DUI Arrest in OC Unmasked No. Cal Killer in Dispute Over Vietnam

Hoa Tran might still be roaming free if he hadn't driven a vehicle in Orange County while intoxicated in 2008.

But the DUI arrest wasn't Tran's biggest problem.

For five years, the Vietnamese immigrant had been wanted by police in Oakland for murdering another immigrant in a late-night bar fight over differing opinions about an area in their native Vietnam.

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Tran, then 24 years old, won the debate after going to his car, retrieving a handgun, shooting the other man, 26-year-old Tho Van Tu, and fleeing.

He'd managed to elude police detectives by successfully assuming his own brother's identity and moving to Orange County. But fingerprint check during his DUI arrest unmasked Tran, who also has a robbery conviction. He was shipped back to Oakland for trial.

Last week, a jury bought Tran's alcohol defense and convicted him of second-degree murder, according to the Oakland Tribune.

He faces a punishment of up to 40 years in a California prison.

–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

R. Scott Moxley

CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.

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