Sanity a Murder-Sentence Issue

Even Adam Tran’s attorney concedes that he murdered Vinh Truong, a college student visiting his family in Garden Grove on summer break.

Where the defense lawyer and an Orange County prosecutor disagree is over how much Tran should be blamed for the 2002 stabbing. Tran, now 30, is a diagnosed schizophrenic who drastically reduced his dosage of antipsychotic drugs after his mother told him to look primarily to God to silence voices in his head in the months before the murder.

Jurors on Tuesday found Tran guilty of second-degree murder and are expected today to start deliberating whether he was sane at the time of the killing. Deputy Public Defender Dolores Yost argues that Tran should be sent to a mental institution, rather than face a sentence of 15 years to life.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Yellin contends that a history of mental illness does not mean Tran was legally insane when he killed Truong, 26.

Yellin said Tran was lucid enough June 11, 2002, to drive to Los Angeles, borrow $200 from his mother, then purchase a knife with an 8-inch blade at a nearby military surplus store. He held several conversations with store clerks, his mother, friends and police officers, nearly all of whom testified that he was acting normally.

Further, the prosecutor said, Tran showed regret for his actions while a detective was interviewing him four hours after the stabbing. In a video shown to the jury Wednesday, Tran hid his face in his hands when Det. Mark Hutchinson told him that Truong was dead.

When asked what he did immediately after stabbing Truong, Tran said he started “praying, hoping he’d make it.” So, Hutchinson asked, “you had a change of heart?”

“Yes, sir,” Tran replied. “I really did.”

Truong was killed while in the apartment complex courtyard talking on his cell phone. Tran came up behind Truong and stabbed him in the back so hard that the blade nearly protruded through his chest.

When police arrived at the complex, prosecutors say, Tran yelled to them, “I did it! I stabbed that man!” He told them that Truong had been making fun of him for more than a year, although by all accounts the two had never met.

Tran had lived in the apartment for about a year, before that residing with his brothers in Los Angeles, where, his family said, he took his medication regularly and seemed to have stabilized.

Then he moved to live with his mother in Garden Grove, where his condition worsened, said his sister, Kathy Hinh.

Leslie Tran, a devout Christian, advised her son to turn to prayer over pills. The medication had sapped his energy so much that he could no longer work or attend school, Tran told investigators, so she thought religion would be a more effective way of treating his delusions.

She urged her son to pray alongside her and attend church on Sundays. He would go but leave early in the services because he saw blood on the walls, Yost told the jury. He did take his mother’s advice, however, in reducing the dosage of his prescription medication, Haldol, to the point that when he was arrested he told police he was taking just 5 milligrams of the drug each week.

A forensic psychiatrist testified Wednesday that for someone with Tran’s level of delusions and paranoia, 5 milligrams a day would not alleviate his symptoms.

“It’s useless,” said Kaushal Sharma. “There’s no benefit to his mental illness to take medication in that dose in that frequency.”

The month before her son killed Truong, Leslie Tran moved to her sons’ Los Angeles apartment after Adam scared her one night, knocking on a neighbor’s door, with a knife in hand, asking why they wanted to kill him.

Truong’s parents and two sisters have sat through each day of testimony, frequently becoming visibly distraught. During the closing argument in the first portion of the trial, when Yellin displayed the knife used to kill Truong, his mother sighed loudly, and all four started to sob.

They declined to comment about the trial until the jury has announced its verdict on Tran’s sanity.

During her testimony Monday, Leslie Tran showed little emotion, but later that afternoon -- her son’s 30th birthday -- she cried while embracing him, his hands cuffed behind him. She murmured in his ear as the two attorneys looked on.

The mother has been racked with guilt since her son killed Truong, Yost said, regretting ever thinking that prayer and churchgoing would heal her son.

“You always wonder what more you could have done,” Yost said. “She never had any idea it would come to this, or she would have handled things differently. She knows that now.”