Girl, 10, Describes Fatal Attack at Uncle’s Trial : Courts: Tuan Ngoc Le is accused of murder in the deaths of his estranged wife and her mother in Anaheim.

SANTA ANA —  Her voice barely above a whisper, a 10-year-old girl Tuesday described a bloody fatal attack in which she saw her uncle violently grab her aunt and a knife protruding from her grandmother.

“I was so afraid,” the girl, wearing a Snow White T-shirt and blue pants, told jurors during the first day of testimony in the trial her uncle, Tuan Ngoc Le, who is accused of murdering the women.

“What were you afraid of?” Deputy Dist. Atty. Clyde Patrick Von Der Ahe asked gently.

“I was afraid my uncle would kill me,” she replied, speaking through a Vietnamese translator.

The girl’s testimony, and that of her 6-year-old brother, came after Von Der Ahe told jurors in his opening statement that Le fatally slashed his estranged wife and his mother-in-law out of “selfishness” and jealousy, then set their Anaheim home on fire to get back at the family he believed had destroyed his life.

Le couldn’t stand that his 30-year-old estranged wife, Loi Thanh Phan, wouldn’t leave her family and come back to him with their 4-year-old daughter and was upset she was car-pooling to work with a man, the prosecutor said.

“It’s this independence, this if-I-can’t-have-her-no-one-else-will philosophy, mentality, that will lead to a brutal, ugly killing,” Von Der Ahe told jurors.

Le, 34, is charged with arson and two counts of first-degree murder with a special circumstance of multiple murders, meaning he could be sent to prison for life without parole if he is convicted.

Le’s court-appointed attorney told jurors there’s no question the defendant killed his wife and her mother, 69-year-old Sao Thi Nguyen, although he argued the man is not guilty of premeditated murder.

Deputy Public Defender Roger Alexander said Le never planned to murder anyone the morning of July 6, 1994, but ended up in a “frenzy” when his wife refused to listen to his pleas to come back to him with their daughter. The mother was stabbed as she tried to come to her daughter’s rescue, he said.

“He absolutely lost it,” the defense attorney said. “He didn’t think about what the consequences of his actions were.”

Alexander acknowledged the brutality of the killing to jurors in his opening statement, but asked them to keep an open mind and find his client guilty of something less than premeditated, first-degree murder. He said Le was happy when he went to the home that morning, and had only intended to tell his wife about his new $30-a-day job as a waiter, and to plead for her to come back to him with their daughter.

The couple and their child lived briefly together with her relatives in the Hearth Lane home after emigrating in 1993 from Vietnam. But he soon moved out after a dispute with her brother and tensions over his inability to find a job, Alexander said.

Von Der Ahe told jurors that Le knew what he was doing when he went to the family’s Hearth Lane home and had bought a knife at a nearby supermarket just minutes before the attack. After the attack, Le pulled a lawn mower indoors and set it on fire, doing nothing as two strangers rushed into the burning home to help the victims, he said.

“He wanted Loi Phan dead. That’s why she suffered approximately 29 knife wounds,” Von Der Ahe said, adding that the woman’s mother was stabbed about a dozen times.

The defendant’s niece, one of the first witnesses called by the prosecution, said she saw part of the attack after another aunt, who is deaf and unable to speak, tried to motion the children from the living room where they were watching “Ninja 3.”

“Did you ever see a knife?” Von Der Ahe asked the girl.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Where did you see the knife?” he continued.

“On the body of my grandmother,” the girl said, later responding under questioning that she last saw her grandmother trying to crawl away from the attack.