Matriarch's Murder Brings Sorrow, Rage

In a family whose lifeblood has been photography's power to preserve, surely the last, best memory of Mayme Jeanne Lui is captured in her smiling color portrait.

Friends and family of the widow of photography-studio founder Yuen Lui will try to forget the image of the 74-year-old woman's body dumped 18 feet down an embankment at 41st Avenue South and South Perry Street. She had been stabbed several times in the chest.

Yesterday, Lui's children issued a statement expressing pain at the loss of a woman friends called "Mimi" and anger at attackers they said took her life for money.

Two young men, 17 and 18, were arrested Friday for the crime, which progressed from a robbery at Lui's Seward Park home to ransom demands to the discovery of Lui's body.

"Everyone who knew her would say she was a trusting and good person. Of course she was devoted to her family," said family friend Dwight Imanaka, reading the statement yesterday. He recalled that just a few days ago, Lui enjoyed taking her grandchildren out to buy school clothes and pizza.

"We want to make this very clear: We feel strongly that the punishment of these killers must match the severity of their crime," the statement said.

"It's a very kind family. How come this happened?" lamented Frank Lau, a dancer and businessman whom the Lui family, which is Chinese-American, helped after he emigrated to Seattle from Guangzhou (Canton).

Mimi Lui "was very peaceful, a very happy person. She always laughed. I feel so sorry."

Police sources said yesterday the kidnappers did not appear to be formally tied to a Vietnamese gang but tried to convince the Lui family they were, to intimidate them.

The family expressed anger at that tactic, saying that "whether or not they actually belong to a formal gang or informal group," the killers preyed on the Asian community's fears of extortion from people of their own ethnicity.

Vietnamese and Cambodian robbery rings often seek out homes where they believe residents keep large amounts of cash or jewelry.

George Nakauye sees the situation from both sides. As a relative by marriage to the Lui family, he grieves for a fine woman. As director of the Asian Plaza Youth Foundation, he works first-hand with kids in various stages of gang involvement, trying to derail violent tendencies.

WELL-KNOWN TARGET

Nakauye feels the family was targeted because of its well-known name. He said there were no previous extortion attempts.

"They're starting to kill people now, definitely," Nakauye said of young gang members and "wannabes." "It has to do with the availability of weapons.

"Our gangbangers are out there renting these martial-arts movies, these gangster movies, and having fantasies about carrying them out. But in the movies everybody gets up and goes home. In real life, they don't."

Detectives in the Seattle police gang squad have noticed a pattern of increasing violence in crimes involving Vietnamese gangs,

which once confined themselves to home-invasion robberies accomplished by intimidation alone.

In July, Kung Ki, owner of a Chinese restaurant in Lacey, was fatally shot when he became angry with a group of robbers believed to be Vietnamese or Cambodian. His 16-year-old son was wounded in the leg as the robbers left the restaurant.

A 19-year-old Seattle man, allegedly a Vietnamese gang member, was charged several weeks ago with first-degree robbery in Snohomish County Superior Court for a July 3 robbery at the Golden China restaurant in Mountlake Terrace. Victims in that case were pistol-whipped, and the owner was cut with a knife.

And several fatal and near-fatal shootings this summer in parts of South and West Seattle have involved various Asian gangs.

PHONE CALLS TRACED

The 24-hour Lui drama ended about 7 p.m. Friday when officers found Lui's body. It began, according to police spokeswoman Vinette Tichi, when Lui's son Wah received a series of phone calls late Thursday from men who first asked for his deceased father, then said they had kidnapped his mother.

Wah Lui called his sister to check on their mother. The woman and her Mercedes-Benz were missing from the home, in the 6000 block of 52nd Avenue South, and there was blood in the garage.

The suspects began to reveal themselves when they placed another call to Lui's home, identifying themselves as local gang members and saying they wanted $100,000, Tichi said. Police traced the call to a home in the 3200 block of South Holden Street.

The Seattle police emergency-response team watched that house Thursday night, and officers found Lui's car in the 6800 block of Holly Park Drive South the next morning.

About an hour later, as police watched, the two suspects approached the car with a bucket of water, apparently to clean out blood. They were arrested.

When police and FBI agents showed up at Jefferson Park Golf Course at noon, as had been arranged before the two were arrested, no one appeared to collect the ransom.

A search warrant served on the Holden Street house uncovered personal items belonging to Lui, including jewelry and identification.

Police believe Lui was stabbed during the robbery at her home, but they were not sure exactly when she died.

INVESTIGATION CONTINUES

Tichi said the investigation was continuing and more arrests might be made.

Lui's late husband, Yuen Lui, established a children's photo studio in Seattle in the 1940s, specializing in home portraiture. The company now has eight stores in the Puget Sound area and several in the Portland area.