‘Killing Fields’ Cited in Asian Boyz Trial

Children who lived through the “capricious, cascading panorama of death” that was the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia are more likely to become gang members, a psychiatrist testified in a Van Nuys courtroom Monday during the death penalty phase of the trial of four Asian Boyz gang members.

Dr. William Sacks, who for 15 years has studied the effects of the Khmer Rouge on child survivors, testified for the defense that one of the accused suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from the “killing fields.”

That, combined with the realization that life in the United States was far from perfect and the accidental death of an older brother, led Roatha Buth to gang life, Sacks testified.

“Certainly in this boy’s life, there was nothing else to turn to once his older brother died,” Sacks testified. “His friends became the other gang members. This became his new family.”

On cross-examination by Deputy Dist. Atty. Hoon Chun, Sacks acknowledged that in his study of more than 200 Cambodian youths in Oregon and Utah, he found very few who turned to crime.

The prosecutor cited a report by Sacks in which he noted that there seemed to be no correlation between crime and the anxiety and depression suffered by adolescents and young adults who lived through the bloody 1970s regime.

Buth is one of four members of the notorious gang convicted of a series of murders in 1995. Only Buth is subject to a death sentence.

Co-defendant David Evangelista, a former honor student, has been sentenced to prison and will not be eligible for parole for 125 years. The other two defendants have yet to be sentenced.

Over several days, Buth’s mother and two sisters have testified about the suffering they endured in Cambodia and their poor financial state once they finally were given refuge in the United States.

Buth’s mother, Saroun Em, testified last week that two of his siblings became ill and died in Cambodia, and at one point, Buth and his younger sister were separated from his mother and older siblings, who were put in work camps by the Khmer Rouge. The children at times had to beg other villagers for food, she said.

Sacks said Buth’s family also told him that they witnessed fatal beatings. He said the defendant told him he remembered being shot at once and nearly drowning once, but nothing else of the Khmer Rouge regime, which ended in 1979, when Buth was 6.

Prosecutors pointed out that many who witnessed the same violence never repeated it.

Sacks said the effect of those early years is “just one of many factors in this boy’s life” that made him antisocial.

Like many, Buth expected the United States to be heaven, he said. Instead, Buth lived in a housing project where he slept in the same room with his sister and mother and scrounged cans from garbage for extra money.