A Garden Grove man who choked his elderly mother to death because she
wanted him to study medicine instead of pharmacy was sentenced today to six years in prison.
You read that right: choke out your 71-year-old mom, get six measly years behind bars.
When Son Richard Lam Nguyen's trial began in early March, the Orange County District Attorney's Office was pursuing murder charges against him.
The 31-year-old was convicted of
manslaughter on March 23.
]
Late on the night of Dec. 20, 2008, he was in the Garden
Grove home he
shared with his mother when she let him know she did
not support his desire to become a pharmacist.
Nuong Nguyen wanted her boy to become a physician.
Son Nguyen allegedly became so
enraged that he strangled the elderly, 5-foot-tall, 80-pound woman with
his bare hands in the
bedroom.
Police earlier said he then wandered the
street outside for awhile before sleeping in his car parked outside the
home.
Around
10:30 a.m. the next morning, he called police to report that
his mother had passed away.
An autopsy later confirmed she'd been
strangled.
Son Nguyen is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine
with a bachelor's in biology. At the time of the murder, he
was a first-year student at Ross University in Dominica, located in the
Caribbean, studying pharmacy.
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.