Tustin Man, 18, Found Guilty in Slaying of Skater

A jury convicted an 18-year-old man of first-degree murder Thursday for his part in the killing of a former UCLA student leader on a tennis court at Tustin High School.

Domenic M. Christopher of Tustin faces 25 years to life in prison for the slaying of 24-year-old Thien Minh Ly of Tustin.

Ly had just returned from earning a master’s degree at Georgetown University in Washington and had gone to the high school one evening to in-line skate when two men attacked him. According to authorities, Christopher blocked him, and the second man knocked him to the ground, stomped on his head, stabbed him more than a dozen times and slashed his throat.

Ly’s parents attended each day of the weeklong trial and hugged many of the jurors afterward.

“Nothing can be done to take away the pain of the loss of our son,” said the victim’s mother, Dao Ly, 48. “However, justice is served.”

Jury foreman Henry Ruiz, 40, said the presence of Ly’s family in the front row of the courtroom each day was always in the back of his mind.

“The hardest part was not to get emotional with the family,” Ruiz said. “I have two sons, and my heart goes out to them. I hope this releases them from some of the hell they’ve been through, but I know it’s not over for them yet.”

The trial was only a preview of things to come for Ly’s family. They still face the trial later this spring of Gunner J. Linberg, 22, Christopher’s roommate and co-worker at Kmart in Tustin. He is accused of actually stabbing their son to death in January 1996.

Dao Ly described Linberg as “very, very brutal,” but she holds the teenager convicted Thursday just as responsible.

“If Christopher did not participate, my son would not be dead,” she said. “We have been living in hell since they killed my son.”

Prosecutor Debbie Lloyd said during the trial that Christopher “aided and abetted” Linberg in the slaying by helping trap Ly, then kicking him in the head as he took his final breaths.

“I do feel that he was involved and much more than he was telling us,” Lloyd said. “Even with what he did tell us, he was in some way responsible for Mr. Ly’s death.”

Christopher and Linberg initially went looking for someone to rob the night of Ly’s murder, according to prosecutors. When they confronted Ly on the tennis court, he did not have a wallet and could only offer a house key. The robbery then escalated into murder, the prosecutor said during the trial.

Defense attorney Dennis McNerney called the verdict “a shame.” He said during the trial that his client merely had intended to hassle Ly and was not aware that a murder was about to take place.

“He’s got no previous record, and he was involved with a really evil person and just got in over his head,” McNerney said.

The Orange County Superior Court jury deliberated a day and a half. When their verdict was read, Christopher barely reacted, looking back at family members as deputies led him from the courtroom. He will be sentenced May 25.

His maternal grandfather, who asked not to be identified, said the verdict was too severe considering the level of his grandson’s involvement. He acknowledged that Christopher was at the scene of the crime and should be punished, “but not like this,” he said.

Jurors said sending a teenager to prison, possibly for the rest of his life, was not easy. “It was difficult,” Don Hoag, 44, said. “But I believe this world has become very dark, and people like this definitely are just preying on people.”

Ly, former president of the UCLA Vietnamese Student Assn., had been talking to family members about pursuing a career in law and had a job interview scheduled the day after his death.

His sister, 23-year-old Thu Ly, said her family still misses him every day.

“He was the kind of person who was always thinking about how his words and actions would affect someone else,” she said. “It’s so hard to think about how someone who was so peaceful, calm and rational could meet these guys who are the opposite of him.”