Murders of 6 kids are all but forgotten
By Rubén Rosario
Article Last Updated: 09/06/2008 09:57:15 PM CDT
Saint Paul Pioneer Press

Pat Hogan will never forget the day he dug a mass grave wide enough to
fit the bodies of six children side by side.

It was Sunday afternoon, Sept. 13, 1998. Hogan, then a grounds worker
and now the superintendent of Forest Lawn Cemetery in Maplewood,
remembers being called in as he was getting ready to watch the Vikings-
Rams game.

Instead, he listened to the game on the radio as he dug the final
resting place for the victims — all siblings — of one of the worst
mass murders in Minnesota, certainly in St. Paul, in recent memory.

"It is a sight I hope to never see again,'' Hogan recalled last week
after he took me to the grassy burial site.

The kids — three boys and three girls, ages 5 to 11 — are on Lot 134,
Block 33 on the cemetery's northwest corner, between the "Anderson"
and "Hang'' graves.

I could not get there without Hogan's help. Ten years later, there are
no markers, no headstones, nothing to identify who these children were
and where they lie. I believe many people have walked over them
without knowing it.

They deserve better, even now. They deserved far better than the fate
that awaited them Sept. 3, 1998, as they played outside their
apartment at 1541 Timberlake Road in St. Paul.

One by one, each was called to come inside by their then24-year-old
mother, Khoua Her.

A child bride of Hmong descent by 12 and a former Thailand refugee
camp resident, Khoua Her was reeling from personal, financial and

Advertisement
emotional setbacks that included undiagnosed depression.
She was separated from her husband, the children's primary caretaker,
whom she had accused of assaulting her on numerous occasions. She had
lost her job as an assistant at a suburban marketing firm and was
dependent on public assistance. Other than in-laws, she had no family
here.

She was also dating a 17-year-old reputed gangster, a teenager who
later told police about a bizarre suicide pact the two had agreed to
carry out once he got out of jail.

KILLED ONE BY ONE

There is no greater or stronger love, bond or blind trust than that of
a child toward a parent.

Khoua Her, regardless of her very real demons, betrayed that trust in
a stunningly violent and tragic way.

Using the ruse that she wanted to play hide-and-seek inside the home
with them, Khoua Her called in her oldest first.

Eleven-year-old Koua Eai Hang was first to die, according to court
documents. He was found at the top of the landing of Apartment G's
second floor, a black cloth wrapped tightly around his neck.

The others, called into the home in descending order by age, were
found similarly strangled around the split-level apartment in the Mc-
Donough public housing complex. They were Samson Hang, 9; Nali Hang,
8; Tang Lung, 7; A-ee, 6; and Tang Kee Hang, 5.

That's how they were laid to rest, inside child-size Monticello
vaults, west to east, oldest to youngest.

Officials discovered the bodies after Khoua Her, who had put on a red
ceremonial dress and wrapped an extension cord around her neck in a
feeble suicide attempt before she called police to alert them to the
parental slaughter.

Hundreds of mourners attended the burial the day after Hogan dug his
hole. They prayed for the dead kids. They brought flowers and other
mementos. Then they left.

Khoua Her's attorney planned an insanity defense before the woman
pleaded guilty to murder. She owned up to the crime. She was sentenced
Jan. 8, 1999, to 50 years in state prison. The earliest she can walk
out of the Shakopee Prison for Women is Jan. 5, 2032 — 24 years from
now. If that happens, she still would have to satisfy terms of her
probation until 2048.

On the day of her sentencing, before she was sent to prison, she
talked nonstop for nearly two hours about the struggles in her life.
But she never expressed in those two hours any real remorse for
killing her children. I know. I was there.

"There will be no mention that Koua Eai kicked around a soccer ball
and played marbles with neighborhood kids. No one will record for
history that Nali loved to read or write, or that the kids kept a
turtle and pigeons as pets, or what kind of aspirations they had,'' I
wrote in a column published the next day.

"That's the true tragedy here.''

Still is, a decade later.

RARELY VISITED GRAVES

But there is always some positive to such a negative. We can spin it
divine or natural or how we like.

The case brought to light, both locally and nationally, the culturally
muffled taboo subjects of mental and domestic violence facing St. Paul
and especially the nation's Hmong community entering a second
generation of existence in 21st-century America.

By no means was this tragedy culturally exclusive. This is a universal
problem.

"I truly believe that (the killings) ultimately ended up saving a lot
of children as well as women, because it did bring to light, like
never before, issues that were also affecting the American community
at large," said Ilean Her (no direct relation to Khoua Her), executive
director of the St. Paul-based Council of Asian Pacific Minnesotans.

Hogan recalls that Khoua Her called the cemetery a few years ago from
prison.

"She was simply inquiring about the procedure and cost of marking the
graves," Hogan said. Nothing came of the phone call.

"The Hmong community places the memorialization of their loved ones in
very high regard and spares little expense in marking the grave,''
Hogan confided. "Some of the most beautiful and expensive markers and
monuments here at Forest Lawn are on the graves of Hmong people."

Hogan has seen few visitors at the unmarked gravesite in recent years.
Those he has seen, when he has looked up from his office, have been
uniformed St. Paul cops.

"We've picked up flowers over the years that the cops have put down,''
Hogan said.

John Vomastek, a St. Paul police commander and head of the homicide
squad at the time of the 1998 killings, has no idea which cops showed
up at the burial site.

"I don't know who those officers are. But I did not even know we were
doing that,'' Vomastek told me last week. "Maybe it's just these guys
are still struggling with that, because it was a really sad day."

KIDS REMEMBERED

But someone — relative, cop or other — remembered these kids last
week.

Hogan and I discovered candy placed atop the unmarked graves
Wednesday, the 10th anniversary of the mass killings.

There were three cellophane packages, each containing two white-
frosted devil's-food cakes with dark chocolate stripes. Multicolored
candy balls, also wrapped in cellophane, had been placed nearby.

Hogan and Ilean Her both explained that the items signaled an offering
to help feed and nourish the departed in the afterlife.

"The vaults were smaller than others because some of these kids were
really young,'' Hogan said. "It's just a heart-breaking thing to see."

Elsewhere, a ceremony took place. The apartment where the murders
occurred was "cleansed'' of the dead kids' spirits by Hmong spiritual
elders and converted into a St. Paul public housing police substation
in 2000.

At the gravesite Wednesday, I said a prayer for the kids as well as
for their mom and then headed downtown, where the political circus,
and the police presence making sure it would not be disrupted, was in
full swing.