian-American Federation of Florida. “We must never assume from appearances alone that things are going well. Asian-Americans must be ever vigilant.”

The incident that took Lu Nguyen’s life began on a typical summer night in South Florida outside an ordinary-looking apartment complex for middle-income people in a city so tightly controlled by ordinances that in 1985, McDonald’s was not allowed to put up its trademark golden arches.

About 11 p.m. on Aug. 15, Lu--a popular pre-med student at the University of Miami and a good athlete who also studied classical guitar--stopped by the Springside Apartments, site of the first of two open parties he and two friends intended to visit that night. They weren’t there long before Lu got involved in a discussion about the military, which led to a heated difference of opinion about the Vietnam War--and very quickly to an ugly scene that left him limp and dying on the grass outside.

Says Jeanne Mills, Coral Springs’ mayor: “This was a party where minors were drunk and looking to pick a fight. These kids are tough, bad kids, and because they were under the influence of something, control was gone. And once it started, they had to win.”

As a group of about 15 young men encircled Nguyen, hitting and kicking him, between 30 and 50 others watched from the lawn and the apartment building’s balcony, making no effort to intervene, according to police.

“Those standing around were intimidated by the violence,” says Mills. “If they weren’t part of it, they were frightened by it.”

Within days, seven young white men were charged with second-degree murder. One of the seven, 19-year-old maintenance worker Bradley Mills (no relation to the mayor), already has been convicted and was sentenced in December to 50 years in prison--twice the maximum recommended by state guidelines. A Broward County Circuit Court judge found that Mills “instigated, brokered and participated in the mob violence” leading to Nguyen’s death.

The other defendants--Christopher Anderson, Terry Jamerson, Derek Kozma, Michael Barychko, William Madalone Jr. and Christopher Madalone, all aged 18 to 20--are to be tried together March 29. Jamerson, in a statement to police, recalls the beating scene as “chaos. It was a madhouse.”

Before Bradley Mills’ sentence was handed down, Thang Nguyen told the court: “When I think about the way they killed my son, I think we don’t live in America. We live in hell. He never got any chance to fight back.”

After she sat down, sobbing, Bradley Mills spoke.

“I just want to say I’m not a racist,” declared Mills, who contended he had acted as a peacemaker. “I feel terrible for the family. I understand that they’re hurting. Maybe if there’s one thing I could have done to change things, I would have done it. No one deserves to die like this.”

Thang Nguyen says she could not look at Mills as he spoke. “I was crying, so I didn’t see him,” she said. “But there is nothing he could say to make this up.”

*

Dat Nguyen and Thang Phan grew up neighbors in the same coastal town of Nha Trang, about 200 miles north of Saigon. She was four years younger, his sister’s best friend, and Dat says he did not pay her much attention when they were children. But in 1968, shortly after the Tet offensive, he had just graduated from medical school in Saigon when he was assigned to a hospital in his hometown. It wasn’t long before he discovered that his kid sister’s friend had become an attractive young woman.

The courtship was brief. Thang, a teacher, says Dat had always seemed like an older brother. But he was persistent. After a four-month courtship, they were married.

During the war, Dat practiced medicine in Nha Trang, moving to Saigon just before the communist takeover. Afterward, he was ordered to report for re-education, a program of indoctrination he was told would last a month. Dat was gone two years and eight months, undergoing a punishing ordeal in a concentration camp near Saigon.

Soon after Dat’s release in 1978, the Nguyens boarded a boat for Malaysia, a way station to the United States. They figured it would take a few weeks to get a visa. It took a year.

The family arrived in San Francisco on Sept. 21, 1979, and was immediately shuttled to Little Rock, Ark., to be resettled by U.S. Catholic Charities. Eventually they wound up in Houston, where Dat found work as a dialysis technician and began studying for his U.S. medical exams.

After six years in Texas and a brief stay in Buffalo, the Nguyens moved to Plantation, Fla., in 1984, and two years later bought a house in Coral Springs.

*

Coral Springs, a town advertised as “The City in the Country” when planned in 1965, seemed like home. With tree-shaded streets, good schools, abundant sports facilities and parks, it provided the Nguyens and 85,000 other residents a drawing-board version of an American life. Although the population is 87% white, there is a small Asian community here, and the family counted friends among various ethnic groups.

In many ways, Lu and his younger brother, Long, grew up as typical American teens. While competing on the track and swimming teams, Lu also took honors courses and racked up a straight-A grade average his senior year that put him 21st out of 663 students in the 1991 graduating class at Coral Springs High. In the summer he worked as a stock boy at a drugstore.

At home the family spoke Vietnamese, and although Thang Nguyen says Lu did not practice his parents’ Buddhism, both sons were schooled in the traditional values of respect for elders, for others, for life.

“We are American citizens, but we also keep our culture,” says Thang Nguyen. “We tell our sons, ‘Americans will appreciate you for who you are.’ ”

With Lu in college, Long beginning his senior year in high school and both Thang and Dat Nguyen busy with Dat’s growing family medical practice, life seemed relatively seamless. Still, the Nguyens worried.

“When I would mention things that happened to me, my sons would be very angry,” recalls Dat Nguyen. “I would tell them, ‘Don’t be angry. I am an adult; I can tolerate it. If it happens to you, you must walk away like nothing happened. These people enjoy it when they see you are angry.’ ”

The last time Dat and Thang Nguyen spoke to their elder son, he told them he was going jogging with his friend Ryan Guerra and that later he, Ryan and another friend, Jeff Sintay, would stop by two parties they had heard about.

After dinner the Nguyens were talking with friends when, about 11 p.m., they both felt an urge to leave.

“Suddenly,” remembers Dat, “we just wanted to go home.”

Back in Coral Springs, Long told his parents that Lu had indeed gone to a party with friends. The Nguyens went to bed to read and watch television.

The knock on the door came shortly before midnight.

*

Kelly D. Hancock of Ft. Lauderdale, the attorney representing the Nguyen family, says, “In 13 years with the prosecutor’s office, I tried a lot of homicides. But this is one of the most senseless, cruel and atrocious I’ve ever seen. This family’s son was brutally murdered only because he was of Asian descent.”

Thang Nguyen was present in the courtroom for every minute of Mills’ trial. She has attended every bond hearing, every court appearance of the other defendants. She plans to attend their trials too.

“I have to go, because of Lu,” she says. “He died, but if Lu were still alive, he would come. I don’t go to get something for myself, just for him.”

For the Nguyens, the future is unsettled. Long will finish his final year at Coral Springs High School and probably attend college, but the death of his brother has left him badly shaken, his parents say. He is having trouble making plans.

Dat Nguyen continues to minister to his patients, while his wife serves as receptionist and bookkeeper. To honor their son, the family has asked Hancock, the lawyer, to set up a memorial education fund that would provide college scholarships.

But the Nguyens are not sure they can stay in Coral Springs, the city that once seemed so perfect, so typically American. “We left Vietnam because they wouldn’t accept us,” says Dat. “We come here, and our son is killed. Now where is the safe place for us?”