Sister Says Deputies Who Shot Her Brother Overreacted

When Han Huynh would wander away from home, police would sometimes pick him up. They would talk to him, buy him a meal and drive him home, a family member said Wednesday.

But that isn’t how it worked out for the mentally ill 29-year-old Camarillo resident Tuesday night.

“I want to talk to the police who shot him and find out why they shot him to death,” said Huynh’s sister, Pam Hai. “He wasn’t violent, he wasn’t stealing anything, he wasn’t hurting anyone. I want to know what happened. I want to find out the truth.”

Sheriff’s deputies fatally shot Huynh as he walked the streets of a Thousand Oaks neighborhood Tuesday, two days after he left the home he shared with his mother, sister and brother-in-law in Camarillo. Authorities told his sister they had no choice--that Huynh was uncooperative and combative even after they doused him with pepper spray. In the moments before he was shot, he brandished a knife, they said.

Hai knew her brother carried a knife--a black-handled kitchen tool with a 6-inch blade that he used to slice apples and oranges. Holding a similar knife, Hai looked at it and wondered how deputies could have felt threatened.

“This is the knife that cost my brother his life,” she said. “How could he kill anyone with this knife? He just used it to eat his fruit.”

Huynh, who had been in counseling for six years, hadn’t always struggled with mental problems, Hai said.

She said he seemed normal when the family came to the U.S. from Vietnam 15 years ago.

A language barrier kept him from excelling at his Long Beach junior high school in the way he wanted, Hai remembered. So he would stay up all night studying to make up the difference, hoping to someday have a career in computer technology.

But by the time he reached Moorpark College, Huynh began to change. He heard voices. He talked to himself. When he looked at people, they sometimes seemed to tear down the middle and transform themselves into twins.

Everything came to a head one evening six years ago when Huynh began pounding on the walls of his home. Frightened family members called police.

“After that, he had to go to the doctor every day,” Hai said.

Soon he was taking medication and the voices subsided. But he continued to talk to himself on occasion, Hai said. And sometimes, he disappeared for a few days. “I would say, ‘Why you go? If you want to go, you just tell me and I take you,” she tearfully recalled.

He told her not to worry, saying he just wanted to walk. Sometimes he talked about going back to school. Police once found him in Moorpark, near his old campus. Hai last saw her brother Sunday, talking to her husband on their front lawn. By that evening, he was gone. She called police Monday. They called her back Tuesday with bad news.

“If police had only tried to talk to him,” Hai said. “I have a feeling maybe police just overreacted. If police tried to talk to him, I don’t think there would have been a problem. They must have done something wrong. He never had problems with police.”