Gulf Coast Confidential: Drowning in Remorse
On this episode of Gulf Coast Confidential - the lives of four, little children had barely begun when they were cut short by their own father. He threw them off a bridge more than eight stories high near Mobile, Alabama, because he was mad at their mom. It’s the kind of crime people thought he would die for, but the court refused to execute him. Join me on your favorite streaming platform for my podcast Gulf Coast Confidential and let’s dive into the saltier side of the South.
Hi, I’m Mollye Barrows, a long-time reporter in Florida’s Panhandle and welcome to my investigative series, Gulf Coast Confidential. Here I dive into the saltier stories that surface in Northwest Florida and all along the Gulf of Mexico.
This story is especially heartbreaking. The lives of four, little children had barely begun when they were cut short by their own father, who threw them into a watery grave. In 2008, Lam Luong drove to the top of Dauphin Island Bridge in Mobile County, Alabama, and one by one threw the youngsters into the Intracoastal Waterway more than eighty feet below. The murders devastated and horrified their mother and family, as well as the Gulf Coast community where they were killed. Few tears were shed when Luong was sentenced to death for his crimes, but there was plenty of outrage when that sentence was overturned and he got life in prison instead, where he is now said to be…
“Drowning in Remorse”
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, the powerful storm made landfall as a Category 3 and brought unprecedented flooding to other nearby communities on the Gulf of Mexico, including the fishing village of Bayou La Batre, in Mobile County, Alabama. The small city of barely more than 2,000 people experienced the largest storm surge ever recorded in the area which pushed many shrimp and fishing boats onto shore and hit the local economy hard for a time.
Many people and families were left without jobs and homes and forced to move in hopes of finding better opportunities elsewhere. Among them was 34-year-old Lam Luong, a shrimp fisherman, and his common law wife, 20-year-old Kieu Phan, and her child from a previous relationship. Luong and Phan had met the year before, when she was still pregnant and although her baby boy, Ryan, wasn’t his, Luong raised him like he was his own.
The trio moved to Hinesville, Georgia, a small city about an hour outside of Savannah. Phan found employment at a nail salon and Luong worked first at a car wash, and then later as a chef at a restaurant. In the next two years, the couple had three more children together, born almost back-to-back: Hannah, Lindsey, and Danny. Although their family was growing, their relationship was falling apart. Kieu Phan said Luong took up with a girlfriend, refused to work, and was smoking crack cocaine, a drug problem he had struggled with on and off for years. Then he got fired.
Upset and frustrated with Luong’s philandering and lack of support, Phan returned to the Mobile area where she had family. In December of 2007, she and her four little ones moved in with her mother, her sister, and her sister’s four children. Luong followed, and lived with them, too, but his behavior did not improve. He still had a girlfriend, was still not working, and persistently asked his wife and her mother for money, which they gave him. They say he used it to support his drug habit, often staying out all night using crack. The women later testified that while he could be an affectionate father, he was not very attentive, or a good provider and they let him know they were not happy with his behavior.
On the morning of January 7, 2008, Phan and Luong argued. She was headed to work at a nail salon, and he loaded up their children, all except Ryan, in the family van. This was about 8:30 a.m. A few minutes later though, he returned for the 3-year-old boy and prosecutors say that’s when he made the fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive to Dauphin Island Bridge, stopped at the top and threw them off, one by one, into the Mississippi Sound more than 80 feet below. Ryan Phan was one month away from turning four, Hannah Luong was 2 years and 8 months old, Lindsey was a month away from turning 2, and Danny Luong was still a baby, at 4 months old. An autopsy later determined all the children were alive when they hit the water. The cause of death for Ryan, Danny, and Lindsey was blunt force trauma and asphyxia due to drowning. The cause of death for Hannah was drowning.
Luong’s defense attorneys would later say he was intoxicated at the time he killed his kids, high on drugs and alcohol, but police say witnesses who encountered him afterward say Luong did not appear to be under the influence. When he left the bridge, he was running low on gas and tried to enlist several people for help in getting some. They all said he did not appear to be impaired, nor did the gas station video of him trying to get gas. In fact, he showed up at the nail salon where Kieu Phan worked at about 10:00 a.m. that morning and asked for gas money, which she gave him, but police believe he used it to buy crack. He stayed out all day until the van got a flat and a wrecker towed him home about dinner time.
In the meantime, his mother-in-law had been calling him all day asking about the children. At first, he refused to answer the phone, then he told her he gave the children to a woman named “Kim.” When Kieu Phan learned what was happening, she insisted they call the police and report their kids missing. At the Bayou La Batre police station, he kept to his story that a woman named Kim had them. He even went door to door with his wife and her family supposedly looking for the children. His sister-in-law, Tracy Phan, would later testify that she asked him in near hysterics, “Why did you give the kids to people you don’t know?” Then said she told him “Crack people will do anything,” and that he looked down and cried.
The next day Luong suggested to police that perhaps they could find the mystery woman and the children in nearby Biloxi, Mississippi. Police drove him to the Gulf Coast city, but after riding around for about an hour, Luong said he didn’t know where to find them and they went back to Alabama. Not long after their return, Luong finally admitted to his wife that the children were dead. She later testified that he “kept laughing” when he told her they would never be found, while she fell to her knees, crippled by shock and grief.
Luong then took police back to the top of Dauphin Island Bridge and showed them where he parked when he threw his children to their deaths. Witnesses were later found who saw various parts of Luong’s murderous actions. Several saw the children still in the van, parked on the bridge, including a little girl, a toddler with dark hair and “pigtails.” Lindsey’s grandmother said she left the house that morning with her dark hair in pigtails. Another witness saw Luong straddling the rail of the bridge and another saw him throwing “something” off. Luong blamed his family for his actions.
“My family they make me,” Luong told them in broken English. Police say he told them his wife and family looked down on him like he was nothing. He admitted he also thought about killing himself when he was on the bridge, but he didn’t because he, “wanted to see what my wife and family looked like,” to see their faces when they got word of the children’s deaths.
A massive, community wide search began for the bodies of the missing children with more than 150 people, mostly volunteers, taking part. Waterfront landowners in the area were asked to walk their properties for signs of the little ones. The children were found one by one, over a two-week period. Baby Danny was found first, on Saturday, January 12, 2008, nearly thirteen miles west of the bridge on the banks of an isolated marsh area. The next day, 3-year-old Ryan was found, more than sixteen miles west of the bridge. On Tuesday, January 15, one-year-old Lindsey was found eighteen miles west of the bridge in Mississippi. Five days later, 2-year-old Hannah was found floating in the Gulf of Mexico, south of Venice, Louisiana, more than 140 miles west of the bridge.
The children’s uncle and family spokesperson, Kam Phengsisomboun, told media at the time that their 23-year-old mother took the news of Hannah’s discovery the hardest, likely because she was relieved all her children had been found.
"This one is a little bit harder," Kam told AL.com. "All the babies are going to be home."
Neighbors and residents rallied around the devastated Phan family. A local cemetery donated plots for the children to be buried and reserved one for their mother, too. A local school raised money for her, as well. In Bayou La Batre, a memorial was erected at Maritime Park to honor the four lives lost. The community was also invited to the graveside service for the children and the Phan family hosted an appreciation dinner for the volunteers who spent days searching for the bodies. During Mobile’s popular Mardi Gras celebration that year, a moment of silence for them was also observed. The tragedy drew strong reactions of sympathy, anger, and outrage that are still felt to this day.
In 2009, 38-year-old Lam Luong was tried and convicted on five counts of capital murder, four counts for each of his children, and an additional count because multiple murders were involved. He presented little in the way of a defense and at one point plead guilty and told the court he “wanted to die,” but then changed his plea again when he realized the trial was going to happen regardless.
Prosecutors had no trouble convincing the jury he was guilty of what they called a “vengeful, spiteful crime” committed against his family. Jurors returned the unanimous verdict in forty minutes and recommended he receive the death penalty. The judge agreed and added that guards should show him pictures of his children every day he was on death row.
Death row is where Luong stayed for nearly a decade before his conviction and sentence were overturned on appeal in 2013. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals found Luong was denied an impartial jury because he was tried in Mobile County, where the crime happened, and people were immersed in pretrial publicity about one of the most highest profile murders in Alabama’s history.
“Individuals indicated how consumed the Mobile community had become with the tragedy,” the court noted in its decision, “and the anger and outrage that the community felt toward Luong.”
Among other issues, the appeals court also found the court should have granted his defense counsel’s request for funding to travel to Vietnam, where Luong is from, to investigate his background and talk to his family of origin to find mitigating evidence. Mobile prosecutors appealed the decision, and the Alabama Supreme Court overruled it and upheld the conviction and sentence.
In 2018, attorneys for the Vietnamese native argued Luong was ineligible for execution because of intellectual disability and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Both the state and defense asked the court for the sentence, agreeing that IQ tests showed Luong is intellectually disabled. The finding makes him ineligible for the death penalty because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002, the Constitution prohibits the execution of persons with intellectual disabilities.
Luong was tested by state and defense experts and received IQ scores of 51, 49, and 57 on four different IQ tests and he received scores of 61, 55, and 60 on adaptive functioning instruments. The experts agreed that Luong’s disability manifested prior to the age of 18. The American Civil Liberties Union took on Luong’s case during the appeals process. In an article written by ACLU Senior Staff Attorney, Anna Arceneaux, she said Luong’s intellectual disabilities and mental illness went unnoticed in the first trial because of the court’s rush to judgement, complicated by the language barrier.
“Responding to intense community pressure, Judge Graddick was determined to fast-track Luong’s case, and he was convicted and sentenced to death in a record 14 months after the crime. Most Mobile County capital cases aren’t even indicted in that period of time, let alone tried,” Arceneaux wrote.
“In the rush to try Mr. Luong,” she continued, “Judge Graddick took shortcuts and ignored Luong’s constitutional rights, letting the passions of the community guide a complex death penalty case involving a multi-cultural defendant who spoke little English. As a result, Luong’s lawyers and Judge Graddick alike missed the obvious signs of Luong’s intellectual disability and severe mental illness.”
Luong's attorneys also say they uncovered extensive mitigating evidence in Vietnam, previously undiscovered because the court did not provide funding for his defense counsel to go in person to find it. Luong, born during the Vietnam War to a Vietnamese woman and a Black American serviceman, was subject to an especially difficult childhood, prior to him moving to the United States at age 14. The Alabama appeals court noted his defense counsel’s request at the time of his first trial in their decision and although no specifics of abuse or issues are mentioned in the motion, the court decided funding should have been provided at the time to dive into his history.
“Luong moved the trial court for funds for his counsel to travel to Vietnam to investigate his childhood and to interview various relatives, including his mother, stepfather, and aunts in an effort to develop mitigation evidence,” the appeals court wrote. “In support of his motion, Luong attached an affidavit from a Dr. Paul Leung, a Vietnam native and a mitigation expert. Dr. Leung said:" I am of the opinion that Lam Luong's childhood and adolescence in Vietnam is significant mitigation evidence. Vietnamese society is generally cruel in its treatment of Amerasian children, especially black Amerasians, and they are often ostracized and banished from society. Lam Luong is a black Amerasian, and his personal history reveals he was treated much like other Amerasian children born before the fall of Saigon in 1975.”
Lam Luong is now serving out his life sentence at William E. Donaldson Correctional Institution, a medium security prison west of Birmingham, Alabama. His attorney says he is “extremely remorseful” for his crimes. Although, many would have preferred to see him executed for cruelly murdering his children, perhaps living with what he did behind bars also serves as a large millstone around his neck.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of Gulf Coast Confidential. Visit Spotify or YouTube to check out more stories.