Myle and Johnny Nguyen might never be able to forgive Toby Stangel for killing their mother.
But they know Tammy Nguyen would have wanted her 10 children to do just that.
"She was a very forgiving person, and she would have wanted us to forgive but … I don’t think we’re there yet," Myle, 32, said Monday.
"Not even close," said Johnny, 29.
"It’s really about making peace because if you really think about it, she’s already gone, and there’s nothing that can bring her back, you know?" Myle said. "We’re trying … we’re trying … but … I don’t know if we’ll ever get there."
"We can only try," Johnny said.
A state jury in May convicted Stangel of murder, attempted murder and other charges in connection with the June 3, 2011, shooting spree that left Nguyen dead and two others wounded. Sentencing is set for Aug. 14.
After two years of silence, the Nguyens want the public to know the story of their family’s struggle to come to America and achieve the American dream, and of how Stangel’s apparently random act of violence took away their moral compass and altered their lives irrevocably.
"She was basically the glue," Myle said. "And when it happened, I couldn’t imagine why this would happen to someone like that. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t."
The Nguyens commemorated the second anniversary of Tammy Nguyen’s death several weeks ago by having a picnic at her graveside, the same thing they did on the first anniversary.
"She was the definition of a saint," Johnny said. "She was our saint."
TAMMY AND TOM Nguyen were wed in an arranged marriage in Vietnam, said Myle and Johnny Nguyen. Tammy, herself the eldest of 13 children, had her first son, Thomas, in 1973, when she was 16.
In the late 1970s the couple and what was then a family of three boys were among the thousands of so-called "boat people" who fled Vietnam to escape persecution from the victorious Communists. Tom Nguyen was a member of the South Vietnamese Army and had the scars and war stories to prove it, Johnny said.
The Nguyens joined with several other families from their home of Ban Me Thuot, a rural village in southern Vietnam, and departed in a small boat.
"They didn’t know where they were going; they were just hoping to land somewhere other than Vietnam," Myle said.
With food running low and the boat taking on water, the vessel was spotted by a U.S. naval ship that picked them up and dropped them off in Japan where they were adopted by a family there. Shortly after Myle was born in Nagoya in 1981, the family received sponsorship to go to the United States.
In California for more than a decade, Tom Nguyen worked as a mechanic while Tammy tended to the growing family. In the mid-1990s Tom decided to follow a business opportunity running a manapua truck but instead made a career of being a taxicab driver, a job he still holds.
Throughout their time in the U.S., the Nguyens resided in housing projects, and that didn’t change when they got to Hawaii where they lived in Waipahu, Mayor Wright and then Palolo, where Tom, Johnny and two siblings still live.
"That’s OK because I think it kept us grounded," said Myle, who was the first of the kids to earn a college degree and today is a registered nurse.
"You don’t realize until you’re older what your parents do for you," Myle said. "That’s the biggest regret I have is that I never got to repay her for the things that she sacrificed for me and my brothers and sister. That’s what eats me up inside."
"They went through hell to get us here," Johnny said. Growing up, he told Tammy that he would one day buy her a house and make sure she would not go hungry. "I never got the chance," said Johnny, a restaurant waiter.
AMONG THE THINGS the Nguyen children miss most about their mother are her culinary skills.
"She was such a great cook, you know?" Myle said.
"She put a lot of joy, passion and love into her cooking, and you could tell," Johnny said.
"She loved to see people enjoy her food," Myle said.
It didn’t even matter whether she knew the people receiving the benefits of her food. Redeeming bottles and cans for cash she could send back to relatives in Vietnam, Tammy would get help from workers with her load. A grateful Tammy would take them spring rolls, Myle said.
She’d do the same with the neighborhood kids, handing them food and drinks as they walked by, Johnny said. "Everybody loved her."
In Chinatown she would give money to the homeless "even though she didn’t have money," he said.
Tammy was a devout Catholic and pushed her children to attend the Vietnamese-language services at the Co-Cathedral of St. Theresa on School Street every weekend.
While some of them didn’t appreciate the prodding then, they came to depend on their faith when their mom died.
"I actually lost all my faith when that night happened," Johnny said."But slowly you kind of get the answers, not the kind of answers that you want to hear — but it is what it is."
"When your faith really gets tested, that’s when you figure out what’s really important to you," Myle said.
The Nguyens’ youngest daughter, Cindy, was scheduled to have her confirmation at St. Theresa’s in June 2011. The family decided to carry on with those plans a week after Cindy watched in horror as a man approached her family’s minivan at the Kapiolani Boulevard-Waialae Avenue intersection and began firing at them with what police later determined to be 11 shots.
Tammy had been looking forward to Cindy’s confirmation, and holding it was what she would have wanted.
TAMMY WAS DRIVING Cindy home to Palolo from her summer job as a Consolidated Ward Theaters concessionaire the night of the shooting. In a letter to the court regarding Stangel’s sentencing, Cindy recalled that as they approached the intersection just past the H-1 freeway underpass, she and her mother noticed the odd sight of a man coming out of a parked car to their left and raising his arm.
As the shots rang out and glass began to shatter, Cindy instinctively crouched as low as she could to the floor in front of her seat. "I was sure that this man was going to come to the car and check if everyone was dead. He would see that I was alive and surely shoot me." Instead, the gunshots stopped, and she heard the screeching of a vehicle driving away. As she got up off the floor, she noticed the van rolling. She grabbed the wheel and steered it to the right. The van hopped the curb and hit a pole.
That’s when she noticed the dripping, which she first thought she caused by crashing the car. "I lean over to the driver seat and open the door just to realize that the dripping noises (are) not from a car leak, it was blood coming from my mother."
Cindy said she later felt regret for agreeing to stay 30 minutes later at work.
But she wasn’t the only one feeling guilt.
Myle said she had driven Cindy home the previous night but told her mom she couldn’t that night because she had to work early the next morning.
Johnny said he ate dinner that night with his mom but left shortly after to hang out at a friend’s house. "Who’d have known that would be the last time I see her?"
At 12:40 a.m. both were awakened by a phone call from Cindy. Later, Tom Nguyen and the eight Nguyen children on Oahu at the time gathered to stay at Tammy’s bedside. They touched a piece of her body as she drifted away. A phone was placed against Tammy’s ear so Thomas and Thai, living in Japan and Nevada, respectively, could also speak to their mother a final time.
"When we walked out of the hospital, it was pouring rain as if everyone was mourning with us, even God," Cindy said in her letter.
CINDY, who was 16 the night of the shooting, graduated from Kaimuki High School last year and is now attending college hoping to become a dental assistant. Money collected from a fund that was set up in the days after the tragedy to help the family has gone toward her education, the Nguyens said.
Other family events have happened without their matriarch’s presence, including the birth of the Nguyens’ second grandchild, a girl who was named after Tammy.
In the aftermath of the shooting, many of the siblings spent months out of work. Many went to counseling. For a while, "alcohol was my therapy," Johnny said. "But the pain doesn’t go away."
Several months after the tragedy, the siblings and their father decided to gather up their funds, along with their uncles, aunts and cousins, and travel to Ban Me Thuot to visit Tammy’s parents, both in their 90s, and the farm where she grew up. None of the Nguyen children had gone before.
"To us it was kind of like the last thing our mom would want us to do, to go back there and make sure everybody was OK," Johnny said.
In all, more than 20 family members made the trek.
"We needed to get away," Myle said. "And I figured that was closest we could get to her."
The experience, which included getting water pumped from a well, making fire from wood and riding a tractor, was cathartic for the Nguyens.
There was also no TV or Internet access. "There was nothing, just each other," she said.
"It showed how good we got it, and what they left for her, and what they sacrificed for us to have this better life," Johnny said.
"It brought the family a lot closer, and I think it gave us a little bit of closure."
After coming back from Vietnam, the brothers and sisters have made it a point to get together more often — something their mother always preached. They hold Tuesday family dinners.
And they began to realize that their mother’s death, by itself, brought them closer.
"Up until that point we were all drifting apart," Johnny said.
"Everybody was busy with their own lives," Myle said.
"Nobody knew what anybody was doing anymore," Johnny said.
"And that’s the hugest lesson," Myle said. "Take the time out to spend with your loved ones. Take time out from your busy lives because at any moment it can be taken away. And that’s something we learned the hard way. I wish that she could have been here to be a part of everything that’s going on now."
Letter From Cindy Nguyen
