Police Rule Out Race Hatred as Motive in Tustin Stabbing Death

Police discounted racial hatred Monday in the slaying of Tustin honors student Thien Minh Ly and said they firmly believe the motive was robbery in the brutal knife attack.

Meanwhile, Gunner J. Lindberg, 21, and his 17-year-old roommate and co-worker at a Tustin Kmart remained in custody as prosecutors reviewed the case against them.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Debbie Lloyd said she expects to file charges against the suspects today in connection with the frenzied Jan. 28 stabbing, which occurred as Ly practiced his in-line skating on the Tustin High School tennis courts.

Officers who arrested the two on Saturday at an apartment they shared with Lindberg’s great-uncle confiscated white supremacist posters and neo-Nazi literature from the suspects’ bedroom. But investigators have now ruled out a hate crime.

“The racial overtones are really unsubstantiated,” Tustin Sgt. Brent Zicarelli said. “It was something that we didn’t think was a main motive but wanted to look into. We now feel it didn’t have anything to do with the contact” with Ly.

Lindberg is wanted in connection with a Missouri shotgun shooting last summer and served prison time for shooting a police officer’s 11-year-old son in 1992 with a BB-loaded air rifle.

While police believe Lindberg was forming a gang in Missouri before he returned to California last summer, they now say that the gang was not racist in nature but modeled on a mixed-race gang of whites, Latinos and African Americans in Oceanside.

“He was trying to start an offshoot in Missouri and fled in July when they were looking for him,” Zicarelli said. The alleged juvenile accomplice has no known criminal record and had been hanging around with Lindberg since New Year’s Eve, Zicarelli said.

The police statements came one day after Lindberg offered a grizzly account of the knifing during a jailhouse interview, claiming that he and his companion, named Domenic, were high on marijuana and looking for someone to pick on. The youth’s last name is not being used because he is a minor.

Lindberg said he punched Ly and then stood by as the teenager stabbed the UCLA graduate and Tustin High School honors student with a knife the pair had found on the roadside.

But Zicarelli said Monday that police “don’t believe” the ex-convict’s version of events. The grandmother of the juvenile suspect also disputed Lindberg’s account but otherwise declined to comment on the case Monday from the family’s Orange home.

Lindberg’s grandmother also struggled Monday to understand what happened, pondering “what cracked” in the troubled young man she described as a loner. Lindberg’s father abandoned him as a toddler and his stepfather abused him, said the grandmother, who asked that her name not be used.

Lindberg was also greatly troubled by the suicide of his younger brother, Jerry, she said. The 17-year-old killed himself on Gunner Lindberg’s 19th birthday.

Despite his problems with the law, Lindberg “had a heart,” said his grandmother, 66. He would phone her every day when he got home from work, and again before she went to bed, so she would not worry about him, she said.

Lindberg had completed a high school equivalency exam and enjoyed Nintendo, bowling and going to concerts, his grandmother said.

“If I needed him to go with me somewhere, he would,” she said, sobbing. “He would carry things for me, reach things in the cupboard for me. . . . I can’t say that he’s not guilty. I can’t say that he’s guilty. All I can do is love him.”

Times staff writers Lily Dizon and Anna Cekola contributed to this report.