Two Charged In Murder Of Hillyard Pair Execution-Style Killings Horrified Vietnamese Community
Two men are charged with the execution-style killings of a young Vietnamese couple in Hillyard last summer.
Fingerprints, a jail house boast and the recollections of a 5-year-old boy led detectives to pin the murders on Asian gang members Run Peter Chhoun and Giao Ly.
Chhoun is in jail on another murder charge in California. Ly recently was arrested in Connecticut and is being extradited to Spokane for trial.
Spokane County Prosecuting Attorney Jim Sweetser said the suspects face aggravated first-degree murder charges. He said he may seek the death penalty.
The July 10 murders rocked Spokane’s Vietnamese community. Police found few clues in the deaths of Johnny Hagan, 26, and Hong Nga Thi Pham, 23, who were found dead in their apartment at 3203 N. Smith.
Both victims had been tied with telephone cord. Hagan had been shot three times in the head and cut on his neck.
Pham had been shot twice in the head and once in the chest, and her face had been slashed. Police found diamond rings in her mouth that she apparently had tried to hide from the intruders, according to court records.
Five-year-old Johnny Hagan III said he saw what had happened, but at first he couldn’t provide police with much help, court documents said.
Detectives interviewed more than 100 people about the double homicide, an investigation complicated by language barriers, distrust of police and fears of speaking out in the city’s growing Vietnamese community.
Leads surfaced in September as Spokane detective Jim Peterson talked with California police investigating similar Asian gang murders - called “home invasions” - in Sacramento and San Bernardino.
A direct connection was made when fingerprints found on the front door of the Hillyard apartment matched those of Run Peter Chhoun, 23, a jailed suspect in one of the California murders.
Chhoun told police he visited Spokane in July, but denied involvement in the killings. He later failed a lie detector test. He then told police that he knew who committed the murders, but refused to say anything more, according to court documents.
Police brought photographs of Chhoun and others to young Johnny Hagan, who’d started talking about what he’d seen the night his parents died. He told police two men came into the apartment; one had a knife, the other a gun.
The boy put his finger on Chhoun’s photograph and said he was the man who hurt his dad, court records said.
Police said Wednesday the apparent motive for the killings was robbery. Relatives say Pham bought a diamond ring, worth as much as $7,000, just weeks earlier. The couple also carried large amounts of cash.
Court records also say police were told the murders may have been a gang hit. Mark Milazo, who was jailed with Chhoun in Sacramento, Calif., told a Spokane detective that Chhoun said he and Ly were paid $10,000 for the killings.
Milazo said Chhoun described the crime in detail - the .45-caliber gun, the telephone cord used to tie up the victims, the decision to spare the couple’s two children.
Milazo said Chhoun expressed frustration that the woman would not spit the rings out of her mouth.
According to Milazo, Chhoun’s partner in the murders was Ly, or “Sandman,” a man Spokane police call a member of a Vietnamese gang called the “Tiny Rascals.”
Ly, 21, was living in Spokane at the time of the murders. Chhoun told police he visited Ly last July.
After chasing the Ly lead, police asked young Johnny Hagan to look at some photographs again. The boy picked out Ly as the man who used the knife, court records show.
, DataTimes