Daughter asked shot dad for cash
Woman, four others accused in attack that left her mother dead
Acool cucumber, is Jennifer Pan. When her freshly widowed father was in hospital, just out of a coma and recovering from the home invasion she is alleged to have orchestrated to have him and her mother offed, she came to see him.
“My daughter said to me she had to pay $1,200,” Huei Hann Pan told Ontario Superior Court Judge Cary Boswell and a jury here Tuesday.
The money was purportedly for college tuition, though Jennifer, who is now 27, had a rather checkered history in that regard, having for years pretended to be going to university, on her parents’ dime, while never doing so.
Pan was shot twice during the bogus home invasion after one of three armed men threw a blanket over his head, but Bich Ha Pan, his 53-year-old wife and Jennifer’s mother, was shot three times, twice in the back of the head, and died.
Jennifer Pan and the four men now on trial with her — her former boyfriend, Daniel Wong, and David Mylvaganam, Eric Carty and Lenford Crawford—are pleading not guilty to first-degree murder in the mother’s slaying and not guilty to attempted murder in the father’s wounding.
Yet even if the jurors were to find Jennifer innocent as a lamb, by most reckonings it would take considerable chutzpah for a daughter to make a bedside request for cash after a parent suffered such a rough brush with death.
Huei Hann Pan took the witness stand Tuesday, and testified through a pair of Vietnamese interpreters who cycled to his side in 30-minute intervals.
Nov. 8, 2010, was an ordinary weekday for him: He worked a full day, man-shopped with his brother-in-law at Home Depot, had dinner with his wife and Jennifer, checked his email, then hit the sack about 8:30 p.m.
His wife had gone out for line-dancing lessons; Jennifer had a friend over.
When Pan awoke, a “colour-skinned person was pointing a gun in my face,” he said, and hissing softly at him, “Where’s the f—ing money?”
Frightened and surprised, he was told to go downstairs, and as he obeyed, he caught a brief glimpse of Jennifer at her bedroom door, talking to another man with a gun. She wasn’t tied up. He went downstairs, his gunman following him, and there he saw his wife, sitting on a couch with a third man standing behind her with a gun pointed at her back. She was soaking her weary feet, the very picture of vulnerability.
“How could they enter our house?” she asked him in Cantonese. “I said, ‘I don’t know, I was sleeping.’ ”
“Shut up! You talk too much!” his wife’s gunman told her. His gunman, meantime, asked again, “Where’s the f—ing money?”
Pan told him he didn’t have much cash in the house, but said, “My possessions are worth a lot.” The man snapped, “I need f—ing money, noth- ing else.”
Pan still thought — hoped — “they only wanted to rob our properties, not kill my wife.” He told his gunman there was $60 in his wallet upstairs, someone checked, and then someone — he didn’t remember which man — whacked him on the side of the head.
What with regular court breaks, legal arguments and the unusually tight security at the courtroom, this was as far as Pan, who is now 60, made it in his description of that harrowing night.
Though he is clearly a resilient man, and appears physically recovered from his injuries, he was shepherded at every turn by a soother from the victim-witness office.
Originally from Hong Kong, he and his wife came separately to Canada as refugees from Vietnam in 1979, and married in Toronto. Theirs is the familiar yet inspirational story of new immigrants who arrive with nothing and build a successful life. At the time of the attack, after decades of hard work in the auto parts industry, the couple had paid off their Markham house, managed some decent savings (they were, with the house and life insurance, worth close to $1 million), raised Jennifer and her younger brother Felix and were putting them both through university.
Felix was studying engineering; Jennifer was finishing up the hours she needed to complete her pharmacy degree. Or so the parents imagined. In fact, Jennifer had been lying to them for years — about where she was living, what she was doing, and, most importantly to parents who prized education, about going to school. First, she told them she was attending Ryerson University, then that she switched to the University of Toronto for pharmacy. She was living downtown with a roommate.
But they all were caught in the cross-cultural winds: Pan was skeptical and wanted to pry; but her mother said no, she was “already a grownup. You have to let her be herself; too much interference will not be good for her,” and Jennifer, of course, was lying through her teeth.
Hers was no makeshift deception: She invented a volunteer position at the Hospital for Sick Children (it would be useful later in her career) and a job at a Walmart pharmacy, and, as her dad’s suspicions grew (he was “concerned that something was not right”), even brought home a fake degree to show them.
Once, he offered to drive her to Sick Kids, and her mother tried to follow her in, but she disappeared into the big building; he pressed her for tickets to her ‘graduation,’ but she said there were none left. “I said, ‘Maybe I can stand outside, looking in. OK by me.’ ”
A few days later, she brought home the “degree.”
Her dad asked where the pictures were. She gave him an excuse.
Finally, they discovered she wasn’t living with a female roommate and summoned her home, and there, she confessed: “She did not work at the hospital. She had not graduated f rom university. My daughter said she was living with her boyfriend Danny Wong in Ajax,” Pan said.
He gave her an ultimatum: Give up the boyfriend and go back to school, if not, “You have to wait until I’m dead.”
Jennifer Pan’s jig was up. It was the summer of 2010, and then, according to the prosecutor’s opening statement, that she began the hunt for someone to kill her parents.