Teen Said To Lay In Wait For Lui

Mayme Lui was a busy and sociable woman, but also a careful one.

She had an advanced alarm system in her Seward Park home where she lived alone, always let her grown children know where she was going, and had a whistle on her key ring.

But Mayme Lui, say King County prosecutors, was disarmed by a young man who acted lost but secretly carried a knife.

Lui, the 74-year-old widow of Seattle photography-studio founder Yuen Lui, was stabbed to death in the garage of her home Sept. 10. Later that day, her children were contacted by a caller who said he had kidnapped her and wanted $100,000 ransom.

The next day her body was found at the bottom of a Beacon Hill embankment.

Senior Deputy Prosecutor Kerry Keefe said in opening arguments in King County Superior Court that 19-year-old Dung Hoang Le lay in wait for the woman.

"He was motivated by money and greed, and his target was a vulnerable, elderly woman who worked hard throughout her life to build a business and who died at his hands in the garage of her home," Keefe told the jury.

Keefe said Le cut Lui's wrist and hand so he could remove a tight-fitting gold and jade bracelet she had worn for 25 years, then met friends, showed the bracelet and boasted he cut off a lady's arm for it.

Attorneys defending Le, charged with aggravated first-degree murder and extortion, admit he killed the woman, but claim it was not premeditated. Premeditation is a key element prosecutors must prove with aggravated murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence with no chance for release.

Medical experts for the defense are expected to testify Le was suffering from a brain disorder caused or made worse by a car accident the month before the Lui killing. They say his thinking was so impaired it is doubtful he could have formed the intent to kill.

Defense attorney Brian Tsuchida said Le was an obedient, well-mannered person until the Aug. 19 accident in which he smacked his head into the windshield of his car. He suddenly became irrational, distant and showed flashes of instant anger.

Le, a Ballard High School graduate, has no criminal history since he immigrated from South Vietnam with his family nine years ago. "How does a person go from being like that to stabbing a complete stranger 24 times?" asked Tsuchida.

Two of Lui's children yesterday recounted the ransom calls they received that night from a man who claimed to be just a go-between acting for an Asian gang.

The first caller told Wah Lui he had kidnapped his mother and then hung up.

Wah Lui called his sister, Dina Okimoto, and asked her to check on their mother. Okimoto, who lived near her mother, saw the garage door wide open and her mother's Mercedes missing.

Shortly after Okimoto entered Lui's house, the phone rang. The caller said he was hired to help with the kidnapping.

Okimoto kept asking to talk to her mother and successfully kept the caller on the phone for an hour, enabling police to trace it to Le's parents' home.

Police watched Le, arresting him and a teenage accomplice as they apparently tried to wash evidence from Lui's car.

The teenager, convicted of rendering criminal assistance and sentenced to two years in the juvenile facility for helping to dump Lui's body down the embankment, is expected to testify for the prosecution.