Man Pleads Not Guilty to Tustin High Knife Murder

A Tustin man who allegedly confessed in a rambling letter to fatally stabbing a former UCLA student leader pleaded not guilty Friday to murder and other charges.

As Gunner J. Lindberg, 21, entered his plea, a judge in another court decided a teenage co-defendant should be tried as an adult on murder charges stemming from the Jan. 28 slaying of Thien Minh Ly on a darkened tennis court.

Domenic Christopher, 17, is scheduled to enter a plea April 23 in Municipal Court in Santa Ana; the teen previously denied the murder charge in juvenile court.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Debbie Lloyd said the seriousness of the crime was among the factors considered by Juvenile Court Judge Frank F. Fasel in deciding to send the teenager’s case to adult court.

The 24-year-old victim, the former president of UCLA’s Vietnamese Students Assn., 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 his body early the next morning.

Lindberg, in a jailhouse interview with The Times soon after his arrest, said it was Christopher--his roommate and co-worker at a Tustin K mart--who did the stabbing, using a knife the pair found on a roadside during that night’s marijuana binge.

A contrary and harrowing account of the killing later emerged in a letter allegedly written by Lindberg to a prison buddy, according to police search warrant documents.

In the letter, the purported author offered a graphic, blow-by-blow description of how he stabbed Ly as Christopher cheered him on.

Police said the letter reveals a firsthand knowledge of the attack that only the killer could possess, such as the fact that the victim had also been stomped, a detail contained in search warrant affidavits.

In addition to murder, authorities also charged Lindberg, not Christopher, with using a knife.

Lindberg is also wanted in connection with a shotgun attack in Missouri last summer, and he served a prison sentence for a 1989 assault with a BB-loaded air rifle on an 11-year-old boy. The juvenile defendant has no known criminal background.

Police were initially investigating Ly’s slaying as a potential hate crime. Search warrant documents showed that white supremacist materials were found in the pair’s apartment. Investigators said most recently, though, that the crime was probably motivated by robbery.

Lindberg faces a hearing May 1 to determine if there is enough evidence for him to be tried in Orange County Superior Court as charged.