A 73-year-old Garden Grove man allegedly fatally stabbed his 11-year-old stepdaughter Wednesday and stabbed and shot the girl’s mother, then stabbed himself multiple times before being taken into custody, police said.
The 36-year-old mother survived the attack and was listed in critical but stable condition, according to Garden Grove police Lt. Carl Whitney, who said the woman is expected to survive. Two boys, aged 3 and 6, were found unharmed at the residence in the 8900 block of Blossom Avenue.
The suspect, Tanh Thien Tran, is the biological father of the 3-year-old and stepfather of the 6-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl, according to police.
Officers responded to a domestic violence call around 6:30 a.m., Whitney said. When officers arrived, they saw the children’s mother in the front yard with stab wounds and a single gunshot wound, Whitney said.
She told officers the family lived in a duplex, and her husband was in the rear of the home, he said.
“She also told us her three children were still in the house,” Whitney said.
Officers encountered Tran, who was armed with a knife, on the “threshold of the patio door,” he said.
“So we start to negotiate with this guy to surrender and come out and he’s refusing to come out and he’s got some superficial self-inflicted wounds,” the lieutenant said.
Meanwhile, another team of officers made their way into another part of the house and got the children to safety, Whitney said.
“The officers made their way through the house to the same room with the suspect and they can see him negotiating with the (other team of) officers,” Whitney said. “And they see the 11-year-old lying on the floor with stab wounds inside the same room as the suspect. The officers covertly sneaked across the room, grabbed the little girl, picked her up and exited with her while the suspect was distracted by the officers negotiating with him.”
Officers immediately attempted to revive the girl, who was rushed with her mother to UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, where the girl was pronounced dead about 90 minutes later, Whitney said.
Officers eventually subdued the suspect with rubber bullets and bean-bag rounds, he said.
Tran was under guard at a local hospital while being treated for the self-inflicted stab wounds, according to Whitney, who said the couple had been having unspecified domestic disputes.
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