His own worst enemy

Features Enterprise Editor

personaljourneys@ajc.com

ABOUT THE REPORTER AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Josh Green is a freelance journalist and fiction writer who lives in Atlanta with his wife and daughter. The Indiana native has won top awards for journalism in the Hoosier state and in Georgia, where he relocated to work for the Gwinnett Daily Post in 2007. His debut book, "Dirtyville Rhapsodies," is a short story collection set in Atlanta.

Kent D. Johnson is a veteran journalist with more than 31 years experience. He joined the AJC as sports photo editor in 1998 and has held a number of visual editing and shooting roles at the paper since, including photo assignment editor for nine years. Johnson also worked at papers in Charlotte, N.C., Jackson, Miss., Fort Myers, Fla., and Muskogee, Okla.

It was a cool, clear night in September 2012. At 10:57 p.m., the dispatcher answered a call.

“Gwinnett 911.”

“My cousin, he’s threatening to rob a gas station.” The complainant’s voice was a youthful whisper.

“OK. When?”

“Tonight. He showed us a gun and he’s threatening to go out and rob a gas station.”

“And he’s there with you now?”

“No, I locked myself in my room.”

“What is your cousin’s name?”

“Victor Le.”

“And what’s your name?”

“James Pham … P-h-a-m … Can you send help, right away?”

At that moment, Gwinnett County police Officer J.J. Smith was en route to a report of suspicious activity near Stone Mountain. Young and fit, he’d spent all of his five years with the department patrolling southern Gwinnett.

A radio call went out about an Asian male with a gun in Lilburn. Smith changed course and raced to Southgate Drive, a manicured cul-de-sac of palatial homes.

Smith parked his cruiser and walked over to a stacked stone mailbox looking for a house number. Behind it was a large home with a wide front porch. Light dew had settled on the sloping front yard.

The mailbox was unmarked. Smith opened it and found a piece of mail, confirming he was at the right location. Then he heard a voice.

“What are you doing here?”

2. Looking for a purpose

One sunny day in January, Victor’s mother and sister walked into a Duluth coffee shop and settled into a harshly lit booth.

Wearing a houndstooth jacket and billowy scarf, Victor’s mother Tuyet Van Thi Trinh — she goes by Vivian — looked a little sleep-deprived. Her daughter, Sophia Le, a college freshman whose prettiness echoes her mother’s, cracked nervous jokes.

They wanted to refute rumors that linger on the Internet — that some sort of fight between family members preceded Victor’s actions that night. But mostly they wanted Victor’s story to help troubled people and to serve as a cautionary tale for other blindsided families.

Vivian is no stranger to hardship. As a teenager, she was separated from her mother, who paid in gold to evacuate Vivian from communist Vietnam.

She endured a “tough” marriage to a petroleum engineer, whom she’d met on a California vacation and settled with in Texas. Victor was born in Lubbock in 1992, but as his parents’ marriage fizzled, Vivian joined family in Gwinnett, taking Victor with her. The marriage dragged on, though, and Sophia was born in 1995 in Snellville. Five years later, Vivian was divorced.

At the coffee shop, Vivian, 50, dabbed tears with a wadded napkins. She calls herself a “conflicted Buddhist.” She believes in God, but she finds peace in the wisdom of monks, too.

She also believes in signs.

The first sign came when Vivian was sitting on her couch around midnight. For a couple of seconds, through the living room window, she saw a young man in the yard, near the driveway, a vision of Victor. She was not afraid. It was Victor’s way of saying he was OK, she said.

3. Confrontation

Smith pointed his flashlight beam up the long driveway toward the open garage. He saw a young man partially shrouded by bushes and a Bradford pear tree. Smith recognized the clothing description provided by the 911 caller — an orange T-shirt, blue gym shorts. It was Victor. Smith demanded he put his hands in the air.

Victor seemed deaf to the order. He inched around the tree, until the officer could see the object in his hand.

“Drop the gun!” Smith commanded. “You’re not in trouble. We just need to talk to you.”

“Who called you?” Victor asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Your family called us. We’re just here to make sure you’re OK. They said you’re having some problems.”

Victor continued to slowly close the distance.

Smith aimed his 9 mm handgun, his arm resting atop the mailbox.

As Victor kept walking, Smith tossed his flashlight in the street and flipped on his weapon light, both hands on his gun.

“I can’t see,” Victor said.

“I’ll turn off the light and come up there to talk to you, but you have to drop the gun.”

“I can’t do that,” he said as he briskly approached the mailbox.

4. Exceptional youth

Victor was a vibrant and happy child. At 2, he could count to 100 and back in English and Vietnamese. By age 4, he was devouring Dr. Seuss books. But he seemed easily distracted, so Vivian consulted a doctor. Victor was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A few years later, doctors recommended medication, but fearing side effects, Vivian refused.

At Shiloh Middle School, Victor’s intelligence raised suspicions among some teachers. Twice he was accused of plagiarism on writing assignments. “Your writing sounds like academia — like a book, not a student,” one teacher wrote.

Victor was hurt and confused.

“I saw him working late at night, so I knew that was his work,” Vivian said.

Mary Lynn Huie, who taught Victor English at Parkview High School, adamantly discounted the charges. Writing enthralled Victor, she said. He would linger after class to discuss poems by e.e. cummings or Emily Dickinson.

Despite his intelligence, Victor had a mischievous side.

In his teens, he waged paintballs wars with his friends, blew up cans with fireworks and engaged in other relatively harmless hijinks near the creek behind his home.

At Parkview, Victor was an unusual combination of brains and brawn. He won the Gwinnett County freshman wrestling title at 140 pounds, aided by what his sister described as his “horse legs.” And he breezed through gifted classes.

Ekta Patel, 20, now a student at Harvard, recalled meeting Victor in ninth grade and seeing a “cool wrestler who knew how to effectively criticize ‘A Separate Peace.’”

Classmate Roger Lu recalls laying with Victor in the sun-warmed streets of his subdivision on summer nights, gazing at the stars. “He always told me he was going to graduate (high school) a year early,” Lu said. “He told me in ninth grade he wanted to be a doctor.”

From the outside, Victor appeared to have it all together. But internally, he was creating high expectations — and an enormous amount of pressure — for himself.

5. Fallout begins

Victor charged down the driveway and raised his right arm, aiming his weapon toward the mailbox.

Convinced he was about to be shot, Smith fired a single bullet. Victor fell, landing on his back, his bare feet pointed toward the street.

In her bedroom, Vivian heard a loud bang. Afraid to investigate alone, she went to retrieve Victor. They had chatted just minutes before. She had urged him to get some sleep, and they bid goodnight.

Now she found his room empty.

Gun drawn, Smith walked up to Victor and kicked the weapon away. It sounded lightweight and plastic, because it was a BB gun.

A light flipped on in the garage. It was Vivian: “What happened?” she yelled. “That’s my son.”

Smith asked her to step back inside as officer P.D. Ward pulled up. He helped corral the home’s occupants — Vivian, Sophia, cousin James Pham and his mother Monique, a Realtor who owned the home – as they gathered in the garage. Having seen Victor sprawled on the ground, Vivian began to fall ill.

Who called 911? Ward asked.

No one answered.

Ward ushered the family into the house and began to question them. That’s when Vivian’s blood pressure shot dangerously high. She was transported to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Smith stayed with Victor, trying to find a pulse, and securing the scene.

Cpl. D.C. Appleby arrived and, knowing Smith would be shaken by the ordeal, asked if he was OK. Smith told Appleby he’d just called his wife and was contemplating a call to his father.

Inside the house, Appleby turned to James — the suspected 911 caller — for answers. But James said there had been no turmoil that night; he said Victor must have made the call himself.

Dispatch records showed the call had come from Victor’s cellphone. Appleby dialed the number and followed the ring tone to the garage, where Victor’s phone chimed on a workbench. Atop the phone lay a folded, handwritten note.

A crime scene specialist unfolded the paper. It was clear that Victor had never intended to hold up a gas station. Instead, all the night’s events were the careful orchestrations of his suicide.

6. College conflict

Vietnamese culture teaches the young to respect elders, and Victor embodied that. At Walmart, he would help elderly women unload their shopping carts at the register. On vacation, he would buy gifts for his mother but never himself.

But as his last year in high school wore on, Victor became tense, and he would snap at his girlfriend, sister and mother over trivial things. Sophia once commented to Victor that it was her birthday, and he shot back, “Who cares?”

On the fast track to Emory, Victor was taking courses at Georgia Perimeter College at the time, effectively combining his junior and senior years of high school in a process known as joint enrollment. With all his time spent on academics, he’d had to quit wrestling.

Huie wasn’t surprised to see Victor graduate high school early. In his college recommendation letter, she wrote: “Few students I have ever taught could manage what he has done this semester.”

In May 2010, Victor graduated high school with a 4.0 grade point average. Without studying, he scored in the 2200 range on his SAT — 2400 is perfect.

But Patel, Victor’s friend, noticed the confidence he’d typically projected was waning. “He kept saying that, in his efforts to gain a year, he had lost one instead,” she said.

In his college application essay, Victor was clearly torn between his ambition and the advice of close friends — and especially his mother — to slow down and enjoy his youth. “Some worry, even foresee, that my initiative will be my downfall,” he wrote.

In fall 2010, Victor started at Emory. He moved into Harris Hall dormitory and planned to major in neuroscience and behavioral biology. He joined the Tobacco-Free Task Force as a student representative and landed a legislator spot on the College Council. He made friends quickly.

But Victor was struggling with his classes for the first time. He diligently studied his biology, chemistry and philosophy books but couldn’t retain the information.

Whatever worries Victor may have harbored were masked by his new-found passion: Emory Karma Bhangra, a co-ed group that performs Indian folk dances in vibrant costumes.

Dance partner Sarah Nunley said Victor was wholly in the moment when he performed, shouting “Dil bole hadippa!” Translation: “My heart says hurray.”

But late that first semester, Victor made a troubling phone call to his mother. He could not concentrate in class lectures or remember his readings, and he wanted to see a doctor. Vivian made two appointments, but he skipped them both.

He began to talk to Patel about leaving the university to explore the world. He told Nunley he was considering joining the military. His first mention of suicide may have come in a Dec. 6 online chat with Patel.

“tell me the truth, when did you suddenlt (sic) become like this (suicidal)?” Patel wrote.

Victor: “i’d say within the last couple months”

‪Patel: “was there one specific thing?”

‪Victor: “i don’t think so”

7. Justified action

Medics arrived on the scene and found Victor lifeless in the driveway, 37 feet from the mailbox. An investigator pronounced him dead.

Victor’s weapon was collected. A Crosman-Phantom BB gun, it was designed to look just like a semiautomatic handgun.

At Gwinnett police headquarters, Smith’s actions were under investigation. In a white-walled interrogation room, he fidgeted and soberly answered questions.

“When I was out there, it seemed (Victor) was going to continue towards me until he made me do something,” he said.

Police recruits are taught to aim for “center mass” — the chest area, the big target — where bullet strikes cause rapid loss of blood pressure and then unconsciousness. Shooting weapons from the hands of perpetrators or dropping them with shots to their extremities “is exceptionally difficult, even on a still target,” said Cpl. Jake Smith, a Gwinnett police spokesman and no relation to the officer who pulled the trigger.

That night, an officer told the family: “We’re trained to stop the threat. If our lives are in danger, we have to defend ourselves.”

As is protocol, Smith was placed on administrative leave and met with a counselor.

By the week’s end, Smith was cleared of wrongdoing and officials ruled Victor’s death “suicide by cop.”

Rebecca Stincelli, a crisis interventionist, calls this form of suicide a “growing phenomenon.” Her 2010 study, “Suicide By Cop: Victims from Both Sides of the Badge” claims it accounts for about 10 percent of all suicides.

But in Gwinnett, Victor’s incident was rare. Only one other fatal shooting in 2012 qualified as a “suicide by cop,” according to homicide detectives.

“No officer wants to have to shoot someone, and certainly not someone who’s having a crisis,” said spokesman Cpl. Smith. “These are generally not bad guys we’re dealing with, (and incidents) can be trying for the officer in the aftermath.”

So trying, in fact, that Stincelli likens the effects to post traumatic stress disorder in some cases. The period when officers are being investigated can be especially difficult, as they grapple with emotions, knowing their split-second decisions are being analyzed for fault, she said. Some even quit their jobs.

Smith remains employed by Gwinnett police. He declined an interview for this story.

8. Darkest days

Victor’s deterioration happened quickly, a finger-snap in Vivian’s memory.

He finished his first semester at Emory with A’s and B’s. During his second semester, however, he moved back home and told everyone he was commuting to classes. In truth, Victor quit college, flunking everything, including swim class.

That summer, Emory informed Victor he was suspended for one semester. At first he blamed his poor grades on partying, but then admitted he was depressed. This set off alarms for Vivian that he needed professional help. He was diagnosed with major depression and ADHD, and prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft.

After a couple of months, Victor proclaimed himself cured and Vivian agreed to let him stopping taking the pills. The psychiatrist visits waned, too.

To right his grades, Victor enrolled in Georgia Perimeter College that fall, but he earned unimpressive C marks. He slept a lot and started smoking marijuana. He’d quit working out and was changing physically, his chiseled masculinity softening, his face growing boyish. His hands started to shake, and he worried that his dreams of being a neurosurgeon were slipping away.

The next semester, Victor was readmitted to Emory. (Officials at Emory confirmed Victor’s enrollment but declined comment.) He commuted for one week before telling Vivian he needed a break. Vivian would come home from work to find him on the couch with one of his books from adolescence. “I’m reading, Mom,” he’d say.

But every day, the book was open to the same page.

A friend advised Vivian to take Victor to a hospital. Surprisingly, he agreed. A doctor at Eastside Medical Center pronounced a new, more ominous diagnosis: Schizophrenia.

After two days of testing, doctors decided to transfer Victor to Peachford Hospital in Decatur, a mental health service provider. He ripped off his hospital gown and dashed through the corridors of Eastside Medical, as his mother screamed for him to stop. A security guard thwarted the escape, and once back in his room, Victor bashed his head into the wall.

Victor stayed at Peachford for three weeks, but he begged to go home and convinced Vivian to help him get released. She enlisted her family counselor to vouch for Victor, reduced her work hours so she could be home to care for him and agreed to enroll Victor in an outpatient program.

“He will be safe,” she pleaded.

Six months before his death, Victor walked out of the hospital and triumphantly threw his hands up into the springtime air: “Ahh!”

It wasn’t long, though, before Victor told his mother he heard voices telling him to hurt the family dog. Vivian called a Peachford hotline, and they advised her to immediately readmit him.

By then Victor had calmed down and went to bed. When Vivian checked on him, moonlight illuminated his sleeping face, making him appear peaceful. All night Vivian sat next to his bed, slowly realizing she could not bring herself to hand over her child again.

By summer, Victor showed improvement. A new combination of Prozac and antipsychotics seemed to help. He set his sights on returning to Emory again.

A month before he died, Victor wrote a letter to Emory officials explaining his poor performance in an effort to reclassify his failing grades as withdrawals. He was permitted to return and enrolled in two classes. But after only two weeks, he realized his problem with reading retention had not subsided.

Vivian believes Victor’s purpose for living was finally, totally lost.

His letter for readmission foreshadowed his end. He’d been consumed with suicidal impulses at Emory, Victor wrote. During the semester he’d quit school, “I had hoped to acquire a gun to end myself … or a toy gun in order to threaten a police officer into doing it for me.”

9. Lingering questions

Despite the popular notion that “genius is next to madness,” mental illness isn’t especially prevalent in highly intelligent or creative people, said Dr. Peter F. Buckley, a schizophrenia expert and dean of the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.

But when met by brilliance, mental illness doesn’t flinch.

“There’s a person on a track with great potential … and suddenly they’re taken down a different path,” Buckley said. “It’s a great human tragedy.”

While “suicide by cop” might seem like a selfish act, Buckley said it demonstrates a schizophrenic person’s scrambled thinking.

In her interviews with “suicide by cop” survivors, Stincelli found that most perpetrators had not been able to bring themselves to pull the trigger themselves. In police, they saw an easier out.

Huie, Victor’s English teacher, has pondered her student’s death and its effect on others, especially the police officer he goaded into shooting him.

“You think about the impact and how it ripples out,” said Huie, “and all the people — the living — whose lives are torn by it.”

In his suicide note, Victor said: “If I could live another 20 years exactly as I lived the first, I would, but I sense that destiny has something else in store for me.”

10. The second sign

Victor’s funeral was held in Lawrenceville the Sunday after his death. Beside him in the casket, Vivian laid out his Bhangra costume, his sports trophies and stacks of adoring letters from friends and family.

The following Friday, the dance team dedicated a performance to Victor at Emory. Instead of their usual vibrant costumes, the dancers wore black.

The outpouring of support did not soothe for long, though.

“We were just lost,” Monique, Victor’s aunt and James Pham’s mother, said.

Last summer, Vivian and Sophia moved to Duluth. The home they had shared with Victor was too saturated with memories. She decorated the new home with Buddhist calligraphy and two glass cabinets so full of her children’s photographs they can only be described as shrines.

Sometimes Vivian can accept that Victor is gone. She tries to stay active, to host dinner parties, to attend Buddhist retreats and read Buddhist literature.

But more often, Victor’s absence leaves her feeling empty and she’s reminded of his nightmare decline. When she looks back, she sees a landscape of missteps.

She wonders if she should have monitored Victor more closely and coddled him less. Just maybe, taking him to see mental health professionals more frequently would have given him hope. She feels remorse, not just for the loss of her son but for the role Officer J.J. Smith was forced to play in Victor’s death.

Reflecting on Victor one night in her living room, Vivian said, “I did not act quick.” She then repeated the phrase twice more before her voice trailed into a prolonged silence.

At other moments, though, she has found hope — and in seemingly mundane places.

Behind their Lilburn home one day, Vivian saw what she believed to be a second sign.

She was standing near the grave of “Dude,” a spunky little mutt Victor had found in the street and adopted.

On Dude’s grave, the most unusual butterfly lit, all black wings with little specks of white. It was Victor’s spirit, Vivian said.