An 81-year-old man who stabbed his 11-year-old stepdaughter to death while trying to kill his wife during a bloody attack in their Garden Grove home was sentenced Monday, June 1, to 37 years to life in prison.
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An Orange County Superior Court jury in April found Tanh Thien Tran guilty of first-degree murder for killing Anh Duong and attempting to murder her mother, San Nguyen.
In a Santa Ana courtroom, Orange County Superior Court Judge Lewis W. Clapp said he saw Tran as someone who was “unable to control his emotions.” The judge said it was unclear if that was due to the medication Tran had been on at the time of the attack, or perhaps he had been run down by life.
“The whole thing was tragic,” Clapp said.
San Nguyen screamed for help as she ran out of their home in the 8900 block of Blossom Avenue on the morning of Aug. 29, 2018. Police quickly got the mortally injured girl — as well as her uninjured 3- and 6-year-old brothers — out of the home.
“My dad tried to kill me,” the dying girl told police and paramedics as they tended to her on the home’s lawn. She had been stabbed by a knife that pierced the left side of her abdomen. A prosecutor later told jurors that the girl “literally gave her life trying to save her mother’s life.”
A police standoff with Tran — when he made what were believed to be failed attempts to take his own life — ended with Tran’s arrest a short time later.
Tran met Nguyen — nearly 40 years younger than him — while he was in Vietnam. The two dated, married in 2016 and Nguyen moved from Vietnam with her three children to Orange County to live with Tran.
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Tran, who was receiving retirement benefits, stayed home and watched the children while Nguyen worked.
According to the prosecution, Tran came to believe that Nguyen was cheating on him after seeing what appeared to be “flirty” or “romantic” texts to another man on her phone. His anger began “percolating, boiling up over time,” the prosecution added during the trial.
The night before the attack, Nguyen apparently told Tran that while she didn’t plan to divorce him, she did want to find another place where she could live with the children.
The next morning, while Nguyen was getting ready for work, Tran shot her in the arm with a BB gun and then forced her into a closest, where he stabbed her repeatedly with a knife.
Hearing her mothers’ cries, the 11-year-old apparently came to her aid.
Tran grabbed the girl, according to prosecutors, threw her to the ground and straddled her as he kept trying to stab her mother. At some point, the girl was stabbed.
The mother escaped the closet and the home.
Before police took him into custody, Tran slit his wrists, cut his neck and poked the blade into his stomach, but all of the wounds were superficial.
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