Justin Tran was heading to the gym when a black Lexus pulled up near his family’s house in San Jose, California. A man stepped out, fired multiple shots into Tran’s car, and jumped into the sedan as it sped off.
It was about 9:20 p.m. on June 27, 2016. Officers found Tran, 26, slumped over his steering wheel and pronounced him dead at the scene.
“We lived in a cul-de-sac and he’d just turned into the street. … they followed him,” his sister, Jade Phan, told CNN. “They waved him down. He probably thought they needed help, and that’s when it happened.”
For more than two years, there were no arrests and no answers. Then in 2018, about 350 miles away in a CVS parking lot in Westminster, California, another man was shot six times in front of his girlfriend.
Investigators said they eventually uncovered evidence showing that one man was behind both killings: a South Korean named Myung Jin Kim.
As they dug deeper, they learned Kim had allegedly orchestrated the shooting in the San Jose cul-de-sac, but the hitman killed the wrong man. The intended target was Tran’s stepfather, police said.
By the time investigators connected the dots, Kim had vanished. Authorities obtained warrants charging him in both killings, but he remained on the run for years.
Then, in December, investigators learned Kim was in Laos after he visited the US embassy there seeking travel documents. Working with US federal officials and authorities in the Southeast Asian country, investigators in Orange and Santa Clara counties secured his arrest. His extradition in June marked the first time a fugitive had ever been returned to the United States from Laos.
Kim, 32, is being held at the Santa Clara County Main Jail on charges of murder, conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder as he awaits prosecution. At the time of the second killing, he was out on bail on drug and weapons charges.
His attorney, Aimee Buentello, declined to comment, saying she’s still reviewing the prosecution’s evidence. Kim has not yet entered a plea but is scheduled to appear in court next month in San Jose, the next step in unraveling what led to the death of a young man police say was the victim of a botched murder-for-hire plot.
A decade has passed since that killing on a quiet San Jose street. But for Tran’s family, the arrest revisited a painful, complicated chapter of their lives.
“It’s just so hard to talk about,” Phan said. “Me and my mom have come to a silent mutual agreement that we’re going to remember him before everything happened. We don’t like to talk about the things that happened after.”
At the time of his death, Tran worked at a Jiffy Lube, his sister said. He was into cars, and it seemed like a good steppingstone as he figured out what to do next.
As the only son and oldest of four siblings, he was a steady presence in his sisters’ lives. He often shot hoops outside the family home, laughing and yelling with his friends late into the night, Phan said.
“He would drive me home from school with EDM-type music on really loud, so the car was kind of shaking and I would get so scared,” said Phan, who was 15 when he died. “He was so full of life.”
A decade later, Phan, now 25, is almost the same age as her brother when he died. She still remembers exactly where she was when she got the news. The sisters, along with their mother, were vacationing in Florida while Tran stayed home in San Jose. The siblings shared the same mother, but Tran had a different father, Phan said.
“We were in the hotel room and my mom frantically woke us all up and (said) your brother’s in trouble … and I was very confused. She was kind of freaking us out. I was in shock, I didn’t understand what was happening,” she said.
When they got home from the airport, police cars lined their cul-de-sac. The days and weeks that followed brought many questions but no clear answers. The family grieved quietly, rarely speaking to one another about what happened, Phan said.
“The last few years have been pretty rough,” she said. “After it happened, we kind of tried to hold it all together for the sake of the family. But recently it’s been really tough.”
Tran had lived in the San Jose house with his mother, sisters and stepfather, according to police.
Surveillance footage from the family’s home showed a black Lexus driving around the neighborhood in the days before the killing. On the day Tran was ambushed, the vehicle circled the area 16 times before the shooting, according to investigators.
The morning after the shooting, Tran’s stepfather told investigators he believed the attack was gang related, according to a statement of facts from San Jose police. He suggested to police the attack was related to a Vietnamese café he had owned in San Jose that contained illegal gambling machines. He said the machines were owned by a Vietnamese man he believed was in a gang, and who paid him monthly rent to keep them there.
The stepfather told police he feared “there would have been an issue” if he’d spoken up about not wanting the machines there. He declined to elaborate to investigators, saying he wanted to protect his family.
The stepfather’s name was redacted from the police documents, and CNN was unable to contact him for additional information.
Investigators have said Tran did not know the suspects, and that they believe the stepdad was the intended target. The San Jose Police Department and Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office declined to provide additional details, including a possible motive, citing an ongoing investigation.
Tran’s killing followed two other fatal shootings of Vietnamese-American men with ties to local restaurants, according to San Jose Police and CNN affiliate KGO-TV. Over the previous 18 months, two men had been gunned down point-blank at Vietnamese cafes.
The FBI had raided one of the cafes over illegal gambling machines more than a year before Tran’s shooting, according to local media. Authorities have connected gambling machines in the cafes to Vietnamese street gangs, according to CNN affiliate KPIX-TV.
“There … are some similarities with the listed cases,” police said in a statement at the time.
Investigators have not shared many details on the 2018 fatal shooting in Westminster, a suburban city in Orange County, beyond its alleged connection to Kim. CNN has reached out to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and the Westminster police.
His death from gun violence shocked the family, Phan said.
“He was not into those kinds of crowds, those kinds of people,” she said. “It just didn’t make any sense at all.”
A police document offers a clearer picture on what investigators believe happened in San Jose.
Three years after Tran’s shooting, a confidential informant told investigators that a hitman had been offered $20,000 to kill an “Asian male in his 50s” who owned a restaurant in San Jose, according to the statement of fact from San Jose police. The informant told police that the gunman was given the addresses of the intended victim’s home and restaurant, and drove to the Bay Area with at least one accomplice.
The suspects returned to Los Angeles after killing Tran, where they learned they’d killed the son instead of the stepdad, according to the police document. The gunman was offered $50,000 to go back and kill the stepfather but never did, the informant told police.
Two fatal shootings, two years apart — but both traced to the same suspect, police say.
Investigators later learned that days after Tran’s killing, the suspects identified by the informant had been arrested in unrelated incidents in Southern California. In May 2019, San Jose police retrieved the suspects’ phones from the arresting agencies and found photos taken inside a San Jose hotel two days before Tran’s killing.
One of the suspect’s phones was registered to Myung Kim and included a note with the addresses of the intended victim’s home and his restaurant, according to the police document.
Several days after Tran’s killing, Kim’s phone, along with the suspects’, all pinged at the same location in Los Angeles, according to San Jose police. The informant told police that’s where the hitman was handed an envelope of cash.
In 2020, police charged two Los Angeles-area men and a woman with participating in Tran’s killing. A spokesperson for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office said they received “significant prison time” for homicide charges but did not provide additional details.
Eventually, Jade Phan and her mother packed up Tran’s empty room. “My mom, one day, was like, ‘I can’t keep coming in here,” Phan said.
This summer, they finally got the news they’d been hoping for. Phan said she learned of Myung Kim’s arrest when her mother texted her an article about it in June. They processed it with the same quiet resolve that’s marked their grief for a decade.
“My mom and I don’t talk about it because, ultimately, it won’t change anything,” she said. “I know she feels at peace about it.”
Phan did not respond to additional questions about her parents. CNN reached out to her sister and her mother but did not hear back.
Authorities have released few details about Kim’s flight from the US and capture in Laos, or his connection to the victim’s family and the other suspects. It’s unclear when Kim left the country.
But his arrest was a triumph for California investigators who spent years trying to track him down. In November 2018 they obtained an arrest warrant for Kim in the Westminster killing, followed by a warrant in 2020 with additional charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the San Jose case.
Without an extradition treaty between the United States and Laos, authorities in Laos took him into custody for immigration violations.
Investigators in Santa Clara and Orange counties said they never gave up on the case.
Once the Santa Clara County case is over, Kim will be taken to Orange County to face charges there, authorities said.
“Justice knows no borders and we will go to the literal ends of the earth in the pursuit of justice,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement. “It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow. But the long arm of the law of Orange County is coming for you and there is not a country on earth that is capable of shielding you.”
With Kim’s arrest and prosecution, Phan said she hopes the last of her brother’s alleged killers is convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term.
But the arrest does little to change the fact that her brother is still gone. Now that she’s almost his age when he died, she often thinks of how young he was.
“Everything is just happening for me, it probably was for him as well. His life was just getting started,” she said. “He was just figuring everything out.”
As the years pass, she worries her memories of him are beginning to fade. After the family cleaned out his room, she kept his black Hennessy T-shirt. “It’s kind of a silly shirt, but I remember him wearing it a lot,” she said.