Orange County criminal Huy Trong Tran wasn't happy that girlfriend Michelle Ho broke up with him to date Antonio Hernandez. Tran begged Ho to come back to him. She refused, which only fueled Tran's anger.
He sent Hernandez 20 nasty, threatening text messages, including, “You can have my leftovers” and “When I see you, it's on!”
The sentiment was 5150 bravado.
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Later, Tran–the class act that he is–pummeled Ho to the floor.
When Hernandez showed up with a friend after the attack, Tran pulled out a semi-automatic handgun and cocked it. Hernandez drove away. But Tran pursued him on a high-speed chase through Little Saigon residential neighborhoods.
Eventually, Tran–a convicted drug dealer–fired the weapon. The bullet shattered Hernandez's rear window and narrowly missed his head. After Tran left the chase, Hernandez returned to Ho's house to check on her well being, but was again confronted by Tran, who fired another shot and fled.
After he was arrested and convicted on double attempted murder charges, Tran argued on appeal that he couldn't have technically committed the crimes because he had been “angry, upset” about losing Ho and also had been “under the influence of a powerful drug [methamphetamine].”
Too bad, a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana ruled this week. Bringing a loaded gun to Ho's house and twice firing it over an extended period of time established premeditation despite the drug use and emotional instability.
What does all this mean for the 28-year-old Tran? He will continue to serve his life in prison sentence. When he's done, an Orange County judge made sure he'll face another 20 years.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
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.
