‘I did not kill him. I did not shoot my husband.’
Widow says she was ‘easy target’ after husband found dead
When she came home, Tu Huynh walked right into what she would later describe as a “heartbreaking nightmare.”
In the bedroom of the Newpark Drive home she shared with her husband and young daughter, she found the 34-year-old civil engineer shot to death on Feb. 2.
“Nothing in life can prepare you for finding your husband dead,” she told reporters Wednesday.
Frantic, Huynh called 911, but after an interrogation — during which she says she was denied a lawyer — the 29-year-old found herself behind bars, facing a murder charge after police claimed she faked her husband’s suicide. Negative publicity
Three days later, friends and family bailed her out, but Huynh still lost her job and found herself plagued by negative publicity.
“My face was splattered over the TV and newspaper accompanied by rumors, assumption and speculations,” she said. “I was accused of killing my husband to get insurance money.”
It wasn’t until two months after the shooting that the medical examiner ruled Steven Hafer’s death a suicide, and prosecutors dropped the charges against Huynh.
“I want the record to be absolutely clear I do not know specifically what drove Steven to do what he did,” she said this week. “But I pray that he’s now in peace. I did not kill him. I did not shoot my husband.”
At one point, prosecutors said Huynh admitted to having an affair with an ex-boyfriend before her husband’s death. Huynh said Wednesday that wasn’t true, though she admitted the couple had their troubles and called the relationship “a work in progress.”
“I wish law enforcement had prioritized the finding of facts instead of an easy target to demonize. I wish the media took seriously the task of educating the public instead of reporting scandalous rumors and half-truths for shock value,” she said.
Her lawyer, David Armbruster, did not rule out the possibility of pursuing a civil action, though he did not shed light on what specific details of the medical examiner’s findings prompted prosecutors to drop the case.
“It was an absolute lack of evidence,” he said. “In my opinion, I think law enforcement jumped to conclusions.” Getting her life back
Investigators initially became suspicious when they said Huynh kept changing her story about the shooting, prosecutors said. The shotgun apparently had been wiped clean, and the trajectory did not match a self-inflicted wound, they said.
Armbruster said Wednesday he thought investigators should have paid more attention to the trajectory and impact of the shot fired.
Originally from Vietnam, Huynh immigrated to the United States in 2004 and was later granted citizenship. She eventually became a registered nurse and had once worked at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
She met Hafer, a Michigan native, through mutual friends in the Houston area. The couple married in 2014 and had a daughter.
Josh Becker, one of Hafer’s longtime friends, later said the couple’s relationship had “a lot of intensity” but described Huynh as “almost angel-like.”
“Nothing would give a clue that something like this would happen,” he said after the arrest.
Now, two months later, the young mother is struggling to put her life back together.
“Steven, the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with, the father of my child — suddenly he’s gone,” she said. “He will never come back. What will I tell my daughter?”