Little Saigon Wah Ching Gangster Anh Duoc Nguyen Learns His Fate

In less than 15 seconds in the middle of the night on June 2, 2007 in Orange County's Little Saigon, gun-happy Vietnamese immigrant Anh Duoc Nguyen, though just 17 years old, forever lost his youth and his freedom.

Until Jan. 20, Nguyen–a onetime Garden Grove High School student and member of the Wah Ching criminal street gang–waited more than 1,670 days inside the Orange County Jail
to officially learn his fate.

He committed his crimes on that June 2007 morning,
lost his jury trial in 2011 and faced Superior Court Judge William Froeberg for his punishment yesterday.
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Joanne Harrold, Nguyen's defense attorney, pleaded with Froeberg
to be lenient because her client had been so young at the time of his
crimes. It was true that the defendant's conduct had been sparked by
juvenile emotions. He'd attempted to murder five people at Westminster's
Bowling Green Park after one of his victims jokingly listing his hometown as “Garden Gang”–not Garden Grove–on his MySpace homepage.

Nguyen–who'd
been a violent troublemaker in school and had been known to address his
teachers as “bitch”–considered the joke offensive and worthy of the
ultimate punishment: death. According to law enforcement reports, he yelled his gang's name before firing five
gun shots. One victim was hit in the stomach and back, and suffered
severe spinal wounds. Doctors were forced to remove about 12 inches of
that man's intestines as well.

Detectives at the Westminster Police Department
pieced together the facts of the crime and eventually arrested Nguyen,
who first denied but later admitted his gang membership. It didn't help
his cause that he possessed a “MPWC” baseball cap (Monterey Park Wah Ching) and carried the gang's tattoo on a wrist: three round burn marks.

At
the sentencing hearing, Nguyen–wearing an Orange jail jumpsuit and
chains–sat quietly at a table and watched Harrold, a former municipal judge who
now enjoys a healthy legal practice representing accused Vietnamese
hoodlums, relentlessly push for leniency. Froeberg listened patiently
and rejected each of her attempts. She even asked him to consider
Nguyen's jailhouse art, which she believes underscores his tender,
non-murderous side.

The judge declined to look at the art before
sentencing Nguyen to spend the rest of his life in a California prison. When he's done with that punishment, the gangster must serve an extra 25 years, according to Froeberg.

A
disappointed Harrold sighed. But she's still not giving up. She says she
has already prepared an appeal in hopes of winning a new trial.

As two bailiffs removed Nguyen from the courtroom in preparation for his
trip to a penitentiary, the now 22-year-old defendant looked at the courtroom ceiling and slowly
shook his head.

It could have been the last time in his life that he'll be outside of a prison.

–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

(rscottmoxley at ocweekly dot com)

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.