Victim Vinh Truong, a student at California State University of Sacramento, was visiting his sister in Garden Grove.  Truong was using a pay phone outside of his sister’s apartment at approximately 10:00 p.m. to finalize plans for his upcoming visit to Vietnam.  Defendant Tran snuck up on the victim while he was making a call and stabbed him once in the back and killed him.

In a taped police interview, the defendant admitted to the intentional killing of the victim.  He went on to say that he had been thinking about killing someone in the apartment complex for a while because people had been talking about him.  He also told the police that he is a paranoid schizophrenic who takes Haldol once a week as needed.  He had never seen the victim before stabbing him.  Tran purchased the murder weapon in Los Angeles the morning of the murder.

Tran’s attorney entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, necessitating a two-phase trial.  The heart of the defense case was the defendant’s two hospitalizations due to hearing voices and threatening suicide.  The jury found the defendant guilty of second degree murder, but couldn’t agree on whether the defendant was sane at the time of the murder.  In a new trial, a jury found the defendant sane. Tran was sentenced to 16 years to life in state prison .