Man Pleads Not Guilty to Burt Slaying

As grieving relatives of California Highway Officer Don Burt looked on, the Anaheim man accused of gunning down the rookie officer during a traffic stop last month pleaded not guilty Friday to a murder charge.

About a dozen family and friends of the slain officer, wearing blue metallic wristbands inscribed with Burt’s name in tribute, said they wanted defendant Hung Thanh Mai to know, if he is guilty, that he’s harmed and changed the lives of many people.

“I wanted him to see me,” said Burt’s widow, Kristin, who is five weeks from delivering the couple’s child. “That was important.”

Mai, 25, who looked down during much of the arraignment before Municipal Judge Daniel T. Brice, was ordered back to court Oct. 25 for a hearing to determine whether he should stand trial on a murder charge that carries a potential death penalty.

Anaheim defense attorney Dennis O’Connell, recently retained to represent the defendant, declined to comment on his client, except to say that Mai is feeling “extremely apprehensive.”

“He doesn’t know what tomorrow will bring,” O’Connell said.

In the days since the slaying, Kristin Burt, 28, said she’s been concentrating on the upcoming birth of her child, not on the defendant.

“I loved my husband more than anything on the Earth, and this baby’s going to know how much it was wanted and loved,” she said.

“But I also don’t want to make my husband appear to be some untouchable perfect being. He wasn’t,” she continued. “He had his faults, and I want the baby to know everything, from how wonderful his dad was to how goofy and weird his dad could be too.”

Don Burt Sr., the victim’s father who is a CHP sergeant, said he wore his uniform to court Friday to honor his son, as well as the other officers who risk their lives daily in the line of duty.

The elder Burt, who patrols freeways in Riverside County, recently wrote about his son for the California Highway Patrolman, a CHP magazine, recalling the birth of his second child and their shared dreams of playing together on the CHP soccer team.

“I have wonderful memories to help me through this, the worst time of my life,” Don Burt Sr. wrote. “I know on this Earth, we will never be teammates again and he is gone from my side, but Donnie will live forever in my heart. He was the best son a man could hope to have and the epitome of what a California Highway Patrol officer should be.”

Burt, 25, who had graduated from the CHP Academy in April 1995, was shot seven times July 13 after pulling over a BMW in a Fullerton restaurant parking lot for a traffic violation. The killer took off in Burt’s CHP cruiser and abandoned it seven miles away in Anaheim.

Police pulled a fingerprint from the car and found a sheaf of phony traveler’s checks in the trunk of the BMW, which was not leased under Mai’s name.

Police and federal agents said the fingerprint and other undisclosed evidence led them to Houston, where Mai was arrested four days after the shooting. The arrest capped a cross-country manhunt that had temporarily resulted in the detainment of a Buena Park man, who later was cleared.

Investigators discovered a plane ticket in Mai’s pocket, and said his clothing and a tennis shoe were speckled with blood.

Mai, amid intense security, was extradited to Orange County. He remains in County Jail without bail.

The defendant, who last worked as a furniture salesman, refused to talk about the charges against him during a recent jailhouse interview, but emphatically denied being a member of a gang based in Long Beach.

Even before the shooting, Mai was being sought on assault charges in Orange County and had been investigated by Huntington Beach police in connection with a fake check ring.

Mai also pleaded not guilty to the assault charges and misdemeanor traffic violations in court on Friday, and faces an Oct. 25 preliminary hearing on those charges as well. He has a criminal record that includes convictions for assault, illegal weapons possession, robbery and forgery.