Early-Morning Stroll Ends in Death for Pious Woman, 72

A morning walk was one of the few indulgences Hai Huynh allowed herself. The 72-year-old would walk briskly around her Irvine neighborhood and then return to her sister’s home at the top of the hill, retreating to her bedroom where she would pray four times a day at a makeshift shrine.

She was beginning her ascent up the hill Monday morning when she was struck and killed by a neighbor backing out of her driveway, a violent end to a life shaped by simple and selfless acts.

Huynh was struck about 8:30 a.m. as she walked on the sidewalk near Ascension and Silent Night and dragged a short distance, said Irvine Police Sgt. Wally Prestidge. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

The driver of the sport-utility vehicle has not been cited.

A neighbor notified the woman’s sister, Marguerite Le, who ran to the scene. “I was never afraid of her walking in the neighborhood,” said Le, 59. “She’s been walking it for seven years. She knew every step. But I’ve always warned her about cars.”

Huynh moved from another sister’s home in Indiana to Le’s house in the gated neighborhood near Concordia University in 1997.

Her sister said Huynh was a devout Buddhist who lived a modest life, worried about the well-being of others and followed a strict vegetarian diet. Her white-walled bedroom had been given over to a shrine.

She prided herself on her attention to health.

“She always joked with me that if everyone was like her, doctors would be starving,” Le said.

Huynh would begin her day at 5:30 a.m., pulling on a gray robe and kneeling on a green rug to pray for those suffering around the world. She then changed to a burgundy sweater and a knit hat and headed out for her hourlong walk.

“She became a figure here,” said Al Jaeger, 59, who met Huynh when he began working as a gate attendant at the complex about five years ago. “I’d see her every day. The people on [Concordia University] campus know her. Security here knows her. It’s just a ... shame.”

A neighbor, Ally Nguyen, said that Huynh saved money from her Social Security checks and gave it to her to send to Vietnam.

“She’d give me about $800 every two months and designated me to send several hundred dollars to relatives, several hundred to a temple and the rest to buy rice for an orphanage,” said Nguyen, 52, a live-in caretaker and neighbor who joined Huynh on her morning walks during the summer.

Family members, neighbors and crisis counselors gathered at Le’s home and remembered Huynh, who had said she chose not to marry, have children or even learn how to drive so that she could more completely devote her time to Buddhism.

Le said her sister would have wanted to pray for the driver of the car that hit her.”I pray for her on my sister’s behalf,” Le said. “I know she is suffering too, and my sister would do that for her.”