By Tim Clifford

What drove 65-year-old Vien Nguyen to kidnap her grandson and daughter-in-law last Tuesday?
“That’s kind of the big question that our investigators are still trying to figure out,” said Sgt. Mike Graddon of the Des Moines Police.

This and a multitude of other questions remain unanswered in the wake of the double kidnapping that resulted in two arrests.

The events began around noon on Tues., April 14, when Nguyen and her son’s girlfriend, Alyssa M. Chang, went to visit her 2-year-old grandson Ronnie Tran and his 40-year-old mother. Nguyen and Chang used a stun gun to subdue the mother and then bound her with plastic zip ties. They then transported the mother and her child to a home in Fife where they tied the mother to the inside of a cupboard in the garage.

That night Chang called her brother, John Truong, who lives in Renton and asked him to babysit young Ronnie so she and her boyfriend could go out for the night. Despite having never met his sister’s boyfriend or seen the child before John agreed and took the boy for the night.

Throughout the night Truong attempted to text and call his sister multiple times but she never answered her phone.

Later that same evening the mother, still trapped in a cupboard in Fife, managed to get free and went to the main house to find her child. When she couldn’t locate him she ran to a nearby house and contacted a friend who later took her to report it to the Des Moines Police. That evening police issued an Amber Alert.
The next morning, April 15, around 9 a.m., John was having breakfast with Ronnie and perusing Facebook when he noticed the Amber Alert and realized the child at his table was the same one pictured in the alert.

“I’m eating my breakfast, checking my Facebook, all of a sudden I see this Amber Alert for this child and I’m like ‘Oh my God! What’s going on?’” Truong told KOMO News during an interview that day.

After his astonishment had settled in he immediately called the police and returned the child safe and sound. His sister was arrested shortly afterward, around 9:30 a.m., and booked on charges of Kidnapping, Assault and Unlawful Imprisonment with bail set at $250K.

A short manhunt was ended around 5:30 p.m. that day when the elderly Nguyen turned herself into authorities. It has been confirmed that at this time Ronnie’s father is not believed to have been involved and is currently not a suspect.

It’s unclear what the state of the marriage between Ronnie’s father and mother is. It is also unclear what the endgame was for Nguyen and Chang as far as what they were planning to do to the mother.

“Detectives are trying to figure out this thing, figure out why it came to be. There are quite a few complexities with it because it’s such a large family, they are dealing with that. They’re certainly dealing with some language barrier since they are Vietnamese,” explained Sgt. Graddon.

Detectives are still investigating the families as well as the home in Fife.