Officials: Buford dad who killed son, self was supposed to be deported


  • By Joshua Sharpe
    joshua.sharpe @gwinnettdailypost.com
  • Updated 19 hrs ago




Thy Anh Ho, who police say committed suicide after killing his toddler son on Wednesday, appears above in mugshots taken at the Gwinnett County jail April 2010, May 2010 and May 2, 2014. Officials say he should have been deported in 2009. (Special Photos)



SWAT team members rush from the scene of the standoff that left Thy Anh Ho and his son, Phillip Nguyen, dead in an apparent murder-suicide Wednesday. (File Photo)



Along with devastation, Thy Anh Ho leaves a legacy of run-ins with law enforcement that began long before he died in an apparent murder-suicide with his toddler.

Officials confirmed to the Daily Post that the 43-year-old registered sex offender was supposed to be deported in 2009 after doing 10 years in an Indiana prison for convictions including criminal confinement, armed robbery and gang activity. But Vietnamese and French authorities declined to provide the necessary travel documents, and Ho had to be released on Sept. 10, 2009, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ho died Wednesday after a 19-hour standoff with SWAT officers at his home off Dock Hughes Road in Buford. For reasons that remain unclear, he had fired a shot into 2-year-old Phillip Nguyen’s back just before turning the gun on himself, authorities said.

The father, short and trim with black tattoos of symbols and figures on his arms and back, moved to Norcross sometime in or before January 2010, when he registered as a sex offender in Gwinnett. His 1999 Indiana conviction had earned him that title.

On March 31, 2010, Ho and another man were accused of beating and robbing a pedestrian near Hong Kong Supermarket on Jimmy Carter Boulevard. Ho had recently started dating Huyen Nguyen, who would become Phillip Nguyen’s mother, according to a police report.

In the robbery, an expensive diamond ring had been stolen from the victim, a ring which Ho was wearing weeks later when police questioned him outside a bar on Jimmy Carter Boulevard.

He lied and lied about where it came from, one officer’s report said. First it was a “souvenir,” then a wedding band (even though he wasn’t married), then a gift from Huyen Nguyen, then a gift to himself.

He pleaded down from robbery to theft by receiving on Jan. 28, 2011 and, after nearly two years in the Gwinnett jail, was released on Feb. 13, 2012, according to records. It wasn’t immediately clear Saturday to whose custody he was released, if anyone’s, but jail records show ICE and the Indiana Department of Corrections wanted him.

Ho was arrested in Gwinnett next on May 2, 2014 on a hold from the Indiana prison system. He listed his employer as a welding company and his address as 1870 Beyers Landing Drive, Buford. Gwinnett police have said they responded four times to the home, which would be the site of the SWAT standoff, in response to disputes, though none escalated to the point of arrests.

Through it all, he remained on the books at ICE.

But the agency said U.S. Supreme Court precedent required that he couldn’t be held. “ICE makes every possible effort to remove all final-order aliens within a reasonable period, which the Supreme Court has determined is 180 days,” spokesman Bryan D. Cox said in an emailed statement. “After that period, if the actual removal cannot occur within the reasonably foreseeable future, ICE must release the alien.”

Ho last reported to ICE on March 17, 2015, as was required after his release.

Police are now trying to determine what led to the violence Wednesday afternoon. His girlfriend’s 20-year-old daughter called 911 the night before, saying her mom’s boyfriend had her mother and 15-year-old brother at gunpoint in the home and was threatening to kill everyone, including himself and the toddler.

He reportedly told Phillip’s mother he’d rather kill the boy than let her alone raise him, according to a warrant police obtained before Ho’s death. Efforts by the Daily Post to reach the mother for comment have been unsuccessful.

After hours of negotiation and allowing the mother and 15-year-old boy to leave, Ho fired a shot at SWAT officers, who couldn’t get to him before he fired two more bullets, police said.

The first went through Phillip’s back, the last through Ho’s skull.

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