FAMILY PRESSURE
Court hears daughter accused in killings describe feeling ‘trapped’ in taped interview
Jury in Jennifer Pan’s murder trial hears interview of the accused telling police she had no choice but to stay with her parents,
In a small voice, sounding more like a 10-year-old than a 24-year-old, Jennifer Pan told a police officer in a videotaped interview that “family always comes first.”
This was Pan’s third statement to police, given two weeks after her mother was fatally shot and her father seriously wounded in what was initially thought to be a random home invasion in November 2010.
Pan had told police she was also a victim of the robbery, tied up by one of the gunmen, but changed her story once her father awoke from a coma and told police a conflicting version of events, according to the Crown.
At the end of this five-hour interview, played for the jury Wednesday, Pan was arrested and charged for the murder of her mother and attempted murder of her father. She is accused of masterminding a conspiracy to hire men to have her parents killed for $5,000 each after they forced her to break up with her boyfriend, Daniel Wong, and placed tight restrictions on her activities.
According to the Crown’s opening statement, Pan admits a role in planning the robbery, telling police in the interview that it was an elaborate attempt to cause her own death.
Wong faces the same charges as Pan at the murder trial which began a month ago in Newmarket. Also charged are Lenford Crawford, Eric Carty and David Mylvaganam.
Near the start of videotaped interview, Pan was crying.
When the officer, Det. William Goetz, said he needed to leave for a moment to move the recording equipment into a different room, she quietly told him: “I’m not comfortable being alone right now.”
She relaxed and grew more confident as they discussed her love of the piano and her hope of becoming a piano teacher.
Wong is her closest friend, she told Goetz. They started dating when she was 17, she said.
“He was a person who filled an empty void for me,” she said. When her parents told her to stop seeing him when she was about 20 or 21, it felt like “a part of me was missing.”
She had hidden the relationship from her parents, but her mother caught her when she saw Wong drop Pan off at the Pacific Mall one day, she said. Her mother suggested she bring Wong home, but “they didn’t like him for some reason.”
Pan suggested it was because he was half-Filipino.
After her parents discovered she was living with Wong’s family in Ajax instead of attending university as she had told them, they told her to either come home or stay with Wong, she said. When Pan said she would return home, she was placed under a 9 p.m. curfew and forbidden to speak to Wong. She also had to tell her parents where she was going, she said. “It wasn’t the best feeling in the world. I felt trapped,” she said. “But I chose to stay with my family.” Goetz asked if it was really a choice. “There was no choice. Because family always comes first.” In court, Pan, now 27, rapidly blinked away tears as she watched the beginning of the video, spending the rest of the time with her head bowed. After she had to break up with Wong, she fell into a depression, she said in the interview. “I didn’t understand why, at 21, I had to be home at 9 p.m.,” she said. She had her first suicidal thoughts around the age of 19, she said. She regretted not going to school and said it was challenging to watch her friends move on with their lives and careers. “Was it tough leading a double life?” Goetz asked. “Yes,” Pan said.
“It wasn’t the best feeling in the world. I felt trapped. But I chose to stay with my family.” JENNIFER PAN DURING A TAPED INTERVIEW WITH A POLICE OFFICER
She began cutting herself to feel “control” over at least one part of her life, she told Goetz.
She said her parents often bickered over housework, and that when her brother left to go to university, she was left alone in the middle of the arguments.
“Did you ever feel they expected too much of you in comparison to other people?” Goetz asked her.
Pan agreed, noting they compared her to classmates, club mates and cousins.
“You should have been that person,” she said her parents told her. “It’s what I heard all my life.”
She told Goetz she wanted to be honest with her parents and tell them she was not going to the University of Toronto to study pharmacy as she claimed.
“It was pretty hard. . . . I wanted to tell them but they always looked down in disappointment,” she said.
Pan said she understood why they had placed such tight restrictions on her after they learned of her lies.
“I needed to put my life in action,” she said. “Considering my past . . . I thought it was a little strict but I understood.”
After her father woke up from his coma, he asked her whether Daniel was behind the shootings, she said.
“I don’t think he did it . . . I don’t think he would hurt anyone,” she said, though she added she could not be 100-per-cent certain.
In the first two hours of the interview, she maintained she was a victim in the robbery.
Through tears, she told Goetz she can’t explain why her parents, Hann Pan and Bich Ha Pan, were shot but she was not.
“Does it make sense they would leave a witness behind?” he asked. “I guess not,” she said. The jury will continue to watch the video statement Thursday.