[5] Tran and Long Nguyen were friends and classmates at Florin High School; both had been expelled in March 1991 after stealing athletic equipment and attempting to set fire to the building.
Loi Nguyen had purchased the guns legally at a local sporting goods store the prior week, following a background check and waiting period.
[6][4] They were frustrated with their lives in the United States since it was difficult to find good jobs and expressed a desire to travel to Thailand and fight the Viet Cong, according to two of the hostages.
[2][11] When the 9-1-1 call came in at 1:33 p.m.,[6] the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department Special Enforcement Detail (SED) was already in the process of gearing up in anticipation of executing a previously planned drug raid.
The criminals apparently heard movement by the police amid shouts of "stay away from the door" coming from inside the store itself.
By this time, the hostages had been tied up with speaker wire and had been arranged inside the store's glass front entrance doors in standing and kneeling positions.
[10] The hostage-takers demanded $4 million, forty 1,000-year-old ginseng roots, four bulletproof vests, a 50-troop military helicopter, and transportation for everyone to Thailand[2] after a refueling stop in Alaska.
[13] At one point during the negotiations, the leader of the hostage-takers, who called himself "Thai" (later shown to be Loi Nguyen),[12] agreed to surrender to the police but only if they were allowed to retain their bulletproof vests and weapons while in prison.
At that point, many of the officers involved felt the exchanges might lead to a negotiated settlement; when he returned to the phone, Loi Nguyen stated that while he accepted those terms, his partners did not.
At that point, the police attempted to distract the gunmen by putting the hostage on the news, which would also move them to the television area of the store, but this tactic did not work.
A second bulletproof vest was delivered to the front door shortly after Brooks was shot, which was to be exchanged for nine more hostages, but no one was released.
[11] Immediately, the hostage-takers ran back and forth, and Long Nguyen started to shoot the seated hostages who were tied down in a row behind the glass door, in full view of the news cameras broadcasting the event live.
"Number One" (Long Nguyen), now stunned and disoriented, managed to stagger out of Boyes's sights and take cover behind a large pillar.
It took the seven-person entry team two to three seconds to get through the back doors from where they had been hiding (a storage space in the rear of the store) because of the "barricades" erected earlier.
Sergeants Don Devlin, Charles Price, and Gordon Smith were armed with SiGARMS Sig P220 pistols, Sergeant Bill Kelly carried a laser-sighted HK MP5, investigators Mike Hammel and Greg Peterson carried H&K MP5SD3 submachine guns, and investigator Roger Stanfill was armed with his AR-15.
At that moment, she was snatched to safety by officers outside the store, causing Peterson's feet to fly out from under him, forcing him to fall backward, just as a shotgun blast immediately blew through the area where he was standing.
Then they spotted a second armed suspect (Pham Nguyen) and fired on him, but he disappeared into the chaos of the screaming and panicking crowd of hostages.
Price and Hammel discovered an unarmed Asian male (Loi Nguyen) lying on the floor, wearing the sole bulletproof vest that had been provided earlier.
[6] Others shot at were Bret Soren, Chris Lauretzen, Curt Warburton, and many others who suffered both physical and extreme emotional consequences including brutal bodily injuries, trauma, and severe ongoing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The hostages killed were store employees Kris Edward Sohne and John Lee Fritz and customer Fernando Gutierrez.
[9][16] One of the nieces, Lisa Joseph, later wrote the book Heads or Tails: A True Hostage Story of Terror, Torture and Ultimate Survival about her ordeal.
[19] Loi Nguyen was arraigned from his hospital bed shortly after the crisis ended and charged with 54 felonies, including murder.
However, Rebecca Moore, a sheriff's detective, pointed out that Loi Nguyen had purchased the guns, driven the group to the store, and handled most of the negotiations: "In my opinion he is the most responsible party for this thing going down.
[23][24][25] Information that surfaced at Nguyen's trial revealed the men's motivation for committing the crime was that they were frustrated by their inability to learn English and find jobs.