1 Man Killed, 1 Wounded as Long Beach Attacks Continue

Two 23-year-old men were shot, one fatally, as they sat in a parked car in Long Beach, becoming the city’s fourth and fifth shooting victims of Cambodian descent since Oct. 19, when a U.S. Marine and his friend were slain, police said Monday.

Long Beach Police Department spokeswoman Nancy Pratt said detectives don’t believe the shootings are connected, apart from the fact that the victims were young men of Cambodian heritage who were shot at night in or near the center of the city.

“I’m not at liberty to say anything now, but the motives in the first and second [shootings] are entirely different altogether,” Pratt said.

The most recent attacks occurred Saturday at 10:15 p.m., officials said. Kimsot Sok was sitting in a parked car near 17th Street and Loma Avenue -- at the east edge of central Long Beach, a few blocks west of the Traffic Circle -- when a gunman walked up to the car and fired several shots at Sok and his friend.

Both men, Long Beach residents, were taken to nearby hospitals, where Sok died. His friend, who was not identified in order to avoid a retaliation attempt, is expected to survive.

Detectives were told that the victims were not employed, said Pratt, who had no other information about them.

About 9:15 p.m. Dec. 19, Long Beach resident Daniel Chantha, 18, was shot to death at a relative’s home in the 1000 block of Atlantic Avenue.

Chantha, of Cambodian descent, was in the backyard of the relative’s property when he heard a knock at the rear gate that leads to an alley, Officer Greg Schirmer said.

When Chantha opened the gate, he was shot a number of times with a handgun. Authorities declared him dead at the scene.

Two months earlier, at 1:30 a.m. Oct. 19, a hooded man sprang from behind a backyard fence parallel to an alley and opened fire on a family and friends of Cambodian descent gathered for an oyster barbecue.

Marine Sok Khak Ung, who was on weekend leave from Camp Pendleton on a visit to his father’s home on 7th Street, was shot and died a short time later.

Vouthy Tho, who had been crowned prom king at Woodrow Wilson High School in 2001 and dreamed of a career in rap or undersea welding, suffered head and torso wounds and died at a hospital the next night.

The irony that the sons of Cambodian refugees who had fled genocide for America, only to be gunned down in street crime -- one of them having survived the Iraq war -- resonated in the national media and incited leaders among refugee businesses and institutions to call for swift arrest of the shooters.

The city of Long Beach has offered a $25,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of a suspect in the October slayings, which alarmed people outside the typically insular refugee enclave.

Police have maintained a high profile in the most crime-riddled midsection of the city, but no arrests have been announced in the case.