Five Dead, Five Injured In Tacoma Shooting -- Police Suspect Gang Rivalry

TACOMA - They sounded like the firecrackers bartender Gayle Smith had heard all night. But as she wiped down the bar at The Yakima Pub, she noticed the popping was lasting longer than it should. She peeked out her tavern's door, looking both ways - the street was empty - and she stepped outside. She noticed some firecracker smoke and some spent bottle rockets. But as she was about to turn around, she heard a sound that turned her stomach: a moaning voice.

She ran, and locked the bar's front door, talking to herself, breathing hard: "It was a gun! It was a gun that was going and going and going."

Early Sunday, at least three gunmen sprayed bullets into Trang Dai, a Vietnamese restaurant in the heart of Tacoma's Southeast Asian community, killing five people and wounding five others. Smith, who works next door at the pub, said her boyfriend looked inside the restaurant a few minutes later and described it as "bodies and blood."

It was the worst mass killing in recent memory here. Sixteen people were inside the restaurant at about 1:30 a.m. when gunmen stepped into the doorway. "When they started shooting," police spokesman Jim Mattheis said, "it had to be total pandemonium."

Police said the shoot-and-run incident made it look like a gang hit, although as of this morning police still had no suspects and no description of the shooters by survivors other than that they were men.

"This is going to be a real whodunit type crime to solve," Mattheis said.

One of the wounded was hospitalized and remained in critical condition this morning, and one was in satisfactory condition. Three others were treated for minor wounds and released.

Among the dead are a woman, Thi Ngoc Tuyen Vo, 21; and four men, Hung Dang Do, 33, and brothers Duy Quang Le, 24 and Hai Le, 27, all of Tacoma. The name of the fourth man was being withheld pending notification of relatives, according to Karen Barr, Pierce County Medical Examiner's Office investigator.

Huy Do said his older brother came to the restaurant to relax, drink coffee with friends and sing karaoke. "He was just an innocent bystander. He didn't do nothing," Do said.

Hung Dang Do came to this country three years ago in search of a better life for himself and his parents, his brother said. His parents were too old to start a career, so Hung, a carpenter, and the rest of the family worked and scraped by to pay for the two-bedroom apartment they shared in Tacoma.

"This shouldn't have happened," the brother said. "He was there to have fun."

Another victim, 28, remained in critical condition at Madigan, while Hoai Nguyen, also 28, who was shot in the shoulder, was in satisfactory condition at Tacoma General hospital.

Another man, Son Kim, 21, who was shot in the finger, was released after treatment at Tacoma General.

Treated and released at St. Joseph hospital in Tacoma were Phat Nguyen, 40, - the restaurant's owner - who was shot in his upper body, and a woman who had minor wounds.

Business was a focal point

Neighbors describe the restaurant, a gray stucco one-level with tired cedar shingles and dark-purple tinted windows, as a gang hangout, a social focal point in a neighborhood where young Vietnamese and Cambodian gangs feud, fistfighting in the street, talking bigger than they are, chasing each other with guns.

Police did say they are checking a videotape from a surveillance camera behind the restaurant. The tape appears to show someone breaking into a car a few days earlier, apparently for a purse.

Police speculate the incident might have fanned a smoldering rivalry between gangs.

Authorities also are looking into a June 28 drive-by shooting at the restaurant. No one was hurt or arrested in that shooting.

Police say yesterday's shooting looks like a gang hit because nothing was stolen, the shooters used three different guns, including an automatic weapon, and did not speak a word when they entered the restaurant.

As they fled down an alley, the gunmen continued to shoot at the restaurant, Mattheis said.

On one outside wall, police circled the bullet holes with orange spray paint and numbered the shots.

The restaurant, at 3819 S. Yakima, sits off a main street in a largely Southeast Asian neighborhood. Tacoma's mayor estimated the city's Vietnamese and Cambodian populations at about 2,500 each. Many storefronts nearby have Vietnamese signs. The video stores carry only Southeast Asian movies.

It is also a neighborhood that keeps to itself: People there are distrusting of outsiders, and prefer to solve problems on their own, said neighbors and residents.

"This community is very tightknit," Mattheis said. "This is a hard case. We have a few officers that speak Vietnamese, but this is going to take somebody coming forward."

Some not surprised

Yesterday, as many as 200 people gathered near the restaurant. Many said they didn't know what happened, and did not seem surprised when they found out.

"Of course!" said one older man wearing camouflage pants.

"So what?" said a younger man with slicked hair.

People talked on street corners, speculating. One man, Vuong Thanh, who frequents the neighborhood, said he thinks the shooting was over a dispute about a young woman at the restaurant and the people she chose to associate with. "She talked to somebody else and (her friends) didn't like it," he said.

"I knew this would happen," said Dionisio Payopay, who moved recently to Puyallup from this area, where he still does shopping. "My son, he is 16, was beat up because the Cambodian gang was trying to make him join them. I said, `Why are you crying?' He said `They beat me up.' That is why I moved."

People in the neighborhood said the past three or four months have been noisy and rowdy: Vietnamese gangs, who play in a pool hall called Saigon, and Cambodian gangs, who play pool in another hall nearby, often have fought, yelling in the street, shooting at one another and smashing each other's car windows. David Forsberg, who works at The Yakima Pub, said he sees youngsters flash handguns several times a day. "Once a kid got out of his car and the gun just fell out his pocket onto the street, plain as day," he said.

Police had been watching the restaurant and some "criminal activity" surrounding it, Mattheis said, without elaborating.

On Friday, there had been a loud argument outside Trang Dai between young men who guarded each other as if they were bodyguards, neighbors said.

Thai Nguyen, the owner of a hair salon next door, said the June 28 drive-by shooting at the restaurant was a symbol of a neighborhood that was changing for the worse.

The neighborhood is scribbled with gang graffiti more and more. Earnest Williams, a pastor at Solid Rock Outreach Church, across the street, complained about graffiti on his building. That, and other incidents such as three stolen cars and broken windows, suggest that the neighborhood is declining, he said. "This neighborhood, with its diversity, has such potential to be happy. It's dangerous now."

Mattheis, however, said gang members typically do little more than tag buildings, and that gang violence in Tacoma is infrequent. Despite that, though, gang officers were on alert last night, searching for any clue as to who may have added five homicide victims to the city's 12 so far this year.

Williams' wife, Mae Williams, witnessed the beginnings of the night, which were innocent enough: She drove by the restaurant about 12:15 a.m. yesterday morning and saw eight people on the street, shooting off fireworks. Apparently, they had been setting them off for most of the evening, and continued until just before the shooting, when they started drinking in the restaurant.

Sometime around 1:30 a.m., three gunmen entered the restaurant through a door on the left side of the building and began shooting. (Later, one man was found dead to the left of the main entrance door. Two bodies were found farther to the left by a booth, and the woman's body was found near a rear door.

Smith, the bartender, said the street was surreal, out of some smokey dream. "It seemed like almost right away the ambulances came from all directions. The red lights were flashing. The ambulances just kept coming and coming. They brought out the gurneys. And the gurneys just kept coming and coming. My boyfriend, who was picking me up, went over and saw. He said it was just bodies and blood everywhere."

Matthew Ebnet's phone message number is 206-515-5698. His e-mail address is: mebn-new@seatimes.com

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.

---------------------------- Other shootings of notoriety ----------------------------

The Tacoma restaurant shooting was one of the worst in the state in recent memory.

Others are:

-- The state's worst mass murder was the 1983 Wah Me massacre, where 13 people were slain in a Seattle International District gambling parlor. The 13 were killed when robbers opened fire after tying up patrons and stealing their wallets.

-- In 1994, Airman Dean Mellberg, who had been discharged from the military for mental-health reasons, opened fire with a semiautomatic assault rifle at Spokane's Fairchild Air Force Base hospital. Four people were killed and 22 were injured, before Mellberg was shot and killed by a base security officer.

-- Two people were killed and five were wounded in 1994 in an alcohol-free club on Rainier Avenue South in Seattle. Police blamed a gunfight between gangs for the shooting at the club, where the clientele was mostly young and Vietnamese. Several men entered the Cafe 49 and opened fire on 50 to 60 people.

-- Two people were killed and three others injured last September in a drive-by shooting on the West Seattle Bridge. The two were changing a flat tire on their car while parked on the bridge when another car drove past them and one of the motorists opened fire with an assault rifle. The car turned around and more shots, a total of 70, were fired.

-- A Ballard High School student, Melissa "Missy" Fernandes, was gunned down outside the high school in a gang-related shooting in 1994. One of the shooters, Brian Ronquillo, was sentenced to 52 years in prison for firing an automatic weapon at the 16-year-old as she stood in a group of friends.