Video at Gang Trial Shows Bragging About Killings

By EVELYN LARRUBIA

Oct. 16, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Jurors watched a chilling homemade videotape Thursday in which a member of the Asian Boyz street gang appears to boast that his friends executed victims with gunshots “between the eyes, point blank.”

The tape, which gave Van Nuys jurors a taste of gang life, was the climax of the testimony of Truong Dinh, the gangster-turned-informant who provided commentary as it was shown in court.

In three days of testimony, Dinh implicated seven former gang members who are defendants in the trial, each accused of murder. Prosecutors allege that the group is responsible for seven murders and 18 attempted murders in a crime spree beginning in 1995.

Dinh and two defendants appeared in the video taken by a gang member, boasting of their violence as they smiled, clapped hands and passed around a handgun. The lens zoomed in on a poster of the elaborate letters ABZ, signifying the Asian Boyz gang.

The topic of the profanity-filled, drunken conversation, Dinh testified, was two separate shootings in which the gang allegedly killed six people.

“See what happen [sic] to their homeboys six feet under the ground,” Bunthong Roeung said on the tape. “Shoot [everybody] to the front, to the back, to the leg. . . . Especially to the [expletive] temple and right between the eyes. Point blank, cuz. Point blank.”

Authorities allege that Roeung, Sothi Mehn, Son Thanh Bui, David Evangalista, Roatha Buth, Kimorn Nuth and Ky Tony Ngo committed a string of murders in a bid to become the most feared Asian gang in Los Angeles. Five of the defendants could face the death penalty.

One alleged gang member was an honors college student at the time authorities allege that the gang was attacking strangers and committing burglaries and home invasion robberies.

The defendants are all foreign-born, having emigrated with their families from Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines. Police allege that they preyed mainly on fellow refugees.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Baird told jurors as the trial opened this week that she would present evidence of several weapons recovered by police. But Dinh’s testimony, and that of another gang member turned informant, is at the heart of the case.

Defense lawyers have attacked Dinh’s credibility; lawyer Daniel Nardoni accused him of wrongfully implicating his friends to save himself.

The joint trial has caused procedural difficulties. Many times during Dinh’s testimony, the judge instructed the jury that the evidence was limited to only some of the defendants.

Since he began testifying Tuesday, Dinh has painstakingly recalled details of shootings he participated in or witnessed. He described running freeway gun battles with gang members shooting out of windows with two and three guns and reaching over the roof of their car to fire at another car. He recalled the ambush and killings of rival gang members outside a Van Nuys apartment complex.

But the most dramatic evidence was the videotape Dinh said the gang made after drinking beers at one gangster’s home in Taft.

In the tape, Dinh complimented Roeung, saying he “grew up with that 12-gauge” shotgun. Nuth chimed in: “Hell, yeah. The big man gotta get the big guns.”

Once you pull the trigger of a gun, Roeung told the camera, “you ain’t got no heart.”