An 81-year-old man enraged by his wife’s flirting with another man fatally stabbed his 11-year-old stepdaughter while attempting to kill his spouse in their Garden Grove home, a prosecutor told jurors Thursday as the defendant’s attorney said the prosecution’s legal theory will not pan out in trial.
Tanh Thien Tran is charged with murder and attempted murder with sentencing enhancements for the personal use of a deadly weapon, inflicting great bodily injury and attempted premeditated murder. He is accused of killing 11-year-old Anh Duong and attempting to kill his then-36-year-old wife, San Nguyen, Aug. 29, 2018, at a home at 8902 Blossom Ave.
“A small Garden Grove community’s peace and tranquility of the morning light was shattered,” Deputy District Attorney Devin Campbell told jurors in his opening statement of the trial.
Neighbors emerged from their homes when they heard San Nguyen’s “blood-curdling screams” of “Help me, he’s killing me,” Campbell said.
A knife-wielding Tran held officers at bay as he made “superficial” cuts to himself with Anh Duong and her siblings, ages 6 and 3, still in the home, Campbell said.
Officers eventually managed to make their way into the home and rescue the three children and attempted to revive the girl, who was taken to an area hospital and pronounced dead later, Campbell said.
The girl told officers, “My dad tried to kill me,” before losing consciousness, Campbell said.
“Those were her last words,” the prosecutor said.
Tran’s “anger percolated” for weeks, leading to the “tragic, needless death of an 11-year-old girl,” Campbell said.
Anh’s “offense” was “trying to come to her mother’s aid as the defendant was brutally stabbing her in a closet,” Campbell said.
Tran had been “mulling the idea of killing San Nguyen” for weeks, the prosecutor said.
The couple had a “nearly 40-year age difference,” Campbell said.
“The defendant came to believe she was cheating on him,” Campbell said. “His suspicions may have been well warranted.”
There were “flirtatious” messages on her phone with another man, Campbell said.
Tran searched his phone for information about GPS tracking devices and how to install them on a car, Campbell said. His online searches “got more sinister” when he tried to find out how to buy a gun, and if BB guns could be lethal.
San Nguyen “broke it to him” the night before the violent conflict that she was looking for a room to rent for him because she didn’t “want her kids living with him anymore,” Campbell said.
Tran, who was retired at the time, would look after the children while Nguyen went to work, Campbell said.
She was “putting on her scrubs” in their bedroom, preparing to go to work when he confronted her with a BB gun that looked like a handgun, Campbell said.
He fired a “through-and-through shot” in her arm before repeatedly stabbing her, Campbell said.
“She’s crying out, pleading for her life,” in the bedroom closet, Campbell said. She attempted to get up, but the “floor was covered with blood” and was “too slippery” for her to gain traction.
Tran said he wanted to kill her and then take his own life, Campbell said. But he was interrupted by Nguyen’s daughter. Tran kept the girl out of the closet, but then changed his mind and pulled her in and “straddled her” while stabbing his wife, according to the prosecution.
San Nguyen managed to get away and run for freedom, but she looked back at her daughter who appeared lifeless, Campbell said. “She called out to her daughter and got no response.” Anh had sustained a fatal stab wound to her life side.
“She literally gave her life trying to save her mother’s life,” Campbell said.
In a trial brief, Campbell said that when Nguyen was released from a hospital in September 2018, she returned home and found a journal her daughter had been keeping that alleged the defendant had been molesting her and that there was evidence Tran’s online search history on his phone included looking for “pornographic videos of 15-year-old girls.”
Tran’s attorney, Eugene Sung of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office, said the day “was a horrible tragedy.”
The attorney said his client met his wife while he was traveling abroad to Vietnam. He was 69 and she was 33 years old at the time, Sung said.
Their “relationship turned romantic” while in Vietnam and they began dating in 2014, Sung said. At the end of the year, Nguyen said, she was pregnant, so they returned to the U.S., where Tran “sponsored her and the kids” and the couple got married in April 2016.