anti-hmong
sarNie Hatchling
credit to startribune.com
Shamed Into Silence
She struggled in the cold grass, sobbing and punching the boy who lay on top of her, but nothing made him stop.
She was only 12 years old, and she didn't want to be a bad girl. No, don't do it, she remembers begging him. I wanna go home.
She had headed to a barbecue with friends earlier that night, but somehow they got separated. She ended up in a St. Paul park with five boys she barely knew.
There in the dark, one of the boys yanked down her blue jeans before dropping his own baggy pants to his knees. He raped her while the others stood nearby, waiting their turn.
When the last boy had finished, she pulled her clothes back on, humiliated, exhausted, hurting. But even more devastating to her than the attack was the realization that it might have ruined her life.
Hmong 12-year-old raped in this parkStormi GreenerBy losing her virginity without marriage -- even violently, against her will -- she had violated a basic tenet of her Hmong culture. If her family found out, they would feel forever shamed. She feared her culture would require her to marry one of her attackers to save her reputation.
So she acted first. In the days that followed, she didn't tell anyone about the crime -- not her parents, not a doctor, not the police. Instead, she said, she called up one of the rapists.
Site of gang rapesStormi GreenerStar TribuneAre you prepared to marry me? she asked the boy. Are you going to marry me?
Scores of Hmong girls in Minnesota -- some not yet in their teens -- have been raped or forced into prostitution over the past several years. Many of their attackers are Hmong gang members who go unpunished because shame keeps their victims from coming forward.
Records show that girls, many of them runaways, have been raped at Twin Cities-area farms, in motel rooms, basements, garages and closets. Some were threatened at gunpoint. Some were held down. Some were lured with methamphetamine, then prostituted to pay for the drug.
Social worker recounts victims' fearsStormi GreenerStar Tribune"It's a huge problem," said St. Paul Police Sgt. Richard Straka, who wrote an article on the topic for an FBI publication in 2003.
The problem isn't necessarily unique to the Hmong community. But it's impossible to compare the problem to other ethnic communities because data on victims, assailants and runaways is broken down only by race, not ethnicity.
A constellation of professionals, however, noticed the growing problem in the Hmong community. Teachers, social workers, law enforcers, prosecutors, medical workers and Hmong leaders have begun drawing attention to it.
St. Paul public schools have trained staff to spot Hmong girls who might be in trouble. Dozens of concerned professionals and community volunteers are meeting monthly as the Hmong Youth Task Force to brainstorm solutions. St. Paul police and Ramsey County sheriff's deputies have begun actively looking for Hmong runaway girls -- a departure from their previous runaway policy.
"We have an urgent situation with very young Hmong girls here in St. Paul that needs your attention," Raymond Yu, student services director for St. Paul public schools, says in a school training video. While the district tries to protect all students, Yu said, it's putting special emphasis on Hmong girls "because of the significant number of reports that we've heard from the St. Paul Police Department and the Ramsey County attorney's office."
Law enforcement and medical workers believe gang rape and prostitution in the Hmong community are more widespread than what they see. Studies indicate that Hmong victims are more reluctant to report the crimes.
Two years ago, pediatric nurse practitioner Laurel Edinburgh became so disturbed by the pattern of brutality she saw in her job treating young rape victims that she started collecting information. In a preliminary analysis, she found that the Hmong girls treated at her St. Paul clinic were about six times more likely than other victims to have been raped by five or more people.
She used her St. Paul clinic's files dating from 1998 to 2003 to analyze 245 cases of 10- to 14-year-olds who had been sexually abused by people outside of their family. Of those, 30 were Hmong girls, all but two of whom had been treated at the clinic in 2003, after investigators started referring Hmong girls there. Because it's not a random sample, the clinic's numbers cannot be used to gauge the relative size of the problem. But they shed light on the nature of the attacks.
"The sexual abuse experiences of very young adolescent Hmong girls were markedly more severe than those of their peers," Edinburgh wrote in a paper she presented at a conference in January.
A growing problem
A Star Tribune analysis using an FBI list of Hmong surnames shows that between 1999 and June 30, 2005, about 76 Hmong men and 21 Hmong teens were charged with sexually assaulting or prostituting girls in Ramsey County, which is home to nearly 60 percent of the state's Hmong.
Prosecutors counted 59 victims believed to be Hmong in those cases, but say there were other victims who didn't cooperate and whose assaults weren't charged. Fifteen victims were of other ethnicities.
Nearly all of the victims were young. More than half of the defendants were charged with crimes against victims younger than 13 years old; 81 of the 97 were charged with attacks against victims 15 and younger.
Secrecy and shame keep victims from coming forward, and authorities believe there are many more crimes undetected. So police search for possible victims.
"You've got to go out to the parks, go to the hotels, work curfews, work truancy," said Minnesota Gang Strike Force investigator Kevin Navara, who has concentrated on Asian gangs for six years.
Tru Thao, a Ramsey County social worker who often deals with runaway Hmong girls, said the problem of gang rape and prostitution is huge. "You know, to be honest, it's not something new. It's just been escalating," she said.
More Hmong refugees have arrived in Minnesota this year as part of a resettlement of 5,000 people, and officials worry about gangs victimizing them.
Der Her, volunteer coordinator at Ramsey County Sexual Offense Services, said the refugees will be "easier prey."
But Sen. Mee Moua, DFL-St. Paul, said new immigrants are more connected to their parents and traditions. "I don't have any concerns that they're going to fall prey," she said. "They have been yearning for an opportunity to come to this country. They're going to be the best students. They're going to be the best workers. They're going to fight their darndest."
Moua acknowledged that running away is a problem in the Hmong-American community, as are gangs and sexual assaults. "I am alarmed by every aspect of it," she said.
But she said that no one knows the relative scope of those problems because there are no good statistics. Moua said she would like to sponsor a bill in the Legislature to fund solutions, but she needs a better grasp of how big the problem is.
Money for after-school programs that once helped keep kids occupied has dwindled. And the federal government turned down a request from Edinburgh last fall to help victims get therapy and other services. Her employer, Midwest Children's Resource Center, a division of Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, cobbled together other grants from foundations.
Police and others who see the problem up close are frustrated.
Until recently, the larger community hadn't shown an interest in solving the problem, said Straka, a former state Gang Strike Force officer who now works Hmong rape and prostitution cases for St. Paul police. "I don't know why. Maybe it's because they are Hmong. Maybe it's because these are not little white girls from the suburbs."
Harrowing experience
The St. Paul 12-year-old who was gang-raped in the park didn't marry any of her attackers. Authorities learned of the attack from someone else, and she eventually told them her story in great detail. More than seven years later, shame keeps her from telling some family members what happened that night. She agreed to tell her story to the Star Tribune, but she wanted her identity to remain private.
She left her house that night with trusted friends, she said. But a little later, when they piled into cars to go to the barbecue, she ended up the only girl in a car full of older boys.
Members of the Asian Crips gang took her to a deserted area of Battle Creek Park. As one began kissing her, she sensed that things were turning ugly. She considered fleeing, but she didn't think she could outrun them.
She told police that one boy walked her to a sprawling tree and then the five boys assaulted her, one by one. Two held her while a third raped her, she said.
Then they took her to another park in Cottage Grove and two of the gang members raped her again.
When she tried to resist another boy's attack, he went to his car and came back with a handgun.
You didn't give me love; I should kill you, she said he told her. She remembers hearing other boys trying to calm him down: Dude, don't do that! Don't shoot her!
He fired. She heard the bullet split the air a few feet away.
"I just screamed really loud," she remembered. "I screamed forever."
Gang members told her that she'd been "raped in" to their group, she told police. At age 12, she was now an official Asian Crip Lady. She was terrified, she said, but she acted tough and hung around with the gang for about two weeks. She was afraid that if she didn't, they might come looking for her or hurt her family.
A few days into the ordeal, three gang members took her to a room in a Minneapolis garage and had sex with her again. She didn't fight, she said, because she knew it wouldn't matter.
When she limped into her house that night in pain, a relative noticed she was walking gingerly and surmised she'd had sex.
You're just a little slut, the girl says the woman told her.
By her second week of being with the gang, the girl said she had learned to anticipate trouble. When she saw gang members talking quietly and pointing to her and other girls, she feared they were plotting to rape again, so she hid.
One time she hid in a laundry room. "I can hear them saying, 'Where's the other girl?' ... But, you know, I kept quiet," she remembered. "I was shaking. I cried to myself."
Two weeks after the rapes in the parks, police arrested some of the gang members on a tip from another victim.
Ten gang members eventually pleaded guilty to sex crimes. Each received prison terms ranging from about 3½ years to more than 11 years, although four were sentenced as juveniles and their prison time was suspended. Prosecutors listed only a few victims when they charged the group, but authorities believe there were more. Other victims wouldn't cooperate because of the stigma, said Chris Wilton, who prosecuted the case in Ramsey County.
In these rape cases, often the victims "will just simply indicate that either nothing happened or they don't want to talk about it," Wilton said. "And so then you're kind of at a dead end."
The girl is afraid that publicly acknowledging that she was one of the victims will hurt her reputation. Even after counseling, she turns some of her anger inward.
"I do blame myself for parts of it," she said. "When they threatened me, how come I just didn't tell them that I'd rather die?"
An emerging problem
Minnesota police got their first indication of the gang-rape problem in fall 1997, when a girl at a Hmong New Year's party told Sgt. Straka that boys had thrown blankets over her and her friends, then raped them. They had met the boys -- Hmong gang members -- through a telephone chatline. Officials learned that at least four girls had been raped. Eight Hmong men and boys aged 15 to 21 eventually pleaded guilty to kidnapping or sex crimes.
Similar crimes have happened elsewhere. In a 1999 Detroit case, nine Hmong males pleaded guilty to sexual assault after raping four Wisconsin girls and holding them captive. A tenth male pleaded guilty on a related charge. That same year in Fresno, Calif., 23 members of a Hmong gang were indicted on 826 counts involving the rape and prostitution of nine girls. Eighteen were convicted or pleaded guilty in the case.
A clash of cultures may play a role in the crimes, some scholars and Hmong leaders say.
For instance, in Hmong homelands, a boy who wanted to marry a girl could get his friends or relatives to help him capture her. Even if he raped her, the assault could be forgiven if he married her. Ilean Her, executive director of the Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotans, said she's afraid those practices get handed down in some families.
"Some [men] are going to end up in prison as long as the mentality is still there," Her said. "And lots of them are passing it on to their sons."
For the same reason, some Hmong mothers aren't sympathetic to daughters who have been raped, she said.
"The older ladies, they will tell you right away, 'When I was young, I was molested. And that's just what girls go through,' " she said.
Even if they resist, girls are blamed for allowing it to happen, studies say.
Moua said it's not strictly a cultural issue. Those who link Hmong gang rape and prostitution in America to Hmong culture are looking for excuses, she said.
"I don't think that Hmong culture is any more of an impediment to identifying solutions within the Hmong-American community than, say, culture is a factor in Catholic families or ... in the Latino community or ... in greater Minnesota in small farm families," she said.
Hmong culture does not condone gang rape or prostitution, she said, and others agree.
Some Hmong immigrants say American culture has been a bad influence. Gangs, violence and premarital sex have become big worries for Hmong parents, some of whom struggle with controlling their children.
Edinburgh said that nearly every Hmong girl she sees who has been raped or prostituted has at least one weeping parent.
"They're hurting," she said. "And they're hurting because they don't know how to help. They don't know what to do."
Brutal, widespread
Gang rapes of young Hmong girls stand out for their relentlessness and brutality, prompting even experienced medical workers to reach for descriptions like "shockingly horrible."
Last November, a 16-year-old Hmong girl from the Twin Cities area bled so badly from a sexual assault in Winona that emergency workers airlifted her to Mayo Medical Center after she was found unconscious in an apartment.
Authorities allege in a criminal complaint that Sue Hang, an 18-year-old Winona man, admitted using a Blatz beer can to rape the girl, crushing the can in the process. Blood had soaked through two blankets and onto the carpet in the bedroom, according to the complaint. Hang was charged in Winona County District Court, as were a woman who was there that night, 19-year-old Armeelia Vang, and two juveniles. They are awaiting trial.
In a case in 2003, Hmong pimps tried out young girls, attempting to rape them to see whether their small bodies were large enough to accommodate adult customers, health workers said.
Runaways targeted
In traditional Hmong households, girls stay home, care for siblings, cook and clean. But in the United States, these girls sometimes rebel. They yearn to do what their American friends do, they say -- go to the mall, go to the movies. Many girls run away.
Generally, they don't travel far. The Hmong community is so tight-knit, and families are so large and sprawling that they can almost always stay with a cousin or a friend. Sometimes they go just a few blocks or a few miles.
One 16-year-old Maplewood girl was pressured briefly into prostitution when she ran away in 2000. At school, her non-Hmong friends chatted about going to the movies, but her parents wouldn't let her go.
She was "never allowed to go out," she said. "Not even with my Hmong friends."
One cold winter day, a 23-year-old St. Paul man picked her up near the clothing store where she worked.
She'd met him through some friends. That afternoon they drove around awhile, then stopped to play video games near the University of Minnesota campus. She told police he then described his "business."
He wanted to prostitute her. She refused.
"I didn't wanna do it, and he said that if I didn't do it he would just drop me off somewhere out in the cold," she said.
He took her to the Midway Motel in St. Paul, where she had sex for money with three strangers that night.
Afraid to go home, she stayed with friends for days, until one of them arranged to have her brothers pick her up. Her parents had reported her as a runaway.
Now 22, the girl said she has never told her parents exactly what happened.
"I just don't know what to say to her [her mother], because either way, you know, I ran away," she said. "Even if I told her I was being prostituted she would be like, 'You deserved it.' "
Afterward, she said, her uncle assumed she'd had sex and asked her if she wanted him to arrange a forced marriage. She declined.
The man was later convicted of promoting and soliciting to practice prostitution. Two of the three men in the motel pleaded guilty to engaging in prostitution. The third was convicted of a misdemeanor count in the case.
The episode still haunts her, she said. It drove her parents to become even stricter, limiting her contact only to cousins they thought were good influences.
"You do really get isolated," she said.
Slow to forget
Once a label is slapped on a girl, it's almost impossible to remove.
A 14-year-old St. Paul girl who was gang-raped in 1998 says the crime taught her how quickly news travels in the small Hmong community.
"After all this happened, I went to school. Everybody knew. They all just looked at me ... like, you know, 'She's just a slut. Don't look at her.' I felt really bad." Schoolmates called her names and beat up her best friend for defending her, she said.
Her family treated her differently, too. One family member doesn't want her to spend time with her younger siblings anymore, apparently afraid she might be a bad influence.
Now 21, she struggles with self-doubt, telling herself that "the past is the past. I'm a better person now." She tries to ignore what others might think.
It hasn't been easy. She believes she still hears whispering and snickers. She might be out shopping, she said, and encounter a Hmong person who gives her the look -- the cold, condemning expression that says she's worthless.
"They all just look at me like I'm just a tramp," she said. "I'm nothing but air."
One Girl's Ordeal of Terror
She was just 12 years old that summer, a 96-pound sixth-grader at a St. Paul magnet school. Her Frogtown apartment sweltered in the rising heat, so she and two friends walked to a corner store for ice cream.
They didn't have far to go -- maybe four blocks. As the girls started home, three guys pulled up in a tan Toyota Corolla and began flirting with them. The driver offered them a ride.
The 12-year-old said no. But the boys persisted. "They started hollering at us, 'Oh, c'mon, girls, let's go play!' " she recalled.
The girl said she reluctantly got into the car at the urging of one of her friends. That simple act -- accepting a ride from strangers -- set into motion a chain of events that led to the unthinkable: forced prostitution by gang members and a seemingly unending series of rapes by a number of Hmong men.
Toua Hong (Taz) ChangStormi GreenerStar TribuneHer ordeal illustrates how Hmong men and boys have raped Hmong girls -- some as young as 10. It is a problem that emerged in the late 1990s and continues today.
This girl told her story so the Hmong community might come to understand how such things happen, and as a cautionary tale to parents and other girls.
It's a story she has told over and over, to police, medical personnel, counselors, lawyers, jurors and reporters. Her accounts are remarkably consistent. Because she is a rape victim and a juvenile, the Star Tribune is using a pseudonym -- Ka -- to protect her privacy.
Chang's residenceStormi GreenerStar TribuneA troubled home
Ka and her friends accepted a ride on that hot summer day because one of the girls wanted to talk with a boy in the car. "She's like, 'If you guys are my true friends, you've gotta go with me,' " Ka said.
The girls said they had to be home by 9 p.m., and the driver, a 20-year-old gang member from Detroit who called himself JB, agreed.
"But that night, they never sent us home," she said. "We was on drugs."
This was not Ka's first experience with drugs. She had begun experimenting several months earlier, when she met two guys on the stoop of her apartment building who were smoking methamphetamine. Before long, Ka started skipping school. She cut class so often that spring that she flunked sixth grade.
Evidence in Chang's trialStormi GreenerStar TribuneKa said her parents' divorce had been troubling her. Her dad was living in Minneapolis with her brother. Her older sister rotated between stints in a hospital, living with her mother, and living with a foster family, she said. Ka, her mother and five younger siblings struggled to get by, often going hungry. They moved from one run-down St. Paul apartment to another.
The summer she met JB they were living in a 110-year-old duplex about a mile east of the state Capitol. Ka said she turned to drugs to escape her anger.
No free ride
After the ice cream outing, Ka didn't see JB for a while. Then one day near the end of summer vacation, she ran into him again at a laundry. He was with a friend, a 20-year-old man called Taz who had moved to the Twin Cities from California.
For the next couple of weeks, Taz -- whose real name was Toua Hong Chang -- entertained Ka and her friends, giving them rides in his sporty red Nissan 240 SX. The girls said he kept crystal meth in an M&M candy tube and offered them all they wanted.
The girls thought he was giving them meth for free, but about the time school was starting, he said it was time to pay up. Ka said she offered to scrape up some money at home, but Taz refused to let her go. Instead, she says, he ordered her to work as a prostitute for him, beginning immediately.
He had taken Ka and two of her friends to a Minneapolis duplex surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. Taz placed a call and three Asian men soon arrived in a shiny black Mercedes SUV.
"When the guys came, all of a sudden he's just pointed a gun at us," Ka later told authorities in a tape-recorded interview. She said he swore at her, demanding that she have sex with the men: "If [you] don't, I'm going to kill you right now!"
'I'm just a little girl'
Ka says Taz tricked her into going into the basement, then ordered her to wait there. Terror gripped her as she listened to the muffled voices upstairs. It was early afternoon, and dim light seeped in through the narrow windows. She could see a stranger's dark trousers and shiny leather shoes at the top of the stairs. As they started down toward her, she looked in vain for a way out.
The shoes belonged to the driver of the black Mercedes, a medium-built Hmong man with graying hair and yellow teeth, Ka said. She didn't know him, but he was Taz's uncle, Pao Xiong, now 35, of St. Paul. Authorities say he worked for some chiropractors and lawyers as an interpreter.
He took off his suit coat, then his white dress shirt.
OK, take your clothes off, she remembers him telling her.
When she hesitated, she said, he grabbed the hem of her blouse and ripped it as he pulled it over her head, then pushed her onto her back.
Ka said she tried to kick him. She tried to grab her ankles to keep him from yanking down her jeans. But the skinny sixth-grader was no match for him.
Upstairs, someone turned up the music. She pleaded with Xiong to stop: You know, you're old. ... Why you gotta do this?
Well, I paid already, she recalled him saying.
Afterward, Taz came downstairs and told her she had more work to do. She didn't cry out, she said, because Taz had already warned her: Don't even try to scream.
Taz returned with a tall, skinny Asian man in his 20s, Ka said. She never learned his name, but she remembers his bright yellow T-shirt and black shoes.
"And [Taz] just looked at me like, with this evil in his eye, and I got so scared," she recalled.
She told the skinny man that Xiong had hurt her. She asked him to get his money back and let her go. She said he responded, If I do that, Taz is going to kill you.
Ka said he then forced her onto the bed.
You know, I'm just a little girl. I'm only 12 years old, she told him.
But the man pinned her arms and legs and raped her, she said.
Before the third man could take his turn, Taz burst into the room and told her to get dressed -- everyone had to leave immediately. One of the residents of the duplex wanted everyone out because his brother had returned from work.
The girl said Taz gave her $20 and warned her that if she told anyone what had happened, she or her family would be killed. He told her and her friends to get in the Mercedes. The men who had raped her would drive them home.
The girls didn't want the men to know where they lived, so they told the driver to drop them off at a Burger King on University Avenue. They cried as they walked Ka home. Her older sister later overheard the girls talking and asked what was wrong. Ka turned her away.
She worried that her family might demand that she marry one of her attackers, a traditional Hmong resolution. She had other worries, too.
Her friends reminded her: If we tell, Taz will come after us and kill us.
Afraid to run
Sometime later, as Ka walked to McDonald's with a friend, Taz and a friend pulled up in a blue car. He ordered her and her 13-year-old companion to get in, Ka said. She refused at first but got scared when Taz yelled at her. "He looked evil," she remembered.
Taz drove them to a house on Richmond Street in St. Paul, where he lived with his wife, baby and the man in the car.
Taz and his friend led the two girls to a garage behind the house and gave them meth, she said. He left for an errand, and when he returned, Ka said, he accused her and the others of stealing his drugs. He produced a long black gun with a folding stock. As he loaded red shells into the gun, Ka said, he boasted about how fast he could shoot. "He told us to go stand in a line so he could kill us," she said.
After a heated argument, Taz sent his friend and Ka outside, leaving him alone with the 13-year-old. His buddy slipped a padlock on the latch, trapping the girl inside.
Ka waited outside, afraid that she knew what was happening in the garage.
Her friend later testified that Taz threw a mattress on the floor, tied her hands behind her back with a jump rope and raped her. She didn't dare fight, she said. The shotgun was leaning against the door.
After the rape of her friend, Ka ran away and stayed with friends in Minneapolis for about two weeks. When she resurfaced, Taz found her and the rapes began again. During the next several weeks, she was raped by at least four of Taz's friends. Ka said in an interview and told authorities that Taz raped her, too, but in court testimony, she said she couldn't recall. Taz was not charged with raping her.
Birthday horror
The last time Ka was raped was her last day as a 12-year-old. She was walking across the street to invite a friend to her 13th birthday party, she said, when Taz and his friends drove up. It was October 2002. Taz demanded that she help him look for another girl, she said. She balked, and one of Ka's younger brothers demanded that Taz leave her alone. The boy ran for help, but Taz pulled her into the car and drove off.
When they arrived at the south Minneapolis home of a man nicknamed "Ocean," five or six men were already there, including JB, Ka said. She saw a girl on the floor with her shirt ripped open.
"She was just looking at me and said, 'Take me home, OK?' " Ka recalled.
Before Ka could answer the girl, Taz pulled her into a bedroom, ordered her to strip and threw a handful of condoms on the bed.
"I was thinking, ... 'Oh my God, I don't want to do this,'" she said.
Five men took turns with her that night, she said. She thought one was a distant relative. When Ka threatened to tell her mother on him, she said he told her, Go ahead. Tell and see what happens.
The man was rough, she said; he raped and sodomized her.
When the men were finished, Ka said she demanded that Taz take her home.
"Somehow, they know that it was my birthday that day," Ka said. "And they was like, 'Stay with us, we will throw a big party for you!' "
After one of the men took her home, she said: "That was the time that I decided to run. I just don't want that to happen to me again."
After her birthday, Ka told her older sister what had happened. Then she ran away to a cousin's house two blocks away, hoping Taz wouldn't find her.
She heard that he and his friends drove past her house several times.
"I was thinking to myself that I should run out of state or something so that they can't find me, but I don't want to do that because I don't want to leave my family," Ka said.
She stopped going to school while she hid. That's what finally brought her to the attention of authorities.
Ramsey County has an aggressive truancy intervention program. Deputy William Harvel talked to Ka's sister, who told him Ka's story. When Harvel found her, Ka was too afraid to talk.
"The first time, I was just, like, stuttering," she said.
Epilogue
Ka looked around the alley behind her apartment building as she retold her story last year. Taz and JB were locked up at the time; so was Taz's uncle, the first man to rape her. But others were still at large, and she feared they might be looking for her.
Ka had testified against Taz, recounting the horrors he put her through. On her first day of testimony, she suffered a panic attack and paramedics were rushed to the courtroom. She persevered, though, returning the next day to resume testifying.
Taz was eventually found guilty of prostituting Ka and sexually assaulting her friend, along with a related gang charge. He was sentenced in August 2003 to more than 20 years in prison.
Ka said that as Taz lined up sex clients, she recalled thinking that her family loved her and that they had urged her to be good. "But I didn't listen to them," she said. "I was like, I'm gonna go kill myself after this."
Ka has since had a lot of counseling. For the most part, she has managed to bury the past. But a patchwork of scars on her forearms betrays her suffering. Medical workers who treat rape victims say they often cut themselves as Ka has done.
At first, she said, she blamed herself because she had gone with Taz and used drugs. "I don't think that no more," she said.
"I'm going to school,I'm doing OK. I like math," she said last year. "I want me to go to school and college and just have a nice life."
Since then, Ka, now almost 16, has dropped out of school and run away again.
No Easy Cases
Lynnette Hedblom was packing the car for a late-summer trip to the cabin when she saw a stocky Asian girl sitting on the curb at the foot of her Roseville driveway. It was after midnight, and the girl was disoriented, talking to herself. She stood to leave, but staggered.
Hedblom watched, worried that the girl would stumble into traffic on Lexington Avenue. The girl took a few steps, then slumped back to the curb.
Hedblom, a reserve officer with the Roseville Police Department, assumed she was drunk. In the dim light, she couldn't see the blood matted on the girl's burgundy jeans.
Hedblom asked her if she needed to call someone for a ride. "And that's when she told me she had actually run away," Hedblom said later. "I wanted to know why she was having a hard time walking. ... And that's when she told me that after she had run away, she had encountered these people the night before ... that had gang-raped her."
Tru ThaoStormi GreenerStar TribuneWhen Hedblom started to call the police, the girl objected. She believed that once word of the assaults got out in her community, she would be considered unworthy of marriage.
The story illustrates the enormous hurdles facing investigators and prosecutors trying to prosecute the rapes of young Hmong girls.
Even when rape victims cooperate, as this girl eventually did, it can be hard to win a conviction.
Many delay reporting the crime until it's too late to gather good evidence. Victims who drank alcohol or used illegal drugs before the attacks undermine their credibility with some jurors.
Investigators and prosecutors say those issues, common to many rape cases, are magnified when the victims are Hmong. They tend to be younger than most other rape victims. They often fall prey to gang members who get them high or drunk and threaten them with weapons. They seldom know the attackers' real names. And, like this girl, they sometimes are attacked by so many men that they become confused and can't clearly remember faces.
If the 12-year-old hadn't gotten lost as she tried to make her way home from St. Paul, the crime might have gone undetected altogether.
Cultural hurdles
Hedblom called the police over the girl's objections.
It's not surprising to those who work on Hmong rape cases that the girl would be reluctant to bring charges. Federal studies show that most rape victims -- more than six out of 10 -- don't report the crime. Hmong victims are even less likely to do so because of the culture's strong clan system and stigmatization of rape victims, according to a 2000 study commissioned by the Minnesota Legislature.
One reason is fear. "If there isn't a conviction, these gang members are going to be after her, and who's going to protect her? Not the county attorney. Not the police," said Tru Thao, a Ramsey County social worker who works with truants and runaways.
And girls can't count on the Hmong community to take their side.
Hmong have a highly patriarchal society. Girls who lose their virginity outside of marriage are devalued; the community scorns them and their families unless the girl marries the rapist. By contrast, some families and clans will rally to protect the males accused of rape or paying for child prostitutes.
"That's one of the main problems," said Richard Dusterhoft, an assistant Ramsey County attorney who has prosecuted these cases for several years. "My experience has been that support, from family, the community, friends, etc., has been one-sided in favor of defendants."
Witnesses, fearing retaliation and pressure from clans, sometimes change their stories when it's time to testify, Dusterhoft said.
Hmong enclaves exist around the country, but in the 1990s, Ramsey County became the ethnic group's leading population center. It is home to nearly 60 percent of the state's Hmong population.
Kevin Navara, a Hmong gang expert with the Minnesota Gang Strike Force, said witnesses and defendants alike sometimes disappear into California, Wisconsin, Michigan or the Carolinas. And victims often will deny that an attack took place or refuse to cooperate with investigators, he said.
That can spoil any chance of trying a suspect, said Chris Wilton, a former Ramsey County prosecutor who has handled a number of Hmong gang-rape cases.
"If the girl simply says, 'It didn't happen and I'm not going to talk about it,' then you're essentially all done with that," said Wilton, now an assistant U.S. attorney.
Gathering evidence
In the case of the 12-year-old girl found in Roseville, her physical condition was evidence of the abuse. She told a Roseville police officer that when her attackers held her down during the rapes, it felt like they were breaking her bones.
She was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul, then to Midwest Children's Resource Center, a division of Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.
Pediatric nurse practitioner Laurel Edinburgh interviewed her and photographed the bruises on her arms, wrists and legs.
Edinburgh swabbed for semen because it could provide the DNA needed to identify the attackers, but the cotton swab filled with blood, she said. More than 40 hours after the assault, the girl was still bleeding.
Edinburgh found no semen on the girl, possibly because it had washed out, but the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension found some in her pants. An expert said it came from more than one person.
For the DNA to mean anything, though, investigators would need to match it to a suspect. Like many young Hmong rape victims, the girl didn't know the names of her attackers and was uncertain where the assaults happened.
She told police she thought it was somewhere in St. Paul, because she remembered seeing the city's name on a manhole cover after she finally broke away and began walking home.
St. Paul police officer Michael Barabas tried to interview her. The girl described three attackers but said there were more. Barabas said she was incoherent. "She couldn't explain what happened to her in a sequence of events," he said. "She had real difficulty."
Eventually, the girl offered one clue: a phone number for a teen who had helped her run away. She knew him only by his nickname, "Johnny." Police traced the number to Yaug Haag Thao, now 19.
Unreliable witnesses
Thao told police that he had taken the girl to a party in St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood where members of at least two Hmong gangs were drinking.
His assistance eventually helped police track down other witnesses and defendants. But over time, his story became filled with contradictions and lapses that later helped the defense. Dusterhoft said such discrepancies are common in Hmong rape cases when the cooperating witness must face the accused in court.
The girl had barely turned 13 when she testified against two men in the first trial. She entered the courtroom with her arms folded across her chest and hurried past the defendants, her eyes cast downward to avoid their hard stares.
At times, she spoke so softly the judge had to remind her to speak up.
She admitted to getting drunk at the party. Authorities say gang members often get girls drunk or give them drugs before raping them.
The party grew loud and the host, Bee Yang, known as Billy, kicked everyone out. He asked a gang member named Lee Teng Lor, now 22, to take the girl home.
Lor said the girl didn't want to go home, so he followed the party to a vacant house near Battle Creek Park that belonged to the family of Blong Xiong, 22. The girl said she felt sick and needed to sleep, so Lor led her to a bedroom. There was no furniture, so she lay down on the floor.
Thao also had followed the party that night. He told police he heard noises coming from the room and went to investigate. He said he watched Lor and several other men have sex with the girl, who was struggling and begging them to stop. Thao said he asked if he could join in, but they refused.
Without Thao, police might have been stymied. The girl didn't know Lor's name. She only remembered that it began with S, that he was short, and that he drove a white pickup.
Lor's name doesn't begin with S, but gang members usually have nicknames. When police questioned Lor, he initially denied knowing about the rapes. But when asked his nickname, Lor held up his hand. Stubby, he said, because he has short fingers.
Two days before his trial was to begin in April 2004, Lor cut a deal. He pleaded guilty to rape and to committing a crime for the benefit of a gang. In exchange for testifying truthfully against other defendants, prosecutors agreed to cap his potential prison sentence.
At trial, Dusterhoft leaned heavily on Lor's testimony. Without informants, he said, it's hard to bring charges in such cases. But jurors may discount an informant who has something to gain by testifying. "No one likes a snitch," Dusterhoft said.
Conflicting stories
Blong Xiong and a co-defendant, Bee Chue Chang, now 21, of St. Paul, were the first to go on trial.
In many ways, it typified Hmong rape trials, Dusterhoft said. A prosecution witness refused to testify when he was called. On the witness stand, Thao continually contradicted his own testimony about who and what he had seen. He said he saw Chang in the bedroom when the girl was being raped. But when Chang's lawyer, Gary Bryant-Wolf, asked Thao if Chang looked the same then as he did that day in court, Thao said he didn't know; he couldn't remember.
Pressed harder, Thao said he didn't really see Chang in the bedroom that night.
Bryant-Wolf, seeking to drive home the point, asked him again. "You didn't see him, did you?"
"Yes," Thao responded.
"OK. So far, we've heard yes, no and I don't know," Bryant-Wolf said. He asked the question once again.
Thao responded that he had forgotten much of what happened that night. Jurors in Minnesota courts can't consider a witness' statements to police as evidence. The statements can only be used to impeach the credibility of witnesses.
Dusterhoft said later that such twists are common when Hmong witnesses face defendants in court. "Some of the perpetrators can be related to some of the victims or to the witnesses, and so there's some pressure ... when it comes to testifying," Dusterhoft said.
Thao's memory hadn't improved by April, when a third defendant, Cha Xiong, now 22, went on trial for aiding and abetting the rape. Cha Xiong's lawyer, Mark Todd, prepared the jurors for Thao in his opening statement by asking rhetorically what he would say about his client. Then he answered his own question: "That is going to be hard to predict because he has said so many things already."
Bee Yang, another gang member, also flip-flopped. Sensing the lawyers' growing frustration, Yang volunteered: "For some reason, I always say yes. I don't know why."
Dusterhoft threw up his hands in exasperation and briefly slumped over a table. Moments later, after District Judge Edward Cleary released the jurors for the afternoon recess, Cha Xiong's attorney said sympathetically to Dusterhoft: "He just says yes to everything. What the heck!"
Vulnerable victims
The victim is potentially the best witness in a rape case. But in these cases, the victims are so young and fragile that prosecutors try to avoid having them testify. In this case, Dusterhoft noted, the victim was just 12, had been drinking, and faded in and out of consciousness as strangers raped her in the dark.
After the assaults, the girl picked out a picture of Bee Chue Chang and said he had assaulted her. But in the picture he had longer hair, dyed reddish-orange. About a year later, at the trial, he had black hair cropped military style. She failed to identify him in person.
She did recognize co-defendant Blong Xiong, known as "Biggie," as someone who had been at the house where she was raped. In court, though, she didn't accuse him of assaulting her.
The girl's testimony highlighted uncertainties in the case. It's not unusual for young victims to make mistakes or to forget details of a crime, especially when they were intoxicated and when they fear being disowned by their families, Dusterhoft said.
In this case, the girl said the attacks started after she had gone to sleep and awoke naked in the dark, with Lor on top of her. She said she struggled, "then I somehow went unconscious."
Some other men and teens at the party piled into the room to rape her. When she came around and resisted, someone would cover her face so she would gasp for air, Lor testified.
"She was screaming," Lor said. "You could say she was trying to get away."
At the first trial, the girl said about five men had intercourse with her and 10 to 15 forced her to perform oral sex. She acknowledged that she wasn't certain of the total.
Making sense of it
"She was not the best reporter of that assault because people were coming in as the assault commences," Dusterhoft told jurors at the first trial. "She wasn't paying attention to their faces."
Jurors had to decide that case with little more than DNA evidence implicating Blong Xiong, the testimony of Lor -- who had cut a deal -- and the girl's confused testimony.
The girl, now 15, appeared more confident in the second trial. She entered the room with her head up, wearing a green and white Michigan sweatshirt and dramatic hoop earrings. She spoke clearly and looked jurors in the eye. But jurors in the trial of Cha Xiong had no DNA evidence to rely on. "There is no physical evidence linking Mr. Xiong to this assault," his attorney said flatly.
In the end, Blong Xiong was the only one of the three defendants to be convicted. Jurors found him guilty of rape and of committing the crime for the benefit of a gang. He insisted he was innocent. Judge Paulette Flynn sentenced him to 13 years in prison.
Lor's plea bargain netted him a sentence of eight years and two months, but it was suspended for his 20 years of probation; he was credited for the year he had already served in jail, fined $1,000, must register as a sex offender and have no contact with gang members.
After Cha Xiong's acquittal in April, Dusterhoft, exasperated, dropped charges against the two remaining defendants, Que Lee, 23, known as "Dracky," and Sia Vang, 20, known as "Tiny."
Asked why, Dusterhoft wrote in an e-mail: "Cha Xiong got acquitted and he admitted being in the room. Bee Chue Chang got acquitted."
Lee, he said, pleaded guilty in a separate case to perjury for the benefit of a gang by falsifying his visa application. In exchange, Dusterhoft dismissed the sex assault charge. Under a plea agreement, he was given five years' probation and could be sent to prison for 2½ years if he messes up. If he stays clean, the case will later appear as a misdemeanor rather than a felony.
Dusterhoft took solace in the fact that Vang faced charges in an unrelated sexual assault, along with two other defendants. He pleaded guilty in that case in a deal that calls for the dismissal of the assault charges in this one. The deal calls for a sentence of just over eight years in prison.
"I don't dismiss any felony lightly," Dusterhoft said. "In light of the jury verdicts, I can't justify putting the victim on the stand again to talk about the terrible things that happened to her when the chances of success are marginal."
the one thing i hate the most about the hmong community...they value their reputation more than anything...including the life of young girls...shit...these girls didn't ask to be rape but yet they're afraid to come out and tell it to the world becuz it's "disgraceful"...and they don't want to shame their family...what the hell???!!!!...screw the family if they think getting raped is disgraceful...c'mon ppl...open your damn eyes!
Shamed Into Silence
She struggled in the cold grass, sobbing and punching the boy who lay on top of her, but nothing made him stop.
She was only 12 years old, and she didn't want to be a bad girl. No, don't do it, she remembers begging him. I wanna go home.
She had headed to a barbecue with friends earlier that night, but somehow they got separated. She ended up in a St. Paul park with five boys she barely knew.
There in the dark, one of the boys yanked down her blue jeans before dropping his own baggy pants to his knees. He raped her while the others stood nearby, waiting their turn.
When the last boy had finished, she pulled her clothes back on, humiliated, exhausted, hurting. But even more devastating to her than the attack was the realization that it might have ruined her life.
Hmong 12-year-old raped in this parkStormi GreenerBy losing her virginity without marriage -- even violently, against her will -- she had violated a basic tenet of her Hmong culture. If her family found out, they would feel forever shamed. She feared her culture would require her to marry one of her attackers to save her reputation.
So she acted first. In the days that followed, she didn't tell anyone about the crime -- not her parents, not a doctor, not the police. Instead, she said, she called up one of the rapists.
Site of gang rapesStormi GreenerStar TribuneAre you prepared to marry me? she asked the boy. Are you going to marry me?
Scores of Hmong girls in Minnesota -- some not yet in their teens -- have been raped or forced into prostitution over the past several years. Many of their attackers are Hmong gang members who go unpunished because shame keeps their victims from coming forward.
Records show that girls, many of them runaways, have been raped at Twin Cities-area farms, in motel rooms, basements, garages and closets. Some were threatened at gunpoint. Some were held down. Some were lured with methamphetamine, then prostituted to pay for the drug.
Social worker recounts victims' fearsStormi GreenerStar Tribune"It's a huge problem," said St. Paul Police Sgt. Richard Straka, who wrote an article on the topic for an FBI publication in 2003.
The problem isn't necessarily unique to the Hmong community. But it's impossible to compare the problem to other ethnic communities because data on victims, assailants and runaways is broken down only by race, not ethnicity.
A constellation of professionals, however, noticed the growing problem in the Hmong community. Teachers, social workers, law enforcers, prosecutors, medical workers and Hmong leaders have begun drawing attention to it.
St. Paul public schools have trained staff to spot Hmong girls who might be in trouble. Dozens of concerned professionals and community volunteers are meeting monthly as the Hmong Youth Task Force to brainstorm solutions. St. Paul police and Ramsey County sheriff's deputies have begun actively looking for Hmong runaway girls -- a departure from their previous runaway policy.
"We have an urgent situation with very young Hmong girls here in St. Paul that needs your attention," Raymond Yu, student services director for St. Paul public schools, says in a school training video. While the district tries to protect all students, Yu said, it's putting special emphasis on Hmong girls "because of the significant number of reports that we've heard from the St. Paul Police Department and the Ramsey County attorney's office."
Law enforcement and medical workers believe gang rape and prostitution in the Hmong community are more widespread than what they see. Studies indicate that Hmong victims are more reluctant to report the crimes.
Two years ago, pediatric nurse practitioner Laurel Edinburgh became so disturbed by the pattern of brutality she saw in her job treating young rape victims that she started collecting information. In a preliminary analysis, she found that the Hmong girls treated at her St. Paul clinic were about six times more likely than other victims to have been raped by five or more people.
She used her St. Paul clinic's files dating from 1998 to 2003 to analyze 245 cases of 10- to 14-year-olds who had been sexually abused by people outside of their family. Of those, 30 were Hmong girls, all but two of whom had been treated at the clinic in 2003, after investigators started referring Hmong girls there. Because it's not a random sample, the clinic's numbers cannot be used to gauge the relative size of the problem. But they shed light on the nature of the attacks.
"The sexual abuse experiences of very young adolescent Hmong girls were markedly more severe than those of their peers," Edinburgh wrote in a paper she presented at a conference in January.
A growing problem
A Star Tribune analysis using an FBI list of Hmong surnames shows that between 1999 and June 30, 2005, about 76 Hmong men and 21 Hmong teens were charged with sexually assaulting or prostituting girls in Ramsey County, which is home to nearly 60 percent of the state's Hmong.
Prosecutors counted 59 victims believed to be Hmong in those cases, but say there were other victims who didn't cooperate and whose assaults weren't charged. Fifteen victims were of other ethnicities.
Nearly all of the victims were young. More than half of the defendants were charged with crimes against victims younger than 13 years old; 81 of the 97 were charged with attacks against victims 15 and younger.
Secrecy and shame keep victims from coming forward, and authorities believe there are many more crimes undetected. So police search for possible victims.
"You've got to go out to the parks, go to the hotels, work curfews, work truancy," said Minnesota Gang Strike Force investigator Kevin Navara, who has concentrated on Asian gangs for six years.
Tru Thao, a Ramsey County social worker who often deals with runaway Hmong girls, said the problem of gang rape and prostitution is huge. "You know, to be honest, it's not something new. It's just been escalating," she said.
More Hmong refugees have arrived in Minnesota this year as part of a resettlement of 5,000 people, and officials worry about gangs victimizing them.
Der Her, volunteer coordinator at Ramsey County Sexual Offense Services, said the refugees will be "easier prey."
But Sen. Mee Moua, DFL-St. Paul, said new immigrants are more connected to their parents and traditions. "I don't have any concerns that they're going to fall prey," she said. "They have been yearning for an opportunity to come to this country. They're going to be the best students. They're going to be the best workers. They're going to fight their darndest."
Moua acknowledged that running away is a problem in the Hmong-American community, as are gangs and sexual assaults. "I am alarmed by every aspect of it," she said.
But she said that no one knows the relative scope of those problems because there are no good statistics. Moua said she would like to sponsor a bill in the Legislature to fund solutions, but she needs a better grasp of how big the problem is.
Money for after-school programs that once helped keep kids occupied has dwindled. And the federal government turned down a request from Edinburgh last fall to help victims get therapy and other services. Her employer, Midwest Children's Resource Center, a division of Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, cobbled together other grants from foundations.
Police and others who see the problem up close are frustrated.
Until recently, the larger community hadn't shown an interest in solving the problem, said Straka, a former state Gang Strike Force officer who now works Hmong rape and prostitution cases for St. Paul police. "I don't know why. Maybe it's because they are Hmong. Maybe it's because these are not little white girls from the suburbs."
Harrowing experience
The St. Paul 12-year-old who was gang-raped in the park didn't marry any of her attackers. Authorities learned of the attack from someone else, and she eventually told them her story in great detail. More than seven years later, shame keeps her from telling some family members what happened that night. She agreed to tell her story to the Star Tribune, but she wanted her identity to remain private.
She left her house that night with trusted friends, she said. But a little later, when they piled into cars to go to the barbecue, she ended up the only girl in a car full of older boys.
Members of the Asian Crips gang took her to a deserted area of Battle Creek Park. As one began kissing her, she sensed that things were turning ugly. She considered fleeing, but she didn't think she could outrun them.
She told police that one boy walked her to a sprawling tree and then the five boys assaulted her, one by one. Two held her while a third raped her, she said.
Then they took her to another park in Cottage Grove and two of the gang members raped her again.
When she tried to resist another boy's attack, he went to his car and came back with a handgun.
You didn't give me love; I should kill you, she said he told her. She remembers hearing other boys trying to calm him down: Dude, don't do that! Don't shoot her!
He fired. She heard the bullet split the air a few feet away.
"I just screamed really loud," she remembered. "I screamed forever."
Gang members told her that she'd been "raped in" to their group, she told police. At age 12, she was now an official Asian Crip Lady. She was terrified, she said, but she acted tough and hung around with the gang for about two weeks. She was afraid that if she didn't, they might come looking for her or hurt her family.
A few days into the ordeal, three gang members took her to a room in a Minneapolis garage and had sex with her again. She didn't fight, she said, because she knew it wouldn't matter.
When she limped into her house that night in pain, a relative noticed she was walking gingerly and surmised she'd had sex.
You're just a little slut, the girl says the woman told her.
By her second week of being with the gang, the girl said she had learned to anticipate trouble. When she saw gang members talking quietly and pointing to her and other girls, she feared they were plotting to rape again, so she hid.
One time she hid in a laundry room. "I can hear them saying, 'Where's the other girl?' ... But, you know, I kept quiet," she remembered. "I was shaking. I cried to myself."
Two weeks after the rapes in the parks, police arrested some of the gang members on a tip from another victim.
Ten gang members eventually pleaded guilty to sex crimes. Each received prison terms ranging from about 3½ years to more than 11 years, although four were sentenced as juveniles and their prison time was suspended. Prosecutors listed only a few victims when they charged the group, but authorities believe there were more. Other victims wouldn't cooperate because of the stigma, said Chris Wilton, who prosecuted the case in Ramsey County.
In these rape cases, often the victims "will just simply indicate that either nothing happened or they don't want to talk about it," Wilton said. "And so then you're kind of at a dead end."
The girl is afraid that publicly acknowledging that she was one of the victims will hurt her reputation. Even after counseling, she turns some of her anger inward.
"I do blame myself for parts of it," she said. "When they threatened me, how come I just didn't tell them that I'd rather die?"
An emerging problem
Minnesota police got their first indication of the gang-rape problem in fall 1997, when a girl at a Hmong New Year's party told Sgt. Straka that boys had thrown blankets over her and her friends, then raped them. They had met the boys -- Hmong gang members -- through a telephone chatline. Officials learned that at least four girls had been raped. Eight Hmong men and boys aged 15 to 21 eventually pleaded guilty to kidnapping or sex crimes.
Similar crimes have happened elsewhere. In a 1999 Detroit case, nine Hmong males pleaded guilty to sexual assault after raping four Wisconsin girls and holding them captive. A tenth male pleaded guilty on a related charge. That same year in Fresno, Calif., 23 members of a Hmong gang were indicted on 826 counts involving the rape and prostitution of nine girls. Eighteen were convicted or pleaded guilty in the case.
A clash of cultures may play a role in the crimes, some scholars and Hmong leaders say.
For instance, in Hmong homelands, a boy who wanted to marry a girl could get his friends or relatives to help him capture her. Even if he raped her, the assault could be forgiven if he married her. Ilean Her, executive director of the Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotans, said she's afraid those practices get handed down in some families.
"Some [men] are going to end up in prison as long as the mentality is still there," Her said. "And lots of them are passing it on to their sons."
For the same reason, some Hmong mothers aren't sympathetic to daughters who have been raped, she said.
"The older ladies, they will tell you right away, 'When I was young, I was molested. And that's just what girls go through,' " she said.
Even if they resist, girls are blamed for allowing it to happen, studies say.
Moua said it's not strictly a cultural issue. Those who link Hmong gang rape and prostitution in America to Hmong culture are looking for excuses, she said.
"I don't think that Hmong culture is any more of an impediment to identifying solutions within the Hmong-American community than, say, culture is a factor in Catholic families or ... in the Latino community or ... in greater Minnesota in small farm families," she said.
Hmong culture does not condone gang rape or prostitution, she said, and others agree.
Some Hmong immigrants say American culture has been a bad influence. Gangs, violence and premarital sex have become big worries for Hmong parents, some of whom struggle with controlling their children.
Edinburgh said that nearly every Hmong girl she sees who has been raped or prostituted has at least one weeping parent.
"They're hurting," she said. "And they're hurting because they don't know how to help. They don't know what to do."
Brutal, widespread
Gang rapes of young Hmong girls stand out for their relentlessness and brutality, prompting even experienced medical workers to reach for descriptions like "shockingly horrible."
Last November, a 16-year-old Hmong girl from the Twin Cities area bled so badly from a sexual assault in Winona that emergency workers airlifted her to Mayo Medical Center after she was found unconscious in an apartment.
Authorities allege in a criminal complaint that Sue Hang, an 18-year-old Winona man, admitted using a Blatz beer can to rape the girl, crushing the can in the process. Blood had soaked through two blankets and onto the carpet in the bedroom, according to the complaint. Hang was charged in Winona County District Court, as were a woman who was there that night, 19-year-old Armeelia Vang, and two juveniles. They are awaiting trial.
In a case in 2003, Hmong pimps tried out young girls, attempting to rape them to see whether their small bodies were large enough to accommodate adult customers, health workers said.
Runaways targeted
In traditional Hmong households, girls stay home, care for siblings, cook and clean. But in the United States, these girls sometimes rebel. They yearn to do what their American friends do, they say -- go to the mall, go to the movies. Many girls run away.
Generally, they don't travel far. The Hmong community is so tight-knit, and families are so large and sprawling that they can almost always stay with a cousin or a friend. Sometimes they go just a few blocks or a few miles.
One 16-year-old Maplewood girl was pressured briefly into prostitution when she ran away in 2000. At school, her non-Hmong friends chatted about going to the movies, but her parents wouldn't let her go.
She was "never allowed to go out," she said. "Not even with my Hmong friends."
One cold winter day, a 23-year-old St. Paul man picked her up near the clothing store where she worked.
She'd met him through some friends. That afternoon they drove around awhile, then stopped to play video games near the University of Minnesota campus. She told police he then described his "business."
He wanted to prostitute her. She refused.
"I didn't wanna do it, and he said that if I didn't do it he would just drop me off somewhere out in the cold," she said.
He took her to the Midway Motel in St. Paul, where she had sex for money with three strangers that night.
Afraid to go home, she stayed with friends for days, until one of them arranged to have her brothers pick her up. Her parents had reported her as a runaway.
Now 22, the girl said she has never told her parents exactly what happened.
"I just don't know what to say to her [her mother], because either way, you know, I ran away," she said. "Even if I told her I was being prostituted she would be like, 'You deserved it.' "
Afterward, she said, her uncle assumed she'd had sex and asked her if she wanted him to arrange a forced marriage. She declined.
The man was later convicted of promoting and soliciting to practice prostitution. Two of the three men in the motel pleaded guilty to engaging in prostitution. The third was convicted of a misdemeanor count in the case.
The episode still haunts her, she said. It drove her parents to become even stricter, limiting her contact only to cousins they thought were good influences.
"You do really get isolated," she said.
Slow to forget
Once a label is slapped on a girl, it's almost impossible to remove.
A 14-year-old St. Paul girl who was gang-raped in 1998 says the crime taught her how quickly news travels in the small Hmong community.
"After all this happened, I went to school. Everybody knew. They all just looked at me ... like, you know, 'She's just a slut. Don't look at her.' I felt really bad." Schoolmates called her names and beat up her best friend for defending her, she said.
Her family treated her differently, too. One family member doesn't want her to spend time with her younger siblings anymore, apparently afraid she might be a bad influence.
Now 21, she struggles with self-doubt, telling herself that "the past is the past. I'm a better person now." She tries to ignore what others might think.
It hasn't been easy. She believes she still hears whispering and snickers. She might be out shopping, she said, and encounter a Hmong person who gives her the look -- the cold, condemning expression that says she's worthless.
"They all just look at me like I'm just a tramp," she said. "I'm nothing but air."
One Girl's Ordeal of Terror
She was just 12 years old that summer, a 96-pound sixth-grader at a St. Paul magnet school. Her Frogtown apartment sweltered in the rising heat, so she and two friends walked to a corner store for ice cream.
They didn't have far to go -- maybe four blocks. As the girls started home, three guys pulled up in a tan Toyota Corolla and began flirting with them. The driver offered them a ride.
The 12-year-old said no. But the boys persisted. "They started hollering at us, 'Oh, c'mon, girls, let's go play!' " she recalled.
The girl said she reluctantly got into the car at the urging of one of her friends. That simple act -- accepting a ride from strangers -- set into motion a chain of events that led to the unthinkable: forced prostitution by gang members and a seemingly unending series of rapes by a number of Hmong men.
Toua Hong (Taz) ChangStormi GreenerStar TribuneHer ordeal illustrates how Hmong men and boys have raped Hmong girls -- some as young as 10. It is a problem that emerged in the late 1990s and continues today.
This girl told her story so the Hmong community might come to understand how such things happen, and as a cautionary tale to parents and other girls.
It's a story she has told over and over, to police, medical personnel, counselors, lawyers, jurors and reporters. Her accounts are remarkably consistent. Because she is a rape victim and a juvenile, the Star Tribune is using a pseudonym -- Ka -- to protect her privacy.
Chang's residenceStormi GreenerStar TribuneA troubled home
Ka and her friends accepted a ride on that hot summer day because one of the girls wanted to talk with a boy in the car. "She's like, 'If you guys are my true friends, you've gotta go with me,' " Ka said.
The girls said they had to be home by 9 p.m., and the driver, a 20-year-old gang member from Detroit who called himself JB, agreed.
"But that night, they never sent us home," she said. "We was on drugs."
This was not Ka's first experience with drugs. She had begun experimenting several months earlier, when she met two guys on the stoop of her apartment building who were smoking methamphetamine. Before long, Ka started skipping school. She cut class so often that spring that she flunked sixth grade.
Evidence in Chang's trialStormi GreenerStar TribuneKa said her parents' divorce had been troubling her. Her dad was living in Minneapolis with her brother. Her older sister rotated between stints in a hospital, living with her mother, and living with a foster family, she said. Ka, her mother and five younger siblings struggled to get by, often going hungry. They moved from one run-down St. Paul apartment to another.
The summer she met JB they were living in a 110-year-old duplex about a mile east of the state Capitol. Ka said she turned to drugs to escape her anger.
No free ride
After the ice cream outing, Ka didn't see JB for a while. Then one day near the end of summer vacation, she ran into him again at a laundry. He was with a friend, a 20-year-old man called Taz who had moved to the Twin Cities from California.
For the next couple of weeks, Taz -- whose real name was Toua Hong Chang -- entertained Ka and her friends, giving them rides in his sporty red Nissan 240 SX. The girls said he kept crystal meth in an M&M candy tube and offered them all they wanted.
The girls thought he was giving them meth for free, but about the time school was starting, he said it was time to pay up. Ka said she offered to scrape up some money at home, but Taz refused to let her go. Instead, she says, he ordered her to work as a prostitute for him, beginning immediately.
He had taken Ka and two of her friends to a Minneapolis duplex surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. Taz placed a call and three Asian men soon arrived in a shiny black Mercedes SUV.
"When the guys came, all of a sudden he's just pointed a gun at us," Ka later told authorities in a tape-recorded interview. She said he swore at her, demanding that she have sex with the men: "If [you] don't, I'm going to kill you right now!"
'I'm just a little girl'
Ka says Taz tricked her into going into the basement, then ordered her to wait there. Terror gripped her as she listened to the muffled voices upstairs. It was early afternoon, and dim light seeped in through the narrow windows. She could see a stranger's dark trousers and shiny leather shoes at the top of the stairs. As they started down toward her, she looked in vain for a way out.
The shoes belonged to the driver of the black Mercedes, a medium-built Hmong man with graying hair and yellow teeth, Ka said. She didn't know him, but he was Taz's uncle, Pao Xiong, now 35, of St. Paul. Authorities say he worked for some chiropractors and lawyers as an interpreter.
He took off his suit coat, then his white dress shirt.
OK, take your clothes off, she remembers him telling her.
When she hesitated, she said, he grabbed the hem of her blouse and ripped it as he pulled it over her head, then pushed her onto her back.
Ka said she tried to kick him. She tried to grab her ankles to keep him from yanking down her jeans. But the skinny sixth-grader was no match for him.
Upstairs, someone turned up the music. She pleaded with Xiong to stop: You know, you're old. ... Why you gotta do this?
Well, I paid already, she recalled him saying.
Afterward, Taz came downstairs and told her she had more work to do. She didn't cry out, she said, because Taz had already warned her: Don't even try to scream.
Taz returned with a tall, skinny Asian man in his 20s, Ka said. She never learned his name, but she remembers his bright yellow T-shirt and black shoes.
"And [Taz] just looked at me like, with this evil in his eye, and I got so scared," she recalled.
She told the skinny man that Xiong had hurt her. She asked him to get his money back and let her go. She said he responded, If I do that, Taz is going to kill you.
Ka said he then forced her onto the bed.
You know, I'm just a little girl. I'm only 12 years old, she told him.
But the man pinned her arms and legs and raped her, she said.
Before the third man could take his turn, Taz burst into the room and told her to get dressed -- everyone had to leave immediately. One of the residents of the duplex wanted everyone out because his brother had returned from work.
The girl said Taz gave her $20 and warned her that if she told anyone what had happened, she or her family would be killed. He told her and her friends to get in the Mercedes. The men who had raped her would drive them home.
The girls didn't want the men to know where they lived, so they told the driver to drop them off at a Burger King on University Avenue. They cried as they walked Ka home. Her older sister later overheard the girls talking and asked what was wrong. Ka turned her away.
She worried that her family might demand that she marry one of her attackers, a traditional Hmong resolution. She had other worries, too.
Her friends reminded her: If we tell, Taz will come after us and kill us.
Afraid to run
Sometime later, as Ka walked to McDonald's with a friend, Taz and a friend pulled up in a blue car. He ordered her and her 13-year-old companion to get in, Ka said. She refused at first but got scared when Taz yelled at her. "He looked evil," she remembered.
Taz drove them to a house on Richmond Street in St. Paul, where he lived with his wife, baby and the man in the car.
Taz and his friend led the two girls to a garage behind the house and gave them meth, she said. He left for an errand, and when he returned, Ka said, he accused her and the others of stealing his drugs. He produced a long black gun with a folding stock. As he loaded red shells into the gun, Ka said, he boasted about how fast he could shoot. "He told us to go stand in a line so he could kill us," she said.
After a heated argument, Taz sent his friend and Ka outside, leaving him alone with the 13-year-old. His buddy slipped a padlock on the latch, trapping the girl inside.
Ka waited outside, afraid that she knew what was happening in the garage.
Her friend later testified that Taz threw a mattress on the floor, tied her hands behind her back with a jump rope and raped her. She didn't dare fight, she said. The shotgun was leaning against the door.
After the rape of her friend, Ka ran away and stayed with friends in Minneapolis for about two weeks. When she resurfaced, Taz found her and the rapes began again. During the next several weeks, she was raped by at least four of Taz's friends. Ka said in an interview and told authorities that Taz raped her, too, but in court testimony, she said she couldn't recall. Taz was not charged with raping her.
Birthday horror
The last time Ka was raped was her last day as a 12-year-old. She was walking across the street to invite a friend to her 13th birthday party, she said, when Taz and his friends drove up. It was October 2002. Taz demanded that she help him look for another girl, she said. She balked, and one of Ka's younger brothers demanded that Taz leave her alone. The boy ran for help, but Taz pulled her into the car and drove off.
When they arrived at the south Minneapolis home of a man nicknamed "Ocean," five or six men were already there, including JB, Ka said. She saw a girl on the floor with her shirt ripped open.
"She was just looking at me and said, 'Take me home, OK?' " Ka recalled.
Before Ka could answer the girl, Taz pulled her into a bedroom, ordered her to strip and threw a handful of condoms on the bed.
"I was thinking, ... 'Oh my God, I don't want to do this,'" she said.
Five men took turns with her that night, she said. She thought one was a distant relative. When Ka threatened to tell her mother on him, she said he told her, Go ahead. Tell and see what happens.
The man was rough, she said; he raped and sodomized her.
When the men were finished, Ka said she demanded that Taz take her home.
"Somehow, they know that it was my birthday that day," Ka said. "And they was like, 'Stay with us, we will throw a big party for you!' "
After one of the men took her home, she said: "That was the time that I decided to run. I just don't want that to happen to me again."
After her birthday, Ka told her older sister what had happened. Then she ran away to a cousin's house two blocks away, hoping Taz wouldn't find her.
She heard that he and his friends drove past her house several times.
"I was thinking to myself that I should run out of state or something so that they can't find me, but I don't want to do that because I don't want to leave my family," Ka said.
She stopped going to school while she hid. That's what finally brought her to the attention of authorities.
Ramsey County has an aggressive truancy intervention program. Deputy William Harvel talked to Ka's sister, who told him Ka's story. When Harvel found her, Ka was too afraid to talk.
"The first time, I was just, like, stuttering," she said.
Epilogue
Ka looked around the alley behind her apartment building as she retold her story last year. Taz and JB were locked up at the time; so was Taz's uncle, the first man to rape her. But others were still at large, and she feared they might be looking for her.
Ka had testified against Taz, recounting the horrors he put her through. On her first day of testimony, she suffered a panic attack and paramedics were rushed to the courtroom. She persevered, though, returning the next day to resume testifying.
Taz was eventually found guilty of prostituting Ka and sexually assaulting her friend, along with a related gang charge. He was sentenced in August 2003 to more than 20 years in prison.
Ka said that as Taz lined up sex clients, she recalled thinking that her family loved her and that they had urged her to be good. "But I didn't listen to them," she said. "I was like, I'm gonna go kill myself after this."
Ka has since had a lot of counseling. For the most part, she has managed to bury the past. But a patchwork of scars on her forearms betrays her suffering. Medical workers who treat rape victims say they often cut themselves as Ka has done.
At first, she said, she blamed herself because she had gone with Taz and used drugs. "I don't think that no more," she said.
"I'm going to school,I'm doing OK. I like math," she said last year. "I want me to go to school and college and just have a nice life."
Since then, Ka, now almost 16, has dropped out of school and run away again.
No Easy Cases
Lynnette Hedblom was packing the car for a late-summer trip to the cabin when she saw a stocky Asian girl sitting on the curb at the foot of her Roseville driveway. It was after midnight, and the girl was disoriented, talking to herself. She stood to leave, but staggered.
Hedblom watched, worried that the girl would stumble into traffic on Lexington Avenue. The girl took a few steps, then slumped back to the curb.
Hedblom, a reserve officer with the Roseville Police Department, assumed she was drunk. In the dim light, she couldn't see the blood matted on the girl's burgundy jeans.
Hedblom asked her if she needed to call someone for a ride. "And that's when she told me she had actually run away," Hedblom said later. "I wanted to know why she was having a hard time walking. ... And that's when she told me that after she had run away, she had encountered these people the night before ... that had gang-raped her."
Tru ThaoStormi GreenerStar TribuneWhen Hedblom started to call the police, the girl objected. She believed that once word of the assaults got out in her community, she would be considered unworthy of marriage.
The story illustrates the enormous hurdles facing investigators and prosecutors trying to prosecute the rapes of young Hmong girls.
Even when rape victims cooperate, as this girl eventually did, it can be hard to win a conviction.
Many delay reporting the crime until it's too late to gather good evidence. Victims who drank alcohol or used illegal drugs before the attacks undermine their credibility with some jurors.
Investigators and prosecutors say those issues, common to many rape cases, are magnified when the victims are Hmong. They tend to be younger than most other rape victims. They often fall prey to gang members who get them high or drunk and threaten them with weapons. They seldom know the attackers' real names. And, like this girl, they sometimes are attacked by so many men that they become confused and can't clearly remember faces.
If the 12-year-old hadn't gotten lost as she tried to make her way home from St. Paul, the crime might have gone undetected altogether.
Cultural hurdles
Hedblom called the police over the girl's objections.
It's not surprising to those who work on Hmong rape cases that the girl would be reluctant to bring charges. Federal studies show that most rape victims -- more than six out of 10 -- don't report the crime. Hmong victims are even less likely to do so because of the culture's strong clan system and stigmatization of rape victims, according to a 2000 study commissioned by the Minnesota Legislature.
One reason is fear. "If there isn't a conviction, these gang members are going to be after her, and who's going to protect her? Not the county attorney. Not the police," said Tru Thao, a Ramsey County social worker who works with truants and runaways.
And girls can't count on the Hmong community to take their side.
Hmong have a highly patriarchal society. Girls who lose their virginity outside of marriage are devalued; the community scorns them and their families unless the girl marries the rapist. By contrast, some families and clans will rally to protect the males accused of rape or paying for child prostitutes.
"That's one of the main problems," said Richard Dusterhoft, an assistant Ramsey County attorney who has prosecuted these cases for several years. "My experience has been that support, from family, the community, friends, etc., has been one-sided in favor of defendants."
Witnesses, fearing retaliation and pressure from clans, sometimes change their stories when it's time to testify, Dusterhoft said.
Hmong enclaves exist around the country, but in the 1990s, Ramsey County became the ethnic group's leading population center. It is home to nearly 60 percent of the state's Hmong population.
Kevin Navara, a Hmong gang expert with the Minnesota Gang Strike Force, said witnesses and defendants alike sometimes disappear into California, Wisconsin, Michigan or the Carolinas. And victims often will deny that an attack took place or refuse to cooperate with investigators, he said.
That can spoil any chance of trying a suspect, said Chris Wilton, a former Ramsey County prosecutor who has handled a number of Hmong gang-rape cases.
"If the girl simply says, 'It didn't happen and I'm not going to talk about it,' then you're essentially all done with that," said Wilton, now an assistant U.S. attorney.
Gathering evidence
In the case of the 12-year-old girl found in Roseville, her physical condition was evidence of the abuse. She told a Roseville police officer that when her attackers held her down during the rapes, it felt like they were breaking her bones.
She was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul, then to Midwest Children's Resource Center, a division of Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.
Pediatric nurse practitioner Laurel Edinburgh interviewed her and photographed the bruises on her arms, wrists and legs.
Edinburgh swabbed for semen because it could provide the DNA needed to identify the attackers, but the cotton swab filled with blood, she said. More than 40 hours after the assault, the girl was still bleeding.
Edinburgh found no semen on the girl, possibly because it had washed out, but the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension found some in her pants. An expert said it came from more than one person.
For the DNA to mean anything, though, investigators would need to match it to a suspect. Like many young Hmong rape victims, the girl didn't know the names of her attackers and was uncertain where the assaults happened.
She told police she thought it was somewhere in St. Paul, because she remembered seeing the city's name on a manhole cover after she finally broke away and began walking home.
St. Paul police officer Michael Barabas tried to interview her. The girl described three attackers but said there were more. Barabas said she was incoherent. "She couldn't explain what happened to her in a sequence of events," he said. "She had real difficulty."
Eventually, the girl offered one clue: a phone number for a teen who had helped her run away. She knew him only by his nickname, "Johnny." Police traced the number to Yaug Haag Thao, now 19.
Unreliable witnesses
Thao told police that he had taken the girl to a party in St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood where members of at least two Hmong gangs were drinking.
His assistance eventually helped police track down other witnesses and defendants. But over time, his story became filled with contradictions and lapses that later helped the defense. Dusterhoft said such discrepancies are common in Hmong rape cases when the cooperating witness must face the accused in court.
The girl had barely turned 13 when she testified against two men in the first trial. She entered the courtroom with her arms folded across her chest and hurried past the defendants, her eyes cast downward to avoid their hard stares.
At times, she spoke so softly the judge had to remind her to speak up.
She admitted to getting drunk at the party. Authorities say gang members often get girls drunk or give them drugs before raping them.
The party grew loud and the host, Bee Yang, known as Billy, kicked everyone out. He asked a gang member named Lee Teng Lor, now 22, to take the girl home.
Lor said the girl didn't want to go home, so he followed the party to a vacant house near Battle Creek Park that belonged to the family of Blong Xiong, 22. The girl said she felt sick and needed to sleep, so Lor led her to a bedroom. There was no furniture, so she lay down on the floor.
Thao also had followed the party that night. He told police he heard noises coming from the room and went to investigate. He said he watched Lor and several other men have sex with the girl, who was struggling and begging them to stop. Thao said he asked if he could join in, but they refused.
Without Thao, police might have been stymied. The girl didn't know Lor's name. She only remembered that it began with S, that he was short, and that he drove a white pickup.
Lor's name doesn't begin with S, but gang members usually have nicknames. When police questioned Lor, he initially denied knowing about the rapes. But when asked his nickname, Lor held up his hand. Stubby, he said, because he has short fingers.
Two days before his trial was to begin in April 2004, Lor cut a deal. He pleaded guilty to rape and to committing a crime for the benefit of a gang. In exchange for testifying truthfully against other defendants, prosecutors agreed to cap his potential prison sentence.
At trial, Dusterhoft leaned heavily on Lor's testimony. Without informants, he said, it's hard to bring charges in such cases. But jurors may discount an informant who has something to gain by testifying. "No one likes a snitch," Dusterhoft said.
Conflicting stories
Blong Xiong and a co-defendant, Bee Chue Chang, now 21, of St. Paul, were the first to go on trial.
In many ways, it typified Hmong rape trials, Dusterhoft said. A prosecution witness refused to testify when he was called. On the witness stand, Thao continually contradicted his own testimony about who and what he had seen. He said he saw Chang in the bedroom when the girl was being raped. But when Chang's lawyer, Gary Bryant-Wolf, asked Thao if Chang looked the same then as he did that day in court, Thao said he didn't know; he couldn't remember.
Pressed harder, Thao said he didn't really see Chang in the bedroom that night.
Bryant-Wolf, seeking to drive home the point, asked him again. "You didn't see him, did you?"
"Yes," Thao responded.
"OK. So far, we've heard yes, no and I don't know," Bryant-Wolf said. He asked the question once again.
Thao responded that he had forgotten much of what happened that night. Jurors in Minnesota courts can't consider a witness' statements to police as evidence. The statements can only be used to impeach the credibility of witnesses.
Dusterhoft said later that such twists are common when Hmong witnesses face defendants in court. "Some of the perpetrators can be related to some of the victims or to the witnesses, and so there's some pressure ... when it comes to testifying," Dusterhoft said.
Thao's memory hadn't improved by April, when a third defendant, Cha Xiong, now 22, went on trial for aiding and abetting the rape. Cha Xiong's lawyer, Mark Todd, prepared the jurors for Thao in his opening statement by asking rhetorically what he would say about his client. Then he answered his own question: "That is going to be hard to predict because he has said so many things already."
Bee Yang, another gang member, also flip-flopped. Sensing the lawyers' growing frustration, Yang volunteered: "For some reason, I always say yes. I don't know why."
Dusterhoft threw up his hands in exasperation and briefly slumped over a table. Moments later, after District Judge Edward Cleary released the jurors for the afternoon recess, Cha Xiong's attorney said sympathetically to Dusterhoft: "He just says yes to everything. What the heck!"
Vulnerable victims
The victim is potentially the best witness in a rape case. But in these cases, the victims are so young and fragile that prosecutors try to avoid having them testify. In this case, Dusterhoft noted, the victim was just 12, had been drinking, and faded in and out of consciousness as strangers raped her in the dark.
After the assaults, the girl picked out a picture of Bee Chue Chang and said he had assaulted her. But in the picture he had longer hair, dyed reddish-orange. About a year later, at the trial, he had black hair cropped military style. She failed to identify him in person.
She did recognize co-defendant Blong Xiong, known as "Biggie," as someone who had been at the house where she was raped. In court, though, she didn't accuse him of assaulting her.
The girl's testimony highlighted uncertainties in the case. It's not unusual for young victims to make mistakes or to forget details of a crime, especially when they were intoxicated and when they fear being disowned by their families, Dusterhoft said.
In this case, the girl said the attacks started after she had gone to sleep and awoke naked in the dark, with Lor on top of her. She said she struggled, "then I somehow went unconscious."
Some other men and teens at the party piled into the room to rape her. When she came around and resisted, someone would cover her face so she would gasp for air, Lor testified.
"She was screaming," Lor said. "You could say she was trying to get away."
At the first trial, the girl said about five men had intercourse with her and 10 to 15 forced her to perform oral sex. She acknowledged that she wasn't certain of the total.
Making sense of it
"She was not the best reporter of that assault because people were coming in as the assault commences," Dusterhoft told jurors at the first trial. "She wasn't paying attention to their faces."
Jurors had to decide that case with little more than DNA evidence implicating Blong Xiong, the testimony of Lor -- who had cut a deal -- and the girl's confused testimony.
The girl, now 15, appeared more confident in the second trial. She entered the room with her head up, wearing a green and white Michigan sweatshirt and dramatic hoop earrings. She spoke clearly and looked jurors in the eye. But jurors in the trial of Cha Xiong had no DNA evidence to rely on. "There is no physical evidence linking Mr. Xiong to this assault," his attorney said flatly.
In the end, Blong Xiong was the only one of the three defendants to be convicted. Jurors found him guilty of rape and of committing the crime for the benefit of a gang. He insisted he was innocent. Judge Paulette Flynn sentenced him to 13 years in prison.
Lor's plea bargain netted him a sentence of eight years and two months, but it was suspended for his 20 years of probation; he was credited for the year he had already served in jail, fined $1,000, must register as a sex offender and have no contact with gang members.
After Cha Xiong's acquittal in April, Dusterhoft, exasperated, dropped charges against the two remaining defendants, Que Lee, 23, known as "Dracky," and Sia Vang, 20, known as "Tiny."
Asked why, Dusterhoft wrote in an e-mail: "Cha Xiong got acquitted and he admitted being in the room. Bee Chue Chang got acquitted."
Lee, he said, pleaded guilty in a separate case to perjury for the benefit of a gang by falsifying his visa application. In exchange, Dusterhoft dismissed the sex assault charge. Under a plea agreement, he was given five years' probation and could be sent to prison for 2½ years if he messes up. If he stays clean, the case will later appear as a misdemeanor rather than a felony.
Dusterhoft took solace in the fact that Vang faced charges in an unrelated sexual assault, along with two other defendants. He pleaded guilty in that case in a deal that calls for the dismissal of the assault charges in this one. The deal calls for a sentence of just over eight years in prison.
"I don't dismiss any felony lightly," Dusterhoft said. "In light of the jury verdicts, I can't justify putting the victim on the stand again to talk about the terrible things that happened to her when the chances of success are marginal."
the one thing i hate the most about the hmong community...they value their reputation more than anything...including the life of young girls...shit...these girls didn't ask to be rape but yet they're afraid to come out and tell it to the world becuz it's "disgraceful"...and they don't want to shame their family...what the hell???!!!!...screw the family if they think getting raped is disgraceful...c'mon ppl...open your damn eyes!
poor girl........i agree with you anti-hmong.....
