DNA Links Convict to 1998 Rape, Murder

In life, Khen Tran might not have been so different from the other hard-working immigrants in Los Angeles County.

She lived with her mother and brother, worked at an electronics company and took English classes, sometimes as many as three a day, to improve her speaking and writing skills.

But Tran’s death, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials said Thursday, was remarkable. She was viciously attacked on an August 1998 evening on her way to her adult school class in Alhambra. She was raped and further sexually assaulted, savagely beaten on the head with some kind of blunt object. Then her car was set on fire and she was left to die in the trunk.

Her murder was not front-page news; The Times ran a five-paragraph story, hardly a blip.

But on Thursday, Sheriff Lee Baca and California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer announced that DNA samples from Tran’s body were matched against nearly 38,000 known felons and 990 cases without suspects and, bingo, a “cold hit” was made.

The match was found by the state’s crime lab, the officials said. Coupling it with fingerprints, Baca said, a suspect has been identified in Tran’s death.

Jason Donaldson, 30, is being held in Twin Towers Jail awaiting transportation to state prison on an unrelated charge. Sheriff’s homicide detectives, who spoke to Donaldson on Wednesday, said they believe he will be charged with Tran’s murder, rape and assault, among other things. They believe it will be a death penalty case.

It is the third case in California in the last five months in which the state crime lab has identified a suspect based on DNA evidence. In December, a sex offender was identified in a San Jose sexual assault case and arrested in Kansas; in February, a convict on death row was identified in the 1984 sexual assault and murder of an 18-year-old San Leandro woman.

The sheriff and the attorney general said the state’s DNA index system has a way to go before it can more quickly identify suspects. In Tran’s case, it took a year from the time the samples were sent to the lab in Berkeley until they were entered into the system, Sheriff’s Department officials said.

Lockyer said he is pushing the governor to provide more funding for the lab to help reduce the backlog, improve the system and hire more staff. By the end of this year, the lab expects to be checking 12,000 DNA samples a month. By next year, the databank will contain more than 200,000 DNA profiles of convicted criminals.

“These successes in solving crimes are becoming more and more frequent,” Lockyer said at a news conference at the sheriff’s headquarters.

DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, is a kind of genetic fingerprint that allows criminalists to match victims with suspects. Because no two DNA profiles are alike (except in the case of identical twins), some convictions have been made when no other evidence was available.

In Tran’s case, homicide Lt. Ray Peavy said the DNA match sealed the case.

“We had exhausted all the leads available to us,” Peavy said. “Until this break occurred, we did not have any idea who the killer was.”

Now, however, Peavy said detectives also have other evidence that they say will tie Donaldson to the brutal crime.

Donaldson is a repeat criminal. He was on parole for a few weeks and living just blocks from the murder scene when Tran’s body was found. He was arrested less than two weeks later after a drive-by shooting in which a pedestrian was wounded. He was driving a stolen car and had days earlier tried to rob two women in Bellflower, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

He was convicted of attempted murder and carjacking and sentenced to 45 years to life.

Tran, who was 46, was an immigrant from Vietnam who moved to the United States in 1979 and to Southern California in 1998.

“She had come here certainly for a better life,” Peavy said.

Detectives attempted to determine whether Donaldson knew Tran, but so far they believe she was a victim chosen at random.