SANTA ANA : Man Sentenced in 1984 Murder Case

Nearly 10 years after a father of eight was shot to death when he surprised burglars in his Santa Ana home, one of his killers was finally sentenced Friday.

A Superior Court judge gave Dung Hoang Le 25 years to life in prison, partially closing a murder case that had remained unsolved for years.

Thanks to an alert analyst and a statewide fingerprint database, investigators arrested Le in 1992 for his role in the murder of Nguyen Chau, who was killed in his home on March 23, 1984. Police, however, are still trying to find Le’s two accomplices.

After the murder, detectives had no leads except a fingerprint on a hunting-style knife in Chau’s bedroom and a fingerprint on a window screen. Santa Ana police investigators eventually labeled the case “unsolved” and entered the fingerprints into a statewide database monitored by the state Department of Justice in Sacramento.

For nine years, the prints could not be identified. But in 1992, after again checking them, a fingerprint analyst matched them with Le’s prints. At the time, Le, 39, of San Diego, was serving a three-year sentence for unlawful possession of a firearm.

Analyst Gordon Low, who works at the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sacramento, said it took him an hour to run Le’s fingerprint against the more than 8 million print records held in the database. Without the computer, Low said, it would take “50 years” to run a check.

Based on the match Low made, the Orange County district attorney’s office decided to file murder charges against Le, and last month a jury found Le guilty of first-degree murder. On Friday, Orange County Superior Court Judge John R. Ryan sentenced Le during a brief hearing.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Debora L. Lloyd said it was “a very simple trial” because the evidence of the prints found in the victim’s home was indisputable.

Though prosecutors did not contend that Le pulled the trigger, he was charged with murder because he was in the process of committing a felony when a homicide occurred. The two other suspects remain at large.

Throughout the trial, Le denied ever being in the Chau home, and said the fingerprints were not his.

But analyst Low disagreed: “One thing is certain, fingerprints don’t lie.”