A man accused in the car-to-car shooting death of a 16-year-old boy on a San Diego freeway nearly 20 years ago gunned the teen down in cold blood in retaliation for a series of gang-related altercations, a prosecutor said Thursday.
But a defense attorney claimed the killing was actually orchestrated by a pair of Northern California-based gang members who were hiding out in San Diego.
Phong Huynh, 42, was previously convicted and sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for the Feb. 13, 2000, slaying of Nghia Tan Pham. That conviction, however, was overturned by an appeals court panel, leading to the retrial that began Thursday.
Pham was struck in the head by one of about a half-dozen shots fired at the car he was driving on southbound Interstate 15, north of state Route 52. The case went unsolved for more than a decade until Huynh, who was living in Montana, was identified as a suspect.
Both the prosecution and defense alleged that Pham was killed in retaliation for a fight he was involved in at a San Diego pool hall, in which he inadvertently bumped a man with a pool cue while lining up a shot at a billiards table. The fight triggered another altercation days later at an area coffee shop, then the shooting, which occurred about a week after the pool hall fight.
Deputy District Attorney Christopher Lawson said Huynh was friends with two men injured in the fight, while Huynh’s attorney, William Nimmo, claimed his client was never there or at the coffee shop fight.
On the night of the shooting, Huynh allegedly had a driver follow Pham as he drove onto the freeway, then fired on him from the front passenger seat. Lawson said Huynh fled to Michigan six weeks after Pham’s death.
The driver of the car had no idea Huynh was planning to kill Pham on the night of the shooting and declined to come forward for more than a dozen years out of fear, Lawson said, but eventually told authorities what happened after being overcome by guilt.
Other witnesses allegedly also told police that Huynh bragged about committing the killing or threatened others that they might be next, Lawson said.
Nimmo countered that the driver and Huynh did not like each other and he would never agree to drive Huynh, like the prosecution claimed.
Nimmo claimed that a pair of San Jose-area gang members were in San Diego and were on the run due to an attempted murder drive-by shooting they committed in the Bay Area. He alleged that those men lost the fight at the pool hall, and their humiliation over the altercation triggered a chain of events that led to Pham’s killing.
“That is what started this on the road to killing,” according to Nimmo, who said that if the gang members had not been in San Diego, and “fueled up by their drive-by, the vengeance of their brutal, violent gang, that this may not have been more than a couple fights.”
Huynh was convicted by a San Diego jury in 2015, but two years later, an appellate court panel overturned his conviction on the basis that he was not allowed to continue a portion of the trial in order to produce a key witness for the defense’s case.
The three-justice panel also ruled that Huynh should have been allowed to introduce evidence that some of the prosecution’s witnesses were associated with a gang that frequented the pool hall and coffee shop.
Huynh allegedly confessed to killing Pham — an associate of some of the gang’s members — at one of the suspected gang members’ homes, something his first trial lawyer characterized as “so highly improbable as to be ridiculous,” the court’s ruling quoted.
The gang evidence was not allowed to be presented at trial, as it was ruled to have no bearing on Huynh’s alleged motive, but the appellate court ruled that its introduction would have allowed for “a materially different understanding of the relationships between the relevant individuals.”
— City News Service
