On the blustery morning of April 16, Hoang Nguyen and his wife, Yen, left their Dutchtown apartment to go grocery shopping, a Saturday routine. After bidding goodbye to their 25-year-old son, Kenny, the couple strolled east on Chippewa Street, crossing Spring and Giles avenues, then headed south on Grand Boulevard toward their market.
In the months that preceded the attack on the Nguyens, Elex Murphy (at Valley Springs Youth Ranch) had reinvented himself with falsehoods, telling acquaintances that his mother was dead, that he was from Atlanta and that he attended Washington University.
Hoang, a 72-year-old retired schoolteacher and avid painter, immigrated with his wife to St. Louis three-and-a-half years ago from their native Vietnam. The couple wanted to be closer to their daughter, Lan, who'd married an American and settled in south county. Kenny joined his parents six months later. By now the Nguyens were fixtures in Dutchtown's growing Vietnamese community and active parishioners at Resurrection of Our Lord. Recently Hoang had begun taking English classes at the International Institute of St. Louis nearby.
The Nguyens ticked off the items on their shopping list — fish, vegetables, noodles — filling their pushcart with grocery bags. Security-camera footage shows the diminutive husband embracing a friend at the cash register as his 59-year-old wife laughs nearby.
When the Nguyens left the grocer at about 10:30, they took a shortcut home through the alley that parallels Chippewa to the south. They'd been taking this route for months; though it made Yen nervous, the alley's gradual slope made it easier for her elderly husband to maneuver their pushcart.
Midway down the alley, Nguyen's cart stopped suddenly — seemingly for no reason. "It was like it was a sign saying we shouldn't go that way," Yen says in hindsight. When Hoang got the wheels moving again, they looked up and saw two young men and two young women approaching.
Moments later, one of the men charged.
Hoang stepped in front of his wife to protect her, she recalls. The man grabbed Hoang's jacket as he pleaded for mercy, shouting, "No, no, no!"
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"Jason" considers himself a typical fourteen-year-old. "I got a good family background," he asserts by phone from his mother's house in St. Louis County, on a morning when he decided to skip school after oversleeping.
Jason, who asked RFT to use a pseudonym, recently moved to the county from south city, where he attended Fanning Middle School, near Grand Boulevard and not far from the Nguyen household. It was during his middle-school years that he was introduced to Knockout King.
"I always hit 'em hard," he says. "If you don't hit 'em hard, they don't go far."
Jason is talking about a ritual — those who participate call it a game — that has been adopted by young teens across the St. Louis area. Once an elusive phenomenon that flew under the local radar, the game exploded onto the collective consciousness with the media reports that followed the attack on Hoang Nguyen.
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