A Fountain Valley man who allegedly shot his fiancée to death after she confronted him about his other girlfriend, has been indicted for murder by the Orange County Grand Jury.
You may recall this happened in the trailer 26-year-old Philip Ngoc Nguyen lived in with his parents. If you think your mother-in-law is a trip, consider this: Nguyen's mother, awakened by the gunshot, tried to phone it in as a suicide.
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And the kicker: bride-to-be and murder victim
Uyennie Ton had given the gun police and prosecutors say was used to kill her to her fiancé as a gift.
Uyennie Ton, 2011 OC Homicide No. 44: Fiancé Philip Ngoc Nguyen Accused of Shooting Her in Head
Wonder if this couple registered at Target?
Actually, theirs was a doomed relationship to the nth degree. Just days before the shooting, according to prosecutors, Ton confronted her boyfriend of three years about the chick he was banging on the side. Nguyen reportedly responded by
proposing marriage and promising to end the affair.
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With Ton in his trailer on the night of Feb. 25, 2011, Nguyen is
accused of calling the other woman to come over for sex. She declined, but Ton overheard the call, spurring a violent argument with Nguyen that was capped, according to the Orange County District
Attorney's office, with Ton being shot in the head.
Calling it in to 9-1-1 as a suicide did not ultimately work, as Fountain Valley homicide detectives, after months of investigation, concluded Ton could not have possibly shot herself. The autopsy, trajectory measurements and gunpowder-residue tests also proved it was no accident, according to prosecutors.
Nguyen was arrested on Oct. 6, 2011.
The recent grand jury indictment, which speeds up the judicial process by eliminating the need for a preliminary hearing, charges Nguyen with one felony count of murder with
sentencing enhancements for the personal use of a firearm and the
personal use of a firearm causing death. A conviction could send him to state prison for 50 years to life. He is currently being
held on $1 million bail.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.