Man who shot two Jewish men gets 35 years in federal prison for hate crimes
Man who shot two Jewish men gets 35 years in federal prison for hate crimes
Prosecutors asked for a 40-year sentence, but the judge cited Jaime Tran's history of mental illness when agreeing with his attorney's recommendation for less time.
A man who shot two Jewish men near Los Angeles synagogues on separate occasions in 2023 was sentenced Monday to 35 years in federal prison amid a sentencing recommendation from prosecutors that a victim described as “lenient.”
Senior U.S. District Judge George Wu’s sentence for Jaime Tran is five years less than the 40 years requested by prosecutors. Wu said Tran’s crimes were “based upon mental health issues, which is not justification for the crime, but an explanation as to why the defendant did what he did.”
“Hopefully with the treatment that he’s going to be receiving, he will get over that particular problem,” Wu said.
One of the victims, identified in court as “Mr. H,” listened to the hearing via phone and told Judge Wu that Tran could have been killed him if he’d fired an inch closer
“I think 40 years is very lenient for an attempt on two people’s lives,” the man said.
Tran, now 30, researched locations with a “kosher market” on Feb. 15, 2023, then drove to the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood and shot a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke who was leaving a synagogue. The next day, he returned to the area and shot another Jewish man who also was wearing a yarmulke and leaving a synagogue. Police arrested him early on Feb. 17, 2023, after a report that someone was shooting a gun behind a motel.
In their sentencing memorandum, prosecutors said Tran “had already victimized more than the two people he shot.”
“He committed the shootings on consecutive days in the same predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Both times he targeted victims leaving religious services, and both times he disappeared immediately afterwards. For those two days, he terrorized an entire community, with neighbors wondering when the gunman would return and whether they too would be shot if they left their homes, simply because they were Jewish,” according to the memo from Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathrynne Seiden and Frances S. Lewis.
After sentencing on Monday, authorities held a press conference in which they praised their work, avoided addressing the victim’s comment about the 40-year recommendation being lenient and said police never publicly denied the first shooting was motivated by antisemitism.
In court, Seiden told Judge Wu that sentencing Tran to 35 years instead of the 40 years prosecutors recommended “would subject the public to decades of risk that he won’t reform” because he’d be only 63 when released.
They “hope” he’ll reform, “but that is a dangerous presumption in this case, because if we are wrong about that, we are subjecting the public to decades of this continued behavior,” Seiden said.
Outside the courthouse, Martin Estrada, U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, told reporters the 35-year sentence “will provide protection to others” because Tran “will not make it out of prison … until well into his 60s.”
“We think this sentence certainly provides protection for our community,” Estrada said.
Deputy Police Chief David Kowalski said police had “very limited information after the first shooting” but after the second shooting, “we immediately contacted our Major Crimes Division analyst because we knew this was targeted violence against someone because of their ethnicity and where it was occurring.”
“After the first shooting, given where it was located and the profile of the victim, why tell the community that there was no reason to suspect an antisemitic motive?” asked Louis Keene, a reporter with the Jewish news institution the Forward.
“I don’t think the messaging at the time after the first shooting was that there’s no concerns in that area,” Kowalski answered.
After the second shooting. Craig Heredia, commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s West LA Division, said in a written statement that the shootings “are certainly concerning but they are not believed to be related.”
“There was no indication of yesterday’s shooting being motivated by hate,” Heredia said, according to a Feb. 23, 2023, Forward article.
Tran’s lawyers said mental illness led to his crimes, but prosecutors said his “conduct was not an isolated bout of mental illness, but a premeditated plan following years of vile antisemitic rhetoric and escalating threats.”
“His preparation included researching Jewish communities and the deliberate out-of-state straw purchase of firearms in cash to avoid detection by law enforcement,” according to the prosecution memo. “Defendant is a self-described ‘ticking time bomb’ whose racism and hate will explode upon other innocent communities absent a significant custodial sentence.”
Tran called himself a “ticking time bomb” in a text message prosecutors cited with dozens of others that include threats of violence, derogatory comments about Jewish people and other racist remarks. Police obtained the messages in 2018 after reports from Tran’s classmates at UCLA School of Dentistry about “concerning behavior, including staring at other students, sometimes pushing and touching other students, and making threatening, racist comments on Snapchat.”
Tran’s lawyer Kate Corrigan wrote in her memo that he is “a young male offender who is challenged by his mental illness.”
“His appearance (long hair with long bangs covering his face) is indicative of those challenges,” she wrote.
“The Defendant reports that during his first year at dental school, he noticed that his mental health began to decline and he began to have problems with his fellow students. He also reported to probation that he should have left the school, but he went on to attend his second year. He reported that during his second year in dental school, his psychiatric disorders began to manifest for the first time,” Corrigan wrote.
Corrigan told Judge Wu on Monday that Tran’s crimes impacted the community, “but his life has also been greatly impacted.”
“He will never have the future that he set out to have, which was being a dentist. I mean, I think we can all agree that getting into the UCLA Dental School took quite a lot of achievement,” Corrigan said.
According to court documents, police took Tran to a hospital in April 2018, and he was involuntarily detained for 72 hours, then for an additional two weeks, which banned him from possessing firearms for the rest of his life. He was involuntarily detained for another 72 hours in August 2019 but posted a picture on Instagram of himself with a gun in May 2022.
Two months later, he was arrested for possessing a loaded gun on a university campus — the filing does not identify the school — then bailed out of jail by his mother.
“He left home again soon afterwards,” prosecutors wrote. “Defendant’s family did not hear from him again until several weeks before the shooting, when he contacted his family to get a spare key for his car, came to pick it up, and left again.”
Later in November 2022, he emailed an antisemitic flyer to former classmates. Police conducted a welfare check at his parents’ home in which they “learned that defendant had not resided at the home in a year, had not contacted his family in six months, and had not taken his medication when he was living at home.”
Prosecutor said Tran knew he couldn’t easily buy a gun in California because of his past mental health holds, so he paid an acquaintance, Eric Celaya, in Phoenix, Arizona, $1,500 to buy him two: a Kahr Arms, .380 caliber pistol and a Zastava, model M70, semiautomatic rifle.
Celaya pleaded guilty in May in the District of Arizona to making a material false statement during the purchase of a firearm. He’s to be sentenced on Oct. 28.
Tran pleaded guilty in June to two counts of hate crimes with intent to kill and two counts of using, carrying, and discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence.
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