Tustin Man, Teen Charged in Skater’s Slaying

Prosecutors on Tuesday charged a Tustin man and his teenage roommate with murder in the stabbing death of a former UCLA student leader, whose body was found on a high school tennis court.

Gunner J. Lindberg, 21, appeared briefly in Municipal Court in Santa Ana on Tuesday, where he was ordered to return March 22 to enter a plea to the charges against him in connection with the Jan. 28 slaying of Thien Minh Ly, 24.

Meanwhile, Deputy Dist. Atty. Debora L. Lloyd said she will seek to have the 17-year-old defendant tried as an adult on the murder charge.

A hearing is scheduled today to determine if the teenage suspect, Domenic Christopher, should remain in custody in Juvenile Hall. Lindberg is being held without bail in Orange County Jail.

In a recent jailhouse interview, Lindberg said he and his roommate, who worked together at a Tustin Kmart, were under the influence of marijuana and looking for someone to pick on when they spotted Ly in-line skating at the tennis court. Lindberg said he punched Ly and then stood by as the teenager stabbed him with a knife the pair had found on a roadside.

But prosecutors have charged Lindberg, not the teenager, with using the knife. A police investigator said Monday that authorities did not believe Lindberg’s story.

Officers arrested the two on Saturday at an apartment they shared with Lindberg’s great-uncle and confiscated white supremacist posters and neo-Nazi literature from the suspects’ bedroom.

But police said Monday they ruled out racial hatred as a possible factor in the killing, and would not be pursuing the killing as a hate crime. They are looking at robbery as a possible motive.

Lindberg also is wanted in connection with a shotgun attack in Missouri last summer. He served prison time for shooting a police officer’s 11-year-old son in 1989 with a BB-loaded air rifle. The Orange County public defender’s office Tuesday was appointed to represent Lindberg in the stabbing case.

The juvenile defendant has no known criminal background, police said.

Police said some evidence was recovered from the apartment, including clothes that appeared to be stained with blood. Authorities said they don’t know whose blood it was.

Ly was stabbed more than a dozen times at the Tustin High School tennis courts, where he regularly practiced in-line skating. His skates were still on his feet when a custodian discovered the body early the next morning.

Ly graduated in the top 10 of his class at Tustin High School and received a bachelor’s degree in biology and English at UCLA, where he also served as president of the university’s Vietnamese Students Assn.

In August 1995, he earned a master’s degree from Georgetown University in physiology and biophysics. He loved poetry, literature and writing and had hoped to help rebuild his homeland someday. He had been talking to friends and family about pursuing a career in law and had a job interview scheduled the day after his death.

Times staff writer Lee Romney contributed to this story.