Jury hears closing statements in Huntington Beach murder trial

Attorneys for a man accused of shooting and killing a bookie he worked for as a middleman three years ago in Huntington Beach told jurors during closing statements Wednesday that he acted in self-defense, but prosecutors alleged he planned the homicide to escape a $60,000 debt.

The defendant, Dennis Tri Gia Dang, 32, of Westminster, was recorded by multiple surveillance cameras as he entered a silver Escalade belonging to the victim, 48-year-old Linh Ho of Fountain Valley, in the parking lot of a strip mall near Warner Avenue and Magnolia Street on Oct. 20, 2019. Dang was seen running from the SUV moments later, shortly before Ho stumbled out of the passenger side, then collapsed on a patch of grass.

Dang told investigators he worked as a middleman in a sports betting operation managed by Ho, and referred to the victim as an “O.G.,” short for “original gangster,” in a recorded statement following his arrest. The gamblers the defendant vouched for had racked up a debt of roughly $60,000, and the victim made it Dang’s responsibility to come up with the money.

The defendant was receiving threats from the victim in the weeks leading up to the shooting, leaving him visibly distraught, his best friend, Casey Ngo, 34, of Midway City, said during testimony. The morning before the shooting, Dang received a text from Ho instructing him to clear his debt the following day “or else you can’t blame me for what happens to you,” the witness, loosely translating from Vietnamese, said.

“It’s coming from a very serious guy who, by Dennis’s account, is a very careful guy,” Dang’s attorney, Ricardo Nicol, told jurors Wednesday. “For somebody like Linh Ho to send a text like that, he had to be very, very upset. And Dennis knows when he sees that ... that he is increasingly in danger.”

However, Deputy Dist. Atty. Janine Madera pointed out there were no explicit threats of violence in any of the messages Ho sent. She also noted the victim was a friend of Dang’s father, and that he had a good relationship with the defendant since the two had worked together for about eight years.

She argued that Dang was “in way over his head” but had no credible reason to believe Ho would physically harm him. She claimed the defendant hatched a plan to kill Ho in order to escape his debt.

Dang asked Ngo to drive him to a meeting with Ho the morning of the shooting. They stopped at the defendant’s home, where he retrieved a black backpack containing a fresh set of clothes and some, but not all, of the money he was told to pay the victim. He also changed into a black T-shirt and cargo shorts before they left.

The defendant and his best friend parked in the back lot of the strip mall, out of view from where Ho had told Dang to meet him. Ngo fell asleep in the driver seat, but woke up upon hearing a gunshot and then saw Dang running toward him.

As the two fled the scene, Dang changed clothes again in the car. He eventually told Ngo that Ho was “tripping on me, so I shot him,” he recalled during testimony.

Madera claimed Dang wore cargo shorts to the meeting in order to conceal the gun he used to kill Ho, although the weapon used in the killing had not been located as of Wednesday. She also suggested he had changed into plain clothing because he knew he was going to shoot the bookie and wanted to avoid being recognized after that took place.

“He has the presence of mind to realize on the five-minute ride that he needed to change,” Madera said.

Madera noted the defendant never claimed there had been any sort of struggle between him and the unarmed victim as he sat in his SUV. In Dang’s recorded statement, he told investigators Ho became upset when he told him he didn’t have all of the money and asked, “Do you know who I am?” so he pulled out a gun and pointed it at the victim’s face. The bookie reached at him in an apparent attempt to swap the firearm away. The weapon was just centimeters away from Ho’s right temple when Dang pulled the trigger, forensic experts said during testimony.

Ho’s wife, Hanh Nguyen, said during trial that she knew he was going to lunch with someone named Dennis, and became worried after not hearing from him an hour after the two were supposed to have met. She got no reply when she tried to reach her husband. She then called Ho’s sister, who in turn called Dang, but he denied any knowledge of the victim’s whereabouts.

Nguyen, an account manager at a mortgage firm, described her husband as a stay-at-home dad and claimed to know nothing of substance regarding Ho’s business. But Nicol cast doubt on her testimony, saying it was highly unlikely that an educated person working in finance would be oblivious to Ho’s gambling operation.

Nicol pointed out that she failed to immediately recall texting the question “How did it go?” to Ho the day of the shooting. He also noted that Dang was one of the first people the victim’s sister called after she had been contacted by Nguyen.

“My heart goes out to her [Nguyen],” Nicol told jurors Wednesday. “But it was obvious she was hiding something. It was obvious she knew something was going down.”

Dang’s attorney did not deny his client’s involvement in the shooting. He also did not contest any of the physical evidence presented by prosecutors but dismissed their conclusion that Ho’s killing was planned ahead of time as “conjecture.”

Nicol pointed out that Ho chose the location of their meeting, a business lot monitored by numerous cameras that would be a foolish place to commit premeditated murder. He also noted that Dang fired only once, and when he was interviewed by detectives, he was unsure whether the victim had lived or died.

In his statement to police, Dang said he “never should have brought” a gun to the meeting and that he only intended to protect himself and “show that I’m a man.”

“If this was Mr. Dang performing an assassination on Mr. Ho ... why not make sure he’s dead? He had six more bullets left,” Nicol asked rhetorically. “There is evidence all over the place that he did not intend to kill Mr. Ho.”

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