ANGIE LEVINE/Daily Bruin Students sing during a commemoration ceremony of UCLA alumnus Thien Minh Ly. Ly was stabbed to death while rollerblading in 1996.

By Jessica Chung

Daily Bruin Contributor



About 150 students commemorated the death of former Vietnamese Student Union president and hate crime victim Thien Minh Ly with a candlelight march and vigil Wednesday night.

Ly, a first-generation college student, was stabbed more than 50 times while rollerblading at Tustin High School in Orange County in 1996 by a man who mistook him for Japanese.

Even six years after Ly’s murder, his family and friends say they are still not over the shock.

“I always thought things like this wouldn’t happen to me,” said his brother, Thai Ly, who was a sophomore at UCLA at the time of the murder. “But it happened to me, and I wish it hadn’t.”

Current VSU co-president Kim Le Pham was a junior at Tustin High when Ly was murdered.

“Even though I was there, it was still shocking and surreal,” she said. “It wasn’t until I got to UCLA that I realized it was a hate crime.”

Wednesday, students marched from Kerckhoff Grand Salon to Bruin Plaza to commemorate Ly’s contributions to the Vietnamese community, said John T. Vu, a second-year economics and art history student who co-coordinated the event.

“Everyone here feels the same,” said second-year business student Linda Phan. “It’s sad and it’s something that shouldn’t have happened.”

Vu said his organization is addressing the issue of hate crimes toward other groups outside the Asian communities.

Hate crimes arise from the need to prove one group is superior to another, said Ronni Sanlo, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Campus Resource Center. She cited as an example Matthew Shepard, a young homosexual student who was tied to a fence and beaten to death because of his sexual orientation.

Though many people see America as multi-cultural, Mari Nakano, a fourth-year student and speaker for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, said she sees a lot of cultural intolerance in hate crimes, adding that the number of hate crimes has increased since Sept. 11.

“I don’t want to have to be here to educate people on hate crimes,” Nakano said.

The evening included a documentary titled “Letters to Thien,” in which his family and friends spoke about their memories of Ly’s life and their pain and anger from his death.

“Everything is still the same, but without him, we feel very weak,” Ly’s mother said in the documentary. “Living without him is hell.”

The video served to put a face to the statistical numbers of hate crimes and to highlight their seriousness, said Thao N. Tran, a second-year political science and philosophy student who co-coordinated the event.

“We can or cannot forgive, but we cannot forget,” Tran said. “We will not forget his death. We will not forget Thien Minh Ly.”