Merchant Wins Free Speech Ruling

A Little Saigon video store owner won a court ruling Wednesday that allows him to hang a Communist flag at his shop, triggering a furor that ended hours later with his collapse in a confrontation with protesters.

Hundreds of Vietnamese Americans, enraged by Truong Van Tran’s plans to display the flag of Communist Vietnam and a picture of Ho Chi Minh, gathered outside the Santa Ana courtroom in the morning.

Passions reached a peak when Tran returned to his Westminster store in the afternoon to find a small group of protesters waiting.

“Someone approached [Tran], spit in their hand and then tried to wipe it on him hard,” said Westminster Police Lt. Bill Lewis.

“It didn’t look like much of a blow. There was some hesitation, and then he fell to the ground.”

Several protesters chanted “Let him die! Let the Communist die!” but Tran, 37, did not appear to suffer serious injury, Lewis said.

He was taken to Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, where officials only described his condition as stable.

The protests followed a Superior Court judge’s decision to lift her earlier ban on the display of the flag and picture in Tran’s store, saying that his 1st Amendment rights must prevail over concerns about symbols that are “indisputably offensive” to Vietnamese Americans.

Tran is “far from blameless” in sending letters challenging anti-Communist groups to confront him, Judge Tam Nomoto Schumann said, but the display at his store constitutes political expression, the most protected form of speech.