Both Sides in Murder Trial Tell Tales of Sorrow

If nothing else, the prosecutors who want four gang members put to death for a long list of murders, and the defense lawyers fighting to win them life sentences, agree on this much: Now is the time for sympathy.

For prosecutors, it is sympathy for the victims, and the heartache their pointless and violent deaths brought to those who loved them.

As she addressed the jury on the issue of penalty for the first time, Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Baird pointed to a diagram of photos of the defendants surrounded by the faces of 29 people authorities say the gangsters victimized.

But the defense hopes the jurors will instead have sympathy for these feared Asian Boyz gang members, some of whom spent their early years in the horrible work camps known as Cambodia’s “killing fields.”

In his opening remarks to the jury, defense lawyer Jack Stone narrated his client Roatha Buth’s life from about his 6th to his 10th birthday--years in which he watched two siblings die of starvation, was so weak from malnutrition he could not bother to swat flies from his face, and worked in chest-high water harvesting rice.

When Buth and his family finally left for the Philippines, then the United States, Stone said he came to a mostly Latino Van Nuys neighborhood where kids picked on him at school because he didn’t speak the language.

“All of this evidence is not intended to play on your emotions,” Stone said. “It’s intended to show who he is and why he is.”

Stone is expected to call family members to recount those years and a psychologist to testify to their effect on his client.

“I don’t contest that Roatha Buth did very bad things in his life,” Stone told the jurors. “We’re trying to make you sympathetic to the kind of life Roatha Buth was forced to live--through no fault of his own--and brought him here today.”

No sooner had he finished than Baird, the prosecutor, again brought up the crimes for which the jury has blamed the defendants--and three others they had not before been asked to judge.

Her first witness was a woman who was beaten and whose husband was killed by three home-invasion robbers, allegedly members of the gang.

The couple’s oldest girl, now 9, refuses to talk about the crime or go to her father’s grave on the anniversary of his death--a day when her siblings write messages to him on balloons and watch them disappear into the sky, where they are sure he will get them.

The youngest, convinced that her father lives on the moon, will not go to sleep until she sees that celestial body and can bid her dead father a good night.

Two weeks ago, the jury convicted gang members of six murders and 16 attempted murders in a 1995 crime spree that authorities say was its bid to become the most feared Asian gang in Los Angeles.

The jury found that Buth, Sothi Menh, Bunthoeun Roeung and Son Thanh Bui committed special-circumstance murders, which make them eligible for death.

The jury will not hear details of the killing of the father of the state’s key witness, who was gunned down at the doorstep of his San Jose home during the trial. The killing led to an enhancement of already tight security.

Authorities were protecting Truong Dinh but had not extended protection to his family because they said they thought that killing a relative was taboo even for this gang, which was once before suspected of killing a witness to a murder trial.

The three other gang members who were convicted for their part in the 1995 crime spree, David Evangalista, Ky Tony Ngo and Kimorn Nuth, are not eligible for death. They will be sentenced separately in several weeks.

Ngo and Evangalista face a maximum of 45 years and six life terms for a murder, conspiracy and six attempted murders. Nuth, who was a juvenile when the killings occurred, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole because the jury found he committed multiple premeditated murders and ambushed three of his victims.