Raising Awareness About the Casualties of Violence : Crime: O.C. victim’s survivors share a picture of shattered lives and anger at his senseless killing.

The family portrait that Jennifer Chough wants to share is not the stuff of gilded frames or photo albums.

It is a picture of crushed lives and private anger; it is a snapshot view of the last hours of her father, Soowon, who left their Anaheim ranch house on Oct. 24 and died that night in Koreatown, bleeding from bullet wounds and pleading for help from strangers who watched him crawl for life to a Mobil gas station.

This is the picture that she and her mother sought to show Gov. Pete Wilson, who met with about a dozen survivors of violence earlier last week to announce a Los Angeles crime summit for law enforcement officials and residents.

“I wanted to meet the governor because I wanted him to see our faces. I wanted him to see that we are real and that this is really happening. I didn’t want my father’s death to go unrecognized or unrecorded,” Chough said.

In the blur of days after her father’s death it seemed to her that his killing had gone unnoticed even though the Los Angeles City Council posted a $25,000 reward for information that led to the arrests of two suspects in his robbery and murder.

Initially, the survivors kept their grief private, worrying that if they spoke publicly news of the tragedy might reach elderly relatives in Korea who might be too frail to cope. So they seethed quietly: How could a man who worked eight years to earn enough money to move from Los Angeles to a placid Anaheim neighborhood lose his life in an instant on a city sidewalk?

Then Chough decided that others should know the same anger: “I want awareness that this isn’t just something that happens to your neighbor or friends. It could happen to you at any time.”

At 19, Chough’s face is smooth and clear and unstained by tears. Her views are firm and unequivocal, the lessons learned from her father, a trucker and Presbyterian church deacon who she said could be unmovable when it came to his beliefs.

From her father’s murder, she learned other lessons: the need for increased law enforcement, longer jail terms and--most critically--the death penalty.

Her mother, Choonja, 44, also supports the death penalty. She gropes for the English to express her thoughts. A sagging mouth and quick tears do it for her. She chops the air with her hand, mimicking a fly swatter. And then the words in Korean rush out so swiftly that it’s almost too fast for her daughter to translate.

“She says: If you take a life, then your life should be taken,” Jennifer Chough said.

“She says that that person that shot my father not only killed him, but destroyed our lives--and the pets. The animals that my dad cared about--we had to give them away knowing that they might not live another week.”

Outside the French doors of their kitchen, a cinnamon-colored chow puppy with a curled tail frolicked among napping cats in tiger yellow, Persian white and calico. The puppy is the last left of five purebred dogs that Soowon had prized.

Soowon, they said, had bred and raised a family of chows that included his favorite, the mother, Jerong, which means cute in Korean.

On the night that Soowon Chough did not come home, she was howling and whining, pacing the floor with each passing car, Jennifer Chough recalled. The family is convinced that Jerong, anxious as she was, knew her master’s fate that long night.

Now Jerong is gone, moved to a new home; soon the seven stray cats that Soowon took home will also be given away to animal shelters.

Choonja Chough, who is a homemaker, said she can no longer afford to care for her family and the stray animals that Soowon could not resist. So great was his love for animals, his family said, that Soowon dreamed of moving somewhere in the country where there was enough space for his menagerie of pets and a house large enough to shelter some of his six brothers and sisters.

It was his compassion for the lost and the weak that his daughter remembers. She also cannot forget that no one showed him same sympathy along a city sidewalk in Koreatown.

On the night he died, Soowon had traveled to Koreatown to take a visiting South Korean friend, Sung Hae Cho, to dinner.

Police said they were walking along Olympic Boulevard about 10 p.m. when they were confronted by a gun-toting robber who was not satisfied with the $20 that Cho gave him. His family said Soowon handed over his money, but was still shot in the chest. His friend was left unharmed.

“After he was shot he had to pull himself over to a gas station and ask for help of the clerk because nobody else would help him,” Jennifer Chough said. Bystanders were too fearful to help her father or his friend and ignored their pleas for aid, she said.

Those were the circumstances that she wanted to convey to the governor--and to others.

“I wanted the governor to see me and my mother, what we have to go through,” Chough said. “We’re not just people you hear of or see in the paper. We’re real. We’re just like anybody else.”