S.F. jury gets case of ’12 mass slayings
A jury began deciding the fate Wednesday of a 41-year-old man charged in one of San Francisco’s worst mass killings — the 2012 hammer attack that left a family of five dead in their blood-soaked Ingleside neighborhood home.
The defendant, Binh Luc, has been in custody since his arrest at a San Mateo hotel shortly after the Lei family’s bodies were discovered on March 23, 2012. With two black eyes he apparently sustained in jail, Luc sat silently in court as his defense attorney, Mark Goldrosen, wrapped up closing arguments in the five-week trial.
Goldrosen didn’t deny Luc was inside the home where the killings happened at 16 Howth St., near City College of San Francisco, but said his client was not the killer. The real perpetrators, Goldrosen argued, were never caught due to a insufficient investigation by
the San Francisco Police Department.
The killers, Goldrosen told the San Francisco Superior Court jury, may have been one of two notorious Chinatown gangsters, or the former boyfriend of one of the victims, known only as “Crazy.” He added that prosecutors failed to prove only one person was responsible for the crime, and investigators couldn’t re-create how the killings unfolded.
“The prosecution’s theory in this case is uncertain,” he said. “And that uncertainty by definition says there’s a reasonable doubt that Mr. Luc is guilty of these murders.”
The defense’s closing came after Assistant District Attorney Eric Fleming summed up his case, which included witness testimony, phone and bank records from the defendant, and several pieces of physical evidence from the crime scene. Luc’s blood was found around the house, and blood from one of the victims was spattered on 18 places on the defendant’s jeans and in his car.
Investigators lifted Luc’s fingerprint from a bottle of window cleaner discovered among several bottles of bleach, paint and other household items prosecutors said the defendant used in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up the crime scene.
No weapon was ever found, but prosecutors said Luc used a hammer to fatally beat the victims. They were Hua Shun Lei, 65, and his wife, Wan Yi Wu, 62; their children, Ying Xue Lei, 37, and her brother, Vincent Lei, 32; and Vincent Lei’s girlfriend, Chia Huei Chu, 30.
In his final argument before the jury began deliberating, Fleming played a video from the crime scene, showing the victims bodies in different rooms of the home, their heads and bodies severely beaten and blood everywhere.
“The crime scene took four long days to process,” Fleming told the jury in response to the defense’s closing. “There were over 10 tests in this case and all of the physical evidence came back to the victims and this defendant.” He said it was “crazy to think” Luc was at the scene while someone else committed the murders and wasn’t responsible for the deaths.
“They’re trying to bamboozle you. That’s what they’re trying to do,” Fleming said. “Don’t be bamboozled.”
Luc has a prior conviction in 1998 from an armed robbery at a Chinese restaurant in San Jose. He served eight years in San Quentin State Prison and was handed over to federal immigration authorities for deportation back to his home country of Vietnam.
Luc, though, was released after Vietnamese officials refused to provide him with travel documents.