> 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
>
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> 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.