Prayer service at monastery encourages love after mass murder
Vietnamese community grieves for eight killed in Edmonton
EDMONTON — On Sunday morning, Tam Nguyen fell to his knees and prayed for his slain wife and infant daughter.
Nguyen attended a prayer service at the Truc Lam Monastery surrounded by dozens of members of the city’s Vietnamese community a week after his family was among those killed by gunman Phu Lam.
Hands pressed together, Nguyen prayed before a table laden with food, flowers and tea displayed as offerings to the recent dead. Nguyen’s wife Ha Truong and daughter Valentine Nguyen were among the eight people massacred by Lam on Dec. 28 and Dec. 29.
A distraught Nguyen approached abbot Phap Hoa last week at the monastery he’d attended as a child. “He just wanted me to help him on this because he never had any experience about a funeral,” Hoa said. On Sunday, Nguyen grieved in silence.
“We are here to share our sadness with the community today,” Thich Thien Tam, president of the Edmonton Buddhist Research Institute, told those gathered at Truc Lam. “The people killed could’ve been our husband, our daughter, our wife or our son. We should not waste our emotion on anger, but direct it toward love.”
Tam asked the congregation to “pray wholeheartedly for our passed loved ones to be born in a better place.”
Amid the smell of incense, families held their hands in prayer, while others wiped tears from their eyes.
A week ago, 53-year-old Lam killed his wife and seven others in a series of “planned, deliberate, targeted” murders that included two children. He then killed himself in a Fort Saskatchewan, Alta., restaurant surrounded by police. The victims inside the north Edmonton home were Lam’s wife Tien Truong, 35, and her eight-year-old son Elvis Lam, her father Dang Truong, 55, her mother Dau Le, 55, her sister Ha Truong, 33, her sister’s daughter, Valentina Nguyen, 3, and her friend Viet Nguyen, 41.
Cyndi Duong, 37, was killed by Lam at her home in southwest Edmonton on Monday night.
In late 2012, Lam was charged with assault, sexual assault and threats causing death, though those charges were dropped after witnesses recanted their statements.