On April 4, 1991, 41 employees and customers were taken hostage by four gunmen and held at a Good Guys! electronics store at the corner of 65th Street and Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, California, near Florin Mall (now Florin Towne Centre) for approximately eight hours. Near the end of the hostage crisis, six were killed: three hostages and three of the four hostage-takers. The fourth hostage-taker was captured by authorities, and an additional 14 hostages were injured during the crisis. To this day, the hostage crisis remains the largest hostage rescue operation in US history, with over 40 hostages having been held at gunpoint.
The four gunmen were all Vietnamese immigrants: brothers Loi Khac Nguyen, 21; Pham Khac Nguyen, 19; and Long Khac Nguyen, 17; and their friend, Cuong Tran, 17. The Nguyens had fled Vietnam as a family of eight in 1979 at the start of the second wave of Vietnamese refugees, first sailing to Malaysia and remaining anchored there for the first seven months, then waiting for four more months in an Indonesian refugee camp before they arrived in California in 1980. The entire family lived in a two-bedroom apartment not far from the Good Guys! store. Cuong Tran had moved with his parents into a new home in Elk Grove 15 months before the hostage crisis.
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 attended Valley High School but dropped out during his senior year. Pham Nguyen was attending William Daylor High School (a continuation school) after having transferred from Valley following attendance issues.
On the day of the hostage crisis, Pham Nguyen briefly came to school and asked to be excused with a toothache. The Nguyen brothers told their parents they were going fishing at the Sacramento River.
At approximately 1:00 p.m., on April 4, 1991, the four perpetrators drove into the parking lot of the Good Guys! electronics store, in the South Area of Sacramento County. The group left their vehicle, a 1982 Toyota Corolla, and entered the store armed with three pistols and a shotgun. Loi Nguyen had purchased the guns legally at a local sporting goods store the prior week, following a background check and waiting period. Although reported, the gunmen were not members of the Oriental Boys gang, and the hostage-taking and subsequent crisis were not considered to be gang-related.
They herded customers and staff into a group, including a shoplifter attempting to leave the store, and began shooting at the ceiling of the store. One employee escaped after being ordered to lock the doors. Although initial reports indicated they had taken the hostages after a failed robbery attempt, subsequent statements to hostages and negotiators instead proved "they were attempting to gain notoriety," according to Sacramento County Sheriff Glen Craig. 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.
Law enforcement and media response
When the 9-1-1 call came in at 1:33 p.m., 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. They immediately paged off-duty team members and began preparations to rush to the scene along with the Department's Critical Incident Negotiations Team (CINT) and other local and state law enforcement agencies.
As the situation developed, the local media descended on the area in force, broadcasting the unfolding incident. They were able to get footage of the event because of the store's huge glass front doors, which allowed video crews to see into the store where the hostage-takers lined up some of the hostages in front of the entrance as human shields.
Following the standard operating procedure, the team obtained a floor plan of the building, which was copied and distributed to team members. The SED team was told that there was only one entrance to the store that was not alarmed: a freight entrance located at the rear of the store. Their only option would be to enter the store's showroom, where the hostages were being held, through a fabrics store on the north side of the building. The entry team gained entrance to the fabric store and slowly moved into position. The criminals apparently heard movement by the police amid shouts of "stay away from the door" coming from inside the store itself.
One of the entry team members removed a ceiling panel in the hallway between the two buildings and inserted a pole-mounted mirror. He was able to observe the subjects directing hostages to place large boxes against the back door to block entry. Once the door was barricaded, the area was abandoned. A fisheye camera was installed by the team but was of limited use because of the design of the store, showing only a portion of the showroom near the door. 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.
For more than two hours, the department's CINT tried to end the incident peacefully by negotiating with the hostage-takers. Negotiations were initially conducted from police headquarters, and a special negotiation team took over on-site after a few hours from a bank that had been evacuated. 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 after a refueling stop in Alaska. Throughout the incident, the hostage-takers did not present a consistent set of demands to the negotiators.
One demand that remained constant was for bulletproof vests. During early negotiations, one of the requested vests was exchanged for what was to be the release of nine hostages, although only three were released initially; the police officer who took the first vest to them stripped to his underwear to prove he was unarmed. Loi Nguyen sent a woman to retrieve the vest and threatened to shoot her children if she did not return; after she retrieved the vest, they were the first three hostages to be released. In addition to the hostage exchange, another benefit was that it allowed police to gain information on the current situation in the store. One of the released hostages revealed that the shots heard earlier had been the hostage-takers shooting at the store's security cameras and that none of the hostages had been harmed up to this point. Soon thereafter, more shots were heard, but this was the hostage-takers testing the vest. Approximately an hour later, another woman and her three children were released; an eighth hostage was released at 8:20 p.m., bearing a message that they would start to shoot the other hostages shortly.
At one point during the negotiations, the leader of the hostage-takers, who called himself "Thai" (later shown to be Loi Nguyen), agreed to surrender to the police but only if they were allowed to retain their bulletproof vests and weapons while in prison. The police negotiator informed Loi Nguyen that he would have a short sentence and his vest and guns would be returned upon his release. He set down the phone and began to discuss the situation with his partners. 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. Suddenly, the phone went dead, and the CINT immediately tried to re-establish contact with the store. On the first attempt, the phone was busy, and on the second attempt, a suspect calling himself "Number One" (later shown to be Long Nguyen) answered the phone, informing everyone that he was now in control. From that point on, the situation began to rapidly deteriorate. Shots were once again fired at the store's security cameras.