Suspect to Be Tried in China Citizen’s Death

A Van Nuys man was ordered Friday to stand trial on a murder charge in the slaying of a Chinese student at a Sepulveda Boulevard motel last year.

Francisco Sanchez, 25, is accused of fatally stabbing night clerk Chen Feng, 40, who was studying landscape architecture at UCLA.

Prosecutors had hoped to allow Sanchez to plead guilty Friday, but the deal fell apart after they met for an hour with Chen’s family and consular officials from the People’s Republic of China.

The proposed plea agreement would have permitted Sanchez to plead guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter in exchange for a seven-year prison sentence, said David R. Disco, head deputy district attorney in Van Nuys.

Prosecutors instead decided to proceed with a preliminary hearing so that the family could better understand the process of U. S. law, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Pargament said. Chinese law does not divide the act of killing into degrees, as does U. S. law, Pargament said.

Chen’s family had trouble understanding the difference between manslaughter and murder, the prosecutor said.

“We didn’t want to rush it through,” Pargament said.

Family members believe that Sanchez lured Chen into a motel room, where he was stabbed in the stomach with a steak knife early on the morning of Nov. 28, Pargament said.

Sanchez lived in another room of the motel with his wife and child. Evidence shows that the two men were in the room in which Chen was stabbed to discuss whether Sanchez might rent that room, Pargament said.

The stabbing was the result of an argument about Chen’s attempts to collect rent from Sanchez’s wife earlier in the day, he said.

Deputy Public Defender Dennis G. Cohen said he could argue at a trial that the killing was in self-defense.

Pargament, who said the district attorney’s plea offer is still good, acknowledged that he probably would be unable to show a jury who produced the knife or where it came from. Apparently, no one saw the struggle and stabbing, he said.

Outside the courtroom, Chen’s sister, Chen Xin, 34, tearfully said that the victim left a wife in China and an infant daughter he has never seen.

‘Absolute Reverse’

“People in China have a lot of expectations to go to the United States to go to school,” she said through an interpreter. “And this is the absolute reverse.”

The sister said Chen was the only son of a prominent landscape architectural scholar at Tongji University in Shanghai. Chen’s death has received prominent play in local newspapers there, she said. He had been a graduate student at UCLA for about a year on a full scholarship from American architect I. M. Pei, a native of China, she said.

Prosecutors said Chen’s family and the consular officials did not pressure them to drop the plea bargain.

Ma Lan Tian, a representative of the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, would not say whether the Chinese government had taken a stand on the proposed agreement. He said through an interpreter: “The Chinese government would like to have the killer dealt with under American law, to the fullest extent.”

Van Nuys Municipal Judge James M. Coleman ordered Sanchez to appear Feb. 5 for arraignment in Superior Court.