Expert Links War Terrors to Killer Buth

VAN NUYS —  Children who lived through the “capricious, cascading panorama of death” that was the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s are more likely to become gang members, a psychiatrist testified Monday during the heart of the death penalty defense of four Asian Boyz street gang members.

Dr. William Sacks, who for 15 years has studied the effects of the Khmer Rouge on child survivors, said he examined one of the defendants and found that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from the so-called killing fields.

That, combined with the crushing realization that life in the United States was far from perfect and the accidental death of an older brother, led Roatha Buth to gang life, he testified.

“Certainly, in this boy’s life, there was nothing else to turn to once his older brother died,” said Sacks, a faculty member of Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. “His friends became the other gang members. This became his new family.”

On cross-examination by Deputy Dist. Atty. Hoon Chun, Sacks acknowledged that in his study of over 200 Cambodian youths in Oregon and Utah, he found very few who had turned to crime. Hoon cited one report by Sacks in which he noted that there seemed to be no correlation between crime and the anxiety and depression suffered by adolescents and young adults who lived through the four-year, bloody regime.

Buth is one of four members of the notorious gang who prosecutors say deserve to die for a series of murders in 1995. Three of them are Cambodian and the fourth is Vietnamese.

Three other gang members were convicted for their roles in the same crimes but are not eligible for death. One, former honor student David Evangalista, will not be eligible for parole for 125 years and the other two have yet to be sentenced.

For several days, Buth’s mother and two sisters have testified of the suffering they endured in Cambodia and their poor financial state once they were given refuge in the United States.

Two of his siblings got sick and died in Cambodia and at one point, Buth and his younger sister were separated from his mother and older siblings, who were put in work camps by the Khmer Rouge, Buth’s mother, Saroun Em, testified last week. They lived on very little food, at times only rice soup, and other times had to beg villagers for food, she said.

Sacks said Buth’s family also told him they had witnessed deadly beatings. He said the defendant told him he remembered being shot at once and nearly drowning once, but nothing else during the Khmer Rouge regime, which ended in 1979, when Buth was 6. Sacks testified Monday that violence and starvation was the hallmark of the Communist movement, which sought to end urban life by executing the educated and throwing people out of the cities and into the countryside. He has found that the effect on children who witness such violence and starvation is long-lasting.

He said Buth told him he has had recurring nightmares since he was age 9, including dreams of cannibalism and an armed man laughing as he guards a boatload of dead bodies.

But prosecutors pointed out that many who witnessed the same violence never repeated it in this country and agreed that living through the “killing fields” would not necessarily lead a child to a life of crime. Sacks said the effect of those early years is “just one of many factors in this boy’s life” that made him antisocial.

Like many, Buth expected the United States to be heaven, but instead lived in a housing project in a mostly Latino neighborhood where he slept in the same room with his sister and mother and scrounged cans from garbage cans for extra money.