Clashing arguments in quintuple murder trial
Binh Thai Luc went from room to room inside a San Francisco home and bludgeoned to death five members of a family with a hammer, leaving behind a blood-spattered scene he unsuccessfully tried to cover up with water, chemicals and anything else within his reach, prosecutors said in court Tuesday.
But attorneys for the 41-year-old defendant said that though Luc may have been inside the home on Howth Street where the massacre took place, he had no motive to kill the Lei family, and that police stopped looking for the real killers once they arrested him.
The closing arguments in the 2012 quintuple murder case wrapped up five weeks of testimony, during which attorneys presented hundreds of exhibits and called dozens of witnesses in one of the city’s most gruesome crimes.
“The reason we’re here, the reason there are no more happy family members at 16 Howth
Street, is because of the defendant,” Assistant District Attorney Eric Fleming told a San Francisco Superior Court jury. “The defendant is guilty for wiping out that family.”
Luc sat silently in Judge Carol Yaggy’s courtroom, wearing a light-colored lavender collared shirt, black vest and pants while being flanked by his attorneys, Mark Goldrosen and Teresa Caffese. He had two black and swollen eyes, apparently sustained recently in jail.
Luc is accused of killing Hua Shun Lei, 65; Lei’s wife, Wan Yi Wu, 62; their daughter, Ying Xue Lei, 37; their son, Vincent Lei, 32, and his wife, Chia Huei Chu, 30.
Fleming carefully laid out the case for how and why Luc killed the Lei family, pointing out the defendant’s gambling losses along with an eviction notice for past due rent owed on his apartment.
Luc and Vincent Lei were acquaintances who played mah-jongg together, prosecutors said, and the two planned to meet at the family’s Ingleside home near City College of San Francisco the night of the killings.
Vincent Lei kept a lot of cash in his home, prosecutors said, and Luc had $6,518 on him when he was taken into custody at a hotel in San Mateo shortly after the killings, despite having only $1 in his bank account.
As Fleming sought to explain a motive for the massacre, he also presented several pieces of physical evidence, including showing the defendant’s blood at numerous places inside the Lei home, Vincent Lei’s blood on the defendant’s jeans and in his car, and Luc’s fingerprint on an empty bottle of window cleaner inside the Howth Street home.
Fleming showed the jury crime scene photos of the different rooms of the home where the murders occurred. Each victim was showed splayed out, some doused with liquids and powder, frozen in their nightmarish final moments.
“The mother was beaten the most, 21 times to the head,” he said. “The sister swallowed her teeth. Her ear was torn. Her jaw broken. Vincent was strangled.”
But rather than fleeing immediately after the killings, prosecutors said, Luc tried to haphazardly cover up the scene by pouring bleach, shampoo and other household products on the bodies and around the crime scenes before detaching the traps to the sinks and soaking the home.
Fleming said Luc knew removing the traps would flood the home because he worked as a plumber. Even so, Fleming said Luc “still left us more than enough to prove his guilt.”
While conceding that Luc may have been at the crime scene, the defense countered that the physical evidence presented at trial was circumstantial, and prosecutors presented no direct evidence in the form of witness testimony.
Goldrosen argued there was no proof any robbery or burglary took place inside the home, raising questions about the possible motive for the killings.
“The only crimes that took place were the murders,” he said. “The circumstantial evidence is simply not convincing enough. The people who are responsible do not include Mr. Luc.
“These are murders that involved some message that was being sent,” Goldrosen said. “These are gang-style, loan shark-style killings. There’s nothing in the evidence to connect Mr. Luc to these types of killings.”
The real killers, he suggested, were never caught because the San Francisco Police Department “stopped their investigation” after taking Luc into custody.
Closing arguments in the case are set to continue Wednesday morning. Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@ sfchronicle.com, bhutchinson@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky