Sister Gone, Pain Lives On -- 1 Year After Massacre, Family, Community Torn

TACOMA - She speaks of pictures, because photographs are all the 28-year-old Myvan Vo has left.

The one by the front door is of Vo and her younger sister, Tuyen, taken a little more than a year ago in an airport. It recalls a similar scene nine years ago, when the two teens left Vietnam in search of a better life.

Across the room is a picture of Tuyen alone, the frame surrounded by incense and Buddhist scriptures. It's a shrine for the 21-year-old victim of Tacoma's worst-ever shooting, in which five were killed in the Trang Dai cafe last July 5.

Myvan Vo can accept her sister's death. But the picture Vo can't resolve is that her killer may have been Vo's former brother-in-law, who once shared her home. That she can't forgive, or understand.

Vo's phone rang shortly after 10 p.m. on July Fourth last year.

Her sister was waiting tables at Trang Dai and was calling to say business was slow. She would head home early and asked her sister to have a bowl of noodles ready.

That was the last Vo heard from her baby sister.

Hours later, according to Tacoma police and court papers, five gunmen sprayed automatic weapons inside the cafe on South Yakima Avenue, while three men waited in getaway cars. They unloaded at least 57 shots. Five people were killed, another five injured.

On Sept. 8, five Tacoma men - Jimmie Chea, Sarun Ngeth, Marvin Leo, John Phet and Veasna Sok - will go on trial on five counts each of aggravated first-degree murder and first-degree assault for what prosecutors say was a gang slaying.

Two sisters' story

But what can a trial resolve when the pain runs deeper, when it's about family betrayal as much as about losing a loved one? Vo wants to know.

The two sisters' story is like many other immigrants' - leaving a poor country for a better future, working odd jobs and long hours, saving money to send to family back home. That they spoke little English didn't deter them when they left Vietnam in 1990. Six years later, Vo married Hung Nguyen. When they found a three-bedroom house in Tacoma, her sister moved in.

Ri Ngoc Le, her husband's half brother, moved in, too.

They all leaned on each other to get by.

Hung owned a carwash. Le worked for him. Vo cooked for the four. The couple didn't worry about Le and Tuyen's squabbling because the two were like siblings.

Tuyen chauffeured Le around, was a patient listener and lent him up to $200.

But then the marriage frayed. The couple divorced last year, and the sisters moved out.

On their own again, Tuyen was not deterred. She was the more gung-ho of the pair, the one who had pushed Vo to join her in America and who juggled two jobs.

Until her death July 5.

Undone by the loss of her sister, Vo turned to her ex-husband once again. He became her emotional support, and they talked of reconciling. Then, on July 18, Vo was awakened by the telephone. Come to the door, said the police, who already had surrounded her house.

As they questioned Vo, she realized who the authorities sought.

The very thought shook her. The main suspect in the Trang Dai massacre was her former brother-in-law.

According to court documents, Ri Le was a gang leader. The shooting had stemmed from a dispute with a rival, Son Hoang Kim, who had accused Le of burglarizing a friend's house.

The two had fought, and prosecutors say the July 5 massacre was payback.

"I'm going to take care of business," they say Le had told a friend.

At the cafe, court papers say, Le positioned drivers in two getaway cars, and gunmen at the front and back doors. With his face covered with a red bandanna, Le burst in firing an assault rifle.

His target, Kim, took cover and was only nicked in the finger by a bullet. None of the others hit was a gang member; none had anything to do with their fight.

Whether Le knew that Tuyen was in the cafe that night is unclear.

On the verge of going home, she'd stayed because someone had ordered iced-milk coffee. When the bullets flew inside the dimly lighted cafe, Tuyen dashed for the back door and was shot by the waiting gunmen.

Also killed were Hai Le, 27; Duy Le, 25; Nhan Ai Nguyen, 26; and Tuong Hung Dang Do, 33.

Five men were arrested two weeks later, but Ri Le, his brother Khanh Trinh and friend Samath Mom initially could not be found.

Vo was stunned. She wondered whether Le had seen her sister yet continued shooting. She wondered if he felt any remorse.

As the police searched for the fugitives, Vo searched for answers. She briefly moved into a friend's house in Auburn to get away from the chaos. The distance provided clarity, she says.

She recalled rumors that Le was a petty thief, rumors she hadn't taken seriously. "He was always polite and nice around the house. He was so quiet, so shy, always answering `yes, ma'am' and `yes, sir,' " she recalls in Vietnamese.

Tipster came forward

Vo says she did not know until after the massacre that Le had an extensive record of burglaries.

On July 21, a tipster directed police to a warehouse on the Tacoma waterfront. There were Ri Le and Trinh in the back seat of a red Mitsubishi Mirage.

As police drew their guns and approached slowly, Le shot his brother and then himself. A suicide note was found. A month later, Mom, the last fugitive, surrendered and hours later hanged himself in jail.

The dead brothers took with them answers Vo needed. They also left a chasm between her and her former in-laws.

Le's mother says that her sons were not capable of murder and that she won't apologize to Vo for something her sons did not do.

"I do not believe my sons were the shooters," Thanh Le says in Vietnamese.

She knows Vo is distraught, but she wants Vo to remember that after the shooting, she brought food, cooked, comforted her during sleepless nights.

"She is family, and I want to support her," she says.

Vo's ex-husband also believes his half brothers may have been at Trang Dai but were not the killers.

He doesn't deny that Le ran with the wrong crowd but says he was not the gang leader that police made him out to be. He remembers a different Ri Le, who scrubbed cars at the lot, who always was respectful and quiet.

He misses his brothers and has renamed his business, Ri's and Khanh's Car Wash.

Le's family wants Vo to know that during those first hard days after the massacre, they did not know Le and Trinh were suspects.

Vo wants to believe them but can't shake the doubts. Although they live a mile apart, Vo and her former mother-in-law have stopped talking.

A mother is responsible for raising her sons right, Vo says.

Her ex-husband has tried again to reconcile, she says. He often stops by, and when she does not acknowledge him, he talks through the thin door.

Sometimes she believes him when he says Le never confessed his role in the shooting. Sometimes Vo doesn't. "How could he not know when Ri works for him and is his brother?" she asks.

They've worked out a custody agreement for their children, one 7 months old, the other 2, so that Nguyen can see them on weekends. Vo wants to move forward now, make enough to get off welfare and become as independent-minded as her younger sister was.

"Every day, when it's 4:15, I still expect to see her Honda pull up," Vo says, looking out her window. "I have to stay busy because if I don't, I'll just think of her."

Recently, Vo carried a picture of her sister back to Trang Dai, which now is closed.

She walked to the back door, looked down and imagined her sister lying there. The thought made her want to cry.

Sometimes, she says, she thinks of how they came to America for a better life and how America appears so much bigger, stranger and scarier now that she is alone.

Tan Vinh's phone is 206-515-5656.