Ex-POW says murder suspect saved his life

Ex-POW says murder suspect saved his life
OCRegister - Santa Ana,CA,USA

Friday, December 5, 2008

MORNING READ: Defense attorney calls retired colonel to talk about the horrors of the Vietnam War. A re-trial related to the case could begin today.
By LARRY WELBORN
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER


He was shot down over Vietnam in May of 1972. He crawled with a broken back and swollen ankle for three days before he was captured by the North Vietnamese.

He was interrogated, tortured and threatened with death.

And then it got bad.

Retired Army Col. William Spencer Reeder told an Orange County jury last year that he was forced to march for three months with a broken back, infected ankle and other injuries up the Ho Chi Minh trail to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prisoner of war camp.

More than three decades have passed since his Vietnam trek, but Reeder still has nightmares.

"I don't like to dwell on that trip," Reeder first told an investigator for the Orange County Public Defender's Office in 2005.

"That trip is about the most horrendous thing that's ever happened to me in my life," Reeder said.

"I mean the other stuff was bad enough. But by many magnitudes, that trip was awful."

Reeder said during the journey he became sick with malaria and dysentery. His ankle infection got worse, swelling three times its normal size. He was cold, fatigued and hungry, about as miserable as one human being could get.

He knew that if he failed to keep up during this three-month-long forced march – if he could not continue – he would be killed, just as he had seen other prisoners get killed when they dropped out.

And that point came.

Le, who had immigrated to Orange County from Vietnam years after the fall of Saigon in 1975, was charged with murdering his brother's live-in girlfriend Tuyet Le, 46, and her 15-year-ol daughter Jennifer Cu in December, 2004.

Senior Deputy District Attorney Ebrahim Baytieh argued during the guilt-innocence phase of the trial that Le, who had moved into his elderly parents' Santa Ana home about a month before the shootings, killed Tuyet because he felt she had been repeatedly disrespectful towards him and his parents.

Baytieh said Le armed himself and went on a rampage. He shot Jennifer Cu in the head and chest in the kitchen, and then shot Tuyet Le once in the chest in the back yard, according to evidence,

Le then prepared to shoot it out with police, but was talked out of it by his father, Baytieh contended. Instead, Peter Le phoned 911 and surrendered.
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