Hospital-Slaying Suspect Blames Bias

He thinks mom got bad care due to his looks, police say

By Jason Ma

Dung Trinh believes that when hospital workers saw him with his ailing mother, they dismissed her as the parent of a gang victim and mistreated her, say authorities and acquaintances. And after Mot Trinh succumbed to a heart attack Sept. 14, her son came back to take the lives of three people, according to source.

“This is the most serious case we’ve had regarding a hospital,” said Anaheim Police Sgt. Joe Vargas. “It shows us that the Vietnamese community is not immune from spontaneous violence. It can be anybody any place.”

Dung Trinh had suspected that his tattooed appearance caused some hospital staff to mistreat his 72-year-old mother in June, when she received hip surgery, according to Huong Nguyen, an office manager for a doctor who had treated Trinh for kidney failure. According to the Anaheim Police Department, though, Trinh was not a member of any gang nor did he associate with criminal elements.

“The hospital, they looked, and he looked like a gangster,” said Nguyen, recalling what Trinh related to her a week before the shooting. “They didn’t like it, so [Trinh] came back to see Dr. Nguyen. He said the hospital didn’t treat her good.”

Nguyen admitted that Trinh’s appearance was initially daunting to her. “The first time he came into the office I was scared, too. I saw some tattoos on his hand and neck.”

But over the next two years, Nguyen said, Trinh proved to be quiet and well-mannered, even helping one patient move into a new house. “He was very nice,” Nguyen said. About a year ago, she added, Trinh quit his job as a chef to care for his mother. “Whatever his mom wanted, he tried to do.”

At 5:43 a.m. Sept. 14, paramedics rushed Trinh’s mother back to the Anaheim Memorial West Hospital, where she died of a heart attack. Later that same morning, Trinh, armed with two .38 revolvers and 50 rounds of ammunition, Trinh went to the nurses station and shot aide Marlene Mustaffa, 60; pharmacist Vincent Rosetti, 51; and maintenance worker Ronald Robertson, 51, as he was closing the lobby door to try to keep the gunman out. Before Robertson was shot, he tackled Trinh and held him long enough for hospital security to arrive, according to Vargas. “Had not Robertson tackeld and detained the suspect, there would have been added victims.” Vargas said.

Mustaffa was on duty while Trinh’s mother was in the hospital, but the other two had no known connection to her.

Vargas said the hospital had no history of complaints from either the younger or elder Trinh. Moreover, he said, there is no evidence suggesting that Mot Trinh was mistreated at the hospital either in June or this month.

West Anaheim spokeswoman Debra Culver declined to discuss the elder Trinh’s case for confidentiality reasons, but said the hospital prides itself on an exemplary level of care.

“We believe we deliver excellent care here,” Culver said. “We have a very high level of patient satisfaction here. Nothing like this has ever happened.”

Vargas, too, said the slayings were unusual. Most crimes involving Anaheim’s 31,000 Asian Americans are related to gangs or home invasions, he said, citing as an example a drive-by shooting in Garden Grove last month. Five Asian Americans died when suspected gang members sprayed an auto shop with gunfire; so far, no arrests have been made.

While Nguyen agreed that the crime was unusual, she said she often hears complaints from Vietnamese American patients about care at area hospitals—and that dissatisfaction over language barriers and other impediments has gotten markedly higher in recent years. Her office serves an almost exclusively Vietnamese American clientele, approximately 80 percent of which are elderly.

“The first time I heard complaints, I thought that the patient demanded too much,” said Huong Nguyen. “But now 50 to 60 percent of [our] patents complain. That means there’s something wrong with the hospital. They think [nurses] didn’t treat them good because they’re Vietnamese and not American. They don’t speak English.”

Because communities adjacent to Anaheim have larger Vietnamese American populations, Nguyen noted many of the complaints were directed at hospitals in Garden Grove and Santa Ana, rather than West Anaheim Medical Center.

At Garden Grove Hospital and Medical Center, 30 percent of the hospital staff speaks Korean or Vietnamese and ethnic liaisons are provided for non-English speakers, said hospital spokesperson Donna Almand. That hospital also has 130 Vietnamese American doctors out of a total of 600 and serves ethnic food geared toward elderly patients who have trouble eating American food, Almand said.

At West Anaheim, traslation problems primary resolved by bilingual services over the phone.