Local News in Brief : Killer of Chinese Student Gets 7 Years

A Van Nuys man was sentenced Friday to seven years in prison in the stabbing death of a Chinese student working as a night clerk at a Sepulveda Boulevard motel.

Francisco Sanchez, 25, was sentenced after a plea bargain with prosecutors. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office dropped a murder charge and allowed Sanchez to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for the lighter sentence.

The victim, Chen Feng, 40, was stabbed in November in a vacant room of the Chateau Motel after he and Sanchez, who lived at the motel with his family, argued about back rent, prosecutors said.

Chen, a student of landscape architecture at UCLA, was a citizen of the People’s Republic of China.

Seeking a murder charge posed problems because prosecutors could not establish who drew the knife used to kill Chen, Deputy Dist. Atty. John K. Spillane said. Also, Sanchez carried the mortally wounded Chen to the motel office and waited for police to arrive, Spillane said.

Consular officials of the People’s Republic of China watched the case closely. After the sentencing, Ma Lan Tian, educational consul in the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, said his government respected U. S. law. But he noted that, under Chinese law, Sanchez would have received the death penalty.