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00:00Back in 1995, I was assigned as a motorcycle officer with the city of San Bernardino.
00:30On August 10, 1995, at about 10 o'clock, I was on a traffic stop when I heard the triple
00:37tone.
00:38Triple tone means that there's some kind of an emergency.
00:42Hello?
00:43Hello, this is 911.
00:44Is there a problem there?
00:45Yeah.
00:46What's the address?
00:47What's the address?
00:48Ma'am, what do you need?
00:49The police or the fire?
00:50Oh, somebody died in my house.
00:51Somebody what?
00:52Die.
00:53What?
00:54Ma'am, what do you need?
00:55The police or the fire?
00:56Oh, somebody died in my house.
00:58Somebody what?
00:59Die.
01:00What do you mean they died?
01:01What do you mean they died?
01:02What's wrong with them?
01:03I don't know.
01:04Ma'am, where is the person that died?
01:06Where is he at?
01:07He's on the floor in the living room.
01:10What's the address?
01:12What?
01:13Elm?
01:14Yeah, it's Elm.
01:19This wasn't my first homicide.
01:20This wasn't my first crime scene.
01:22But this one just stuck with me.
01:26These people were brutally executed.
01:29Brutally killed.
01:31Through all my years in the homicide, I've never seen a scene like this before.
01:35Just it's, to this day, still sticks with me.
01:40Come on.
01:42I'm just gonna die.
01:45And this guy just came to me.
01:47How does he drive his way?
01:49GUN!
01:50I'm just gonna die.
01:51It's like he's done, I'm just gonna die.
01:52It was just like I was like do you want to die.
01:55I can't see yeah.
01:56The story is that he's done.
01:58I decided I can't see.
01:59I have to find out.
02:01There's something like, and the people were looking for the character.
02:04When you're gonna die, they're like, how can I write?
02:05You're watching a story with me.
02:07Yeah, I know, and I know, the people were saying,
02:39When I got off my bike, the first thing I noticed were all the people standing in the front
02:45yard. They were frantic, were all crying. They were yelling in Vietnamese. I didn't know
02:51what they were saying, but the look on their faces told me that there was something inside
02:55that house that was big. I saw a woman there holding about a two or three-year-old. The
03:05child appeared to have been shot. Got immediately called for medical aid for him. That's when
03:13I approached the house. I didn't know if there was a shooter still in the house. I had my
03:22gun at the ready. When I walked in, the first thing I noticed was I could smell the blood.
03:34There was blood everywhere.
03:40I noticed a woman laying on her back. There was a puppet next to her.
03:53Laying there next to her was an older Vietnamese man, probably in his 40s, laying face down,
04:09hands tied behind his back, and appeared to be shot in the back of the head.
04:12And the body next to him appeared to be a young boy. He was face down also with his hands tied
04:21behind his back. I proceeded to where the bedrooms were located. The house appeared to be very
04:30disheveled. It was a mess. There was a bedroom. The door was open. In the back bedroom, there were
04:46two bodies of a boy and a girl. I couldn't believe what I was in. They were both riddled with bullets
04:53shot numerous times. The little boy looked like he was trying to cover his sister as they were being
05:00shot. That was heroic to me. I have two little boys that were about the same age, and that's all I
05:09could think about, is how he, at 10 years old, risked his life to save his sister.
05:23I was a detective working for the city of San Bernardino Police Department in the homicide
05:32unit. And when we got to the front yard, I knew something bad had occurred in that house.
05:41And I kind of even questioned myself if I really wanted to go in and see what was going on.
05:53When I first walked in and started looking, one of the things we did notice was blood prints,
06:07fingerprints from a small child, and smears along the walls, lower to the ground, so we knew they
06:14were not from adults. We knew the three-year-old boy who went to the hospital had wandered around all
06:21night. You know, you start thinking, what does this kid have to suffer when he saw this by himself
06:31in there for probably eight to ten hours before somebody showed up to save him?
06:37When we got closer to looking at the bodies, we noticed a lot of different things.
06:43Dad had cuts on his neck, which were unusual.
06:56The first time I looked at the mother, when she was lying on her back in the living room,
07:01what I saw up her nose, I knew did not belong there. It was kind of a bluish-colored substance,
07:08consistent with what I thought was toothpaste. There was also what appeared to be shampoo
07:16that had been poured into the eyes. In the same room, we found an empty shampoo bottle.
07:23I've worked a lot of murders, a lot of death investigations, and I've never seen anything like
07:28this ever. We found that Lam had been wearing a jade and diamond pendant that apparently had been
07:42taken from her. We thought maybe it was taken as a trophy because some serial killers do that.
07:49When we got to the kitchen area, I saw all the pots and pans were removed from cabinets,
08:00from the countertops. They were all laid on the floor, nice neat little piles. This was not normal.
08:10That house on Elm Street was a horror scene.
08:19As we worked the scene, neighbors were interviewed by some of the detectives. What we discovered was
08:26the Wynn family consisted of six people. The father, Henry Wynn, was 44 years old. The mother,
08:32Trin Nguyen, was 35. The daughter, Doan, was 15 years old. Daniel, the oldest son, was 11 years old.
08:40And the middle son, David, was 10 years old. And Dennis was three and a half the time he was shot.
08:49He was their only surviving victim out of this incident.
08:53I think Dennis had dropped down between the beds and hid in the back bedroom.
08:59He'd caught a couple stray rounds, one in the hand and one in the arm.
09:04We talked to the neighbors and they said that dad ran a landscaping business.
09:11Mom ran a sewing business where she made uniforms for Vietnamese restaurants.
09:17Nobody was aware of any threats to the victim family either.
09:24I found out about it just by working the beat, as they say. It just had all the makings of an
09:30interesting story for a crime reporter. It was a family that was attacked inside their home and
09:36it was terrible and frightening.
09:38San Bernardino is about 60, 70 miles due east of downtown Los Angeles. And there's a couple of
09:46hundred thousand people. The Nguyen family lived on kind of the center part of San Bernardino in a
09:53predominantly Vietnamese and Southeast Asian community.
09:55Detectives continued to do a neighborhood canvas, knocking on doors, asking questions.
10:06Do you see anything? Do you hear anything? Notice anything unusual?
10:11But it was predominantly a non-English speaking community. Most of them spoke Vietnamese.
10:16And so there was just a language barrier, number one. And then there were the cultural aspects of
10:21not understanding the way the police worked in this country.
10:25I was lucky enough to find Peter Lee, the community leader for that Vietnamese area.
10:31So we made him the focus point so he could provide us what we needed.
10:38The Vietnamese people, they tend to afraid the police. They don't like the police because they
10:44had memory back home. They don't follow the law. They can do whatever they want.
10:48So at that point, I started getting phone calls from other agencies. And they were telling me
11:05toothpaste and shampoo in the eyes was a Vietnamese torture technique that was found during the Vietnam
11:13War. They'd shoved toothpaste up their nose, dump shampoos in the eyes to try and irritate them.
11:20So we knew then for sure that that's what it was. It was torture.
11:26I just couldn't understand why someone would hurt someone like that.
11:30Everybody in the neighborhood down here by the Wynn's home was frightened. We couldn't answer the
11:35questions. Who did this? Why did it happen? The violence we saw in that house, we knew that.
11:55This crime was sent as a warning. War violence was coming because we knew this killer was going to
12:03continue doing exactly what they were doing.
12:20On August 9, 1995, the Wynn family was shot and killed inside their house.
12:25The only surviving member of this family massacre was three-year-old Dennis.
12:38We had a detective who worked the Crimes Against Children Division who went to the hospital to try
12:45and talk with Dennis to see if we could get any type of statement from him.
12:48The detectives told us that Dennis, he was experiencing a lot of fear. He was afraid of loud noises.
12:58He just kept repeating that he saw blood. He saw blood. He was clearly traumatized.
13:09Any detective was smart enough to know when not to question and when to question.
13:14He made the determination that this was not the time to be pushing anything because he could still
13:20see the fear in his kid's face. He was scared to death.
13:24When we originally started the investigation, we had no information whatsoever.
13:44The neighbors were not speaking. Our eyewitness, Dennis, wasn't talking.
13:48But then we got a phone call from the crime lab. The criminalist showed me a very unique primer to
13:57only one gun, Glock handgun. So that was our first big break. We knew Glock handguns had been used in this homicide.
14:07The next day, we get a phone call from Sacramento Sheriff's Department. He says,
14:11Hey, we have this home invasion and we submitted casings and have matched against your case. And we got a match.
14:21I jumped out of my chair while I'm talking on the phone. We're back in business. We got a lead.
14:26And one of the detectives up there explained to me their murder had occurred about two weeks before
14:32our case in San Bernardino. They had a mom and pop business they were running out of their house.
14:43He told me that on the day of their murder, the daughter of the victims in San
14:46Sacramento was sitting on the front steps of her apartment. She saw two men come up the stairs
14:55with guns in their hands, and it scared the bejesus out of her. She yelled to her mother,
15:02shut the door, shut the door. The mother ran to the door to try and shut it.
15:16After the suspects entered, they shot mom in the leg. Dad grabbed the chair, tried to hit one of the
15:34suspects, gets shot. The grandfather's there. He gets shot in the head. They're both dead.
15:42The daughter said that the only way that mom survived was because the sirens that were in the
15:50background. They knew they'd been had, and they got out of there as fast as they could.
15:59We started to realize that this wasn't just one lone individual that was committing these crimes.
16:05It was a group of individuals that were acting in a pack mentality, and they were acting
16:12together to target these unfortunate Vietnamese families.
16:18Based on the information we were building from these two cases, I realized that these guys
16:23are progressing at a much more violent rate than we expected.
16:33These guys, if they didn't get stopped, God knows how many more people they would kill.
16:37We needed that information. And the only witness was Dennis, a three-year-old.
16:44So we knew that we needed to try and get what he saw and what he felt.
16:49So we knew that he didn't exactly the same thing was supposed to have to be able to control.
17:06So that's our answer, oh, stop.
17:09Soon after, this family had been murdered.
17:30Dennis was physically recovering, also emotionally recovering.
17:33So there was a police psychologist who was working with the boy
17:36to get him to understand what had happened and be able to communicate
17:39what he knew to police investigators.
17:44Dennis had drawn some pictures, and there were some figures, a lot of red,
17:51what she believed was blood.
17:55The psychologist said she could see Dennis was scared.
18:00You're down the line.
18:03You're down the line.
18:04You're down the line.
18:07He told us exactly what happened.
18:10Through brutality, I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
18:26His mom had always told him that monsters aren't real.
18:32But that was the night he found out she was wrong.
18:34He crawled out of bed
18:37and peeked into the hallway.
18:41Daddy!
18:53It was so cute.
19:07You didn't seem to have to give a chance.
19:08I'm talking about the girls, girls and girls.
19:11Oh, a girl is dancing.
19:15Who is a girl?
19:18Who is...
19:20Who is a girl?
19:23Who is that girl?
19:26Who is that girl?
19:28Who is that girl?
19:30we couldn't identify anybody but dennis remembered seeing men with guns
19:42he actually pointed to one of the investigators had on their belt well he said there were shots
19:50fired dennis also told us they didn't even cover their faces they didn't have any mask or anything
20:20at one point one of the detectives asked dennis if the the killers spoke english like the detective
20:38was speaking to him that's when dennis responded they speak like me which clued the detectives in
20:48that the killers were speaking vietnamese when dennis recognized the language that one of the
20:54killers was speaking they knew that it was a member of the community not an outsider when we
21:00got that information that made a big difference for us still we just didn't know who or where they were
21:06from as the investigation progressed one thing i thought was important for us was to find out
21:16more about the jade necklace taken off the mother trend had a jade necklace which in their culture is
21:23generally seen as bringing protection
21:25in vietnam or cambodis the female they think jade protect their life
21:33so when that thing is lost or stolen or somebody took it they feel it's very bad luck for them
21:41police realized they needed to break the silence in the community so they decided to release more details of the killings and also a five thousand dollar reward for information about what had happened five thousand dollars especially to members of that community was a lot it was not a rich community
22:03investigators are asking for any information or leads surrounding the wind family murders in san bernardino
22:10authorities now believe the shootings may be linked to another family murder which occurred just weeks before in sacramento
22:16we got so many phone calls i mean we had to have detectives just take the phone calls and go through them and see what was useful and what was not
22:34we needed a big break because they killed grandpa and dad and shot mom in the leg in sacramento
22:41and then they killed an entire family in san bernardino and left a three-year-old alive so it was just getting worse
22:49detectives are searching for the killers responsible for murdering two vietnamese families one in san bernardino
23:06and another four weeks earlier in sacramento investigators decided to release more details of the killings and also a five thousand dollar reward for information about what had happened
23:18that decision resulted in a bunch of leads being called in we were given a name of this guy in seattle washington that had the jade and diamond necklace was taken off the mother
23:32the lead also provided me with a drawing of exactly what that pendant looked like but we had no idea at this point if this guy is our killer
23:41we did not know what was going to happen next
23:48we went to the house
24:00we told them that you're either going to give us what we want
24:07or we'll get a search warrant and we're going to charge you with five counts of first-degree murder in san bernardino california
24:14after we told him that he was scared to death he told me he knew of absolutely no murders he pulled out the pendant
24:23i said bingo this is it we got it it was exactly like the drawing bleed had given me
24:32he eventually told him who had given him the jade necklace
24:38this name was run chun
24:40he said run chun had gone to seattle to see a girlfriend when he got there he realized he was out of money and couldn't get back home
24:47he had the necklace with him he offered to trade the pendant for cash so he could drive home
24:54he like many others was terrified of run chun and he probably knew what he was capable of doing
25:03like the smearing of the toothpaste in the nostrils
25:07torturing and terrifying the victims
25:10so we were looking for him and really worried about where he was going to go
25:16as we were searching for run chun
25:29and get a phone call from spokane pd homicide
25:34and they're telling me about a home invasion murder
25:38it was another vietnamese family and i was kind of shocked
25:42i asked if they could tell me what type of gun was used and they said a glock and
25:47i lit up and i asked them to contact their criminalist to contact samuel county sheriff's criminalist
25:55see if they can do a comparison
25:56this was two weeks before the shootings in sacramento
26:02and a month before the newen family killings in san bernardino
26:06spokane pd told me they killed mom and dad in front of two kids
26:11they had a five-year-old and a two-year-old that had survived the incident
26:14we had two more victims
26:17the brutality was just
26:19beyond belief
26:22he had to be stopped
26:26spokane pd interviewed joe hagan
26:34the son of the victims
26:36who was five years old at the time
26:38being five this victim was uh able to speak a little bit more and provide some crucial information
26:46for this overall investigation
26:48during the incident in spokane joe hagan was in his room
26:55and he heard loud banging
27:03little joe got up to poke his head out of his room
27:08and he was able to see
27:15that there were two men
27:17one was a bigger man and one was smaller
27:22he saw guns they were black and shiny
27:27he saw his parents
27:30and their hands were tied together
27:35joe saw his mom wanted to help her
27:40and as he started to get closer he saw his mom's eyes get wide and she started shaking her head
27:47this scared him he backed off
27:52he heard loud noises
27:54gunshots
27:58and ran behind the couch
28:04and grabbed the pillow
28:10and he he put it over his face
28:13because he was afraid
28:14he just continued to hold that pillow over his face because it was so loud
28:23he sat there until sunrise
28:29and that's when he went to his neighbor's house to go get help
28:37the detectives placed this series of photographs out for joe to try to identify who one of these
28:44suspects were
28:46and joe was able to point at one of these photographs
28:51and identify the big man that had hurt his dad that big man turned out to be the same man
28:59that had ripped the necklace off of dennis's mom
29:06ron chun
29:07there's no doubt in my mind that the main man was ron chun
29:15after getting the information on spokane that occurred on july 10th of 1995
29:20when we found out that the ballistics did match what happened on july 27th in sacramento
29:26and those matched the ballistics from august 9th in san bernino
29:30so we definitely connected all three cases together at that point but we still didn't have any other named suspects
29:39i called peter lee he told me that he would put his nose out there and see what he could come up with
29:44the police called me very early then i talked with a lot of people in the neighborhood i said you have
29:54to you have to talk with the police if you don't talk with the police the police can do nothing
29:59the people in the neighborhood scared i think maybe they think they are next then i got a phone call
30:07from peter and he asked if i could come by his office peter lee told me that there was a young
30:12lady that i needed to talk to that had information about the home invasion on elm street this young
30:18lady named carol tran
30:22carol tran had lived about a block away from the win family
30:26we ended up eventually finding her at her residence
30:33person who opened the door was nancy tran carol's mother
30:39too had looked inside the house and saw dennis inside covered in blood
30:45we picked carol tran up and brought her to the station she was definitely scared
30:49she was very reluctant to tell us the whole story but we needed her information
30:59hey tell me what happened
31:00when she started telling us what had happened i couldn't believe what i was hearing
31:22when we interviewed carol tran she was very reluctant to tell us the whole story
31:33but she knew run chun and his gang known as trg
31:40trg or tiny rascals gang was a violent immigrant gang back in the mid 90s
31:46we found out that run chun spent some time in the long beach area which is where trg formed and
31:52that's how trg ended up in san verdino carol tran was not really a member of the gang she was i would
31:59call her an associate hey tell me what happened did they come to your house
32:04they didn't think that my home for a while have you had any relationship with any of these guys no
32:10did you talk to these guys that carved out before you went there what you're in the book to do
32:19she proved to be the ultimate source of information she identified by name everyone involved in that
32:27incident that night vin scrappy tran cj evans and their leader run chun
32:57new asians sometimes keep their
33:27money and jewelry hidden in pots and pans because they don't trust banks carol told authorities that
33:34she did not believe that there was going to be a murder that night that it was only going to be a
33:37home invasion robbery she was stupid enough to be involved with these people she didn't commit
33:44the crimes other than knocking on the door and getting dealt in the door
34:01i got a phone call from sacramento sheriff they had arrested run chun
34:04then scrappy tram and the other guy was cj evans
34:19we got back up to sacramento sheriff's office the first interview we did was with cj evans
34:24and he laid out the whole scenario of everything that happened in san verdino
34:32do you know about that incident i need to have that one more time for me too just to kind of like
34:37lock that down for me so fast he was involved and i don't know what happened
34:41and then were you present when that shooting took place when they were there okay he told me that
34:49carol tran run chun scrappy vin tran and cj himself all went to the house on elm street
35:11the family told them initially they didn't have any money
35:29that's when run chun grabbed a knife and started torturing dad cutting on his neck
35:34to make him give up whatever he had
35:41i didn't even know for myself what happened in the house um one thing i'm really clear
35:46said that was the toothpaste i think that the little boy probably did it
35:53because like none of us would if you're trying to tell me you think the little boy did that i
35:58don't think so because i know all right because i look for fact that another work i know for the
36:03fact that i didn't do it and that i know nothing about it you told me you saw shocker shoot dad when
36:09you saw him shoot the boy next to dad right i was just seeing him shoot dad
36:14and go back to my mom we shot her didn't you say somebody was shooting in that direction or
36:21just scrappy i see him start shooting my daughter
36:29cj seven shown told him to go back outside so he took no part in what was going on inside as far as the
36:35shootings went how much time do you think you spent in the house yourself
36:42one more than not even two minutes i mean what's the total length of time everybody was there
36:50after we'd spoken with cj evans
36:57my partner and i sat down with run chun the police needed a monster to speak to them
37:02the leader run chun okay so you're here in sacramento now it's you scrappy cj and cj yes okay
37:12now i'm going to kind of go to and some events that occurred back in the uh the second week of
37:18august okay around august 9th august 10th you know we believe that you have knowledge about
37:23the family thing more than what you say you do what family
37:25people that you know or they say that you're involved with that in those shootings carol's
37:32saying she was there scrappy is saying he was there cj is saying he was there okay
37:38wouldn't talk didn't care had nothing to say i know for a fact that down there at this house on elm
37:45street carol went to the door and three guys followed carol up and stood off to the side behind
37:51the bushes and i know two guys had guns and the first person everybody wanted to say one of them
37:58lsu yeah i figured that okay he was very cocky very smart ass type personality all these people involved
38:08know that they're going to get some type of punishment for what they did and the only one who
38:14was involved in it and i believe you were okay who hasn't admitted any involvement like you're the angel
38:21okay okay it's you so i supposed to stand up and say okay i killed all the people no you're supposed
38:29to tell us what you did and who you killed or if you shot anybody okay you're not taking care of
38:35business you're letting their story lock you up okay oh this story's already locking me up i don't see that
38:44i tried to explain what he was looking at with uh multiple murder cases life in prison and he just
38:52kind of looked me in the face and said i'm not worried i knew this was going nowhere and i'd never
38:58get nothing out of him and i'm thinking to myself why do i not want to reach across the table and beat
39:04the living out of him because this guy's got me pissed and i knew that that was the point where
39:10i had to back out and say enough's enough carol trend was charged with five counts of first degree
39:20murder she agreed to testify on a plea deal of five counts of second degree murder to be ran concurrent
39:27was sentenced to 15 years to 50 years scrappy pleaded guilty to five counts first degree murder
39:34and he was sentenced to 50 years to life cj has led to five counts of first degree murder 25 to life
39:52during the trial rung chun walked out arrogant cocky like like nothing could touch him
39:59i got called to the stand because obviously i was first on scene and um i gave my story got a little
40:06emotional on the scene i was staring at the face of evil the jury found rung chun guilty and they came
40:16back with a death sentence he's still on death row once we left i went home and the first thing i did is
40:25hugged my boys both of them you want to think that something like that would never happen but it
40:32happened you look at your family and you think how what would you do if that happened to your family
40:42some family come here for better life they had no idea that would happen to the family
40:48it's hard-breaking to this day i still wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the house
40:57on elm street and i've seen a lot of murders but i've never seen anything like that since and i'm
41:04thankful for that when i arrived at the house on elm street something wasn't right
41:15the victim was naked as can be he had something very unusual on the body they found our uncle dad
41:25it was devastating it was like it had become its own urban legend
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