A 73-year-old man accused of killing his 10-year-old stepdaughter and shooting and stabbing his wife remained in a hospital Friday, so his arraignment was rescheduled for Tuesday on charges of murder and attempted murder.
Tanh Thien Tran had been briefly hospitalized for treatment of self-inflicted stab wounds following his Wednesday morning arrest.
Officers responded about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday to a domestic violence call in the 8900 block of Blossom Avenue and discovered Tran’s 36-year-old wife in the front yard with stab wounds and a single gunshot wound, Garden Grove police Lt. Carl Whitney said. The woman told officers the family lived in a duplex and her husband was in the rear of the home, he said.
“She also told us three children were still in the house,” Whitney said.
Two boys, aged 3 and 6, were found unharmed in the residence.
Officers found Tran, armed with a knife, on the “threshold of the patio door,” he said. Tran was suffering from “superficial self-inflicted wounds,” according to the lieutenant.
While Tran was talking to the officers in the rear of the home, other officers found the 10-year-old girl and the two boys inside the home and took them outside.
Officers tried to resuscitate the girl, who was taken with her mother to UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange. The girl was pronounced dead 90 minutes later, but the mother survived, Whitney said.
Officers eventually subdued Tran with rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, he said.
Whitney said the couple had been having domestic troubles, but no specific motive for the outbreak of violence was disclosed. Tran had brought the woman to the United States from Vietnam.
The girl was “really popular at school and really well-liked,” Whitney said.
“One of our sergeants went out there to talk to school personnel and the principal became really emotional when he heard the news,” Whitney said.
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