Shipment reveals opium connection
Saevang, ex-wife, friend enter pleas in connection with large amount of drug





Special Report


» Click here for our special report By Richard Gould | Hickory Daily Record and Monte Mitchell | Journal Reporter

Published: May 19, 2009

Updated: 01:22 am

HICKORY - The shipment from Bangkok arrives Saturday, June 5, 2004, at the Los Angeles International Airport. The manifest says "souvenir."

Nearly 23,000 packages flow through customs that day, but an officer picks this one out for a closer examination. Two days later, an inspector opens the package.

Inside are 30 wooden ducks and 25 wooden balls. The inspector opens one of the wooden ducks and finds a black, tar-like substance inside. It tests positive for opium. The inspector opens three of the balls. Each contains the same black, tar-like substance.

The airway bill on the shipment shows that the package is to be delivered to a sprawling apartment complex off Sandy Ridge Road in Hickory. It is a mostly white, middle-class area, where people think of immigrants mainly as Hispanic. But the growing Asian culture is evident in the nearby Buddhist temple, housed in a building that was once a Li'l General convenience store.

It's a delivery that some believe would set a man on a path to the worst mass murder in Catawba County's history.


Ready for delivery

A Hickory police investigator learns on June 8, a Tuesday, that the delivery is expected in an apartment that is rented by Chiew Chan Saevang and a friend, who had both recently returned from Asia.

On Wednesday, the shipment of opium arrives at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Charlotte.

An agent installs an electronic transmitter in the package, and sprays the figurines with a powder that will be invisible to the naked eye, but will show up under ultraviolet light.

Later that day, an undercover Hickory police investigator delivers the package, which is addressed to a man named Maxx. Saevang opens the door. He tells the deliveryman that he is not Maxx, but that Maxx will be home soon. Saevang signs for the package. Five minutes later, the electronic device signals that the package has been opened. Three minutes after that, Saevang comes out of the apartment carrying the package. Another man, Sue Her, comes out carrying a suitcase.

Each man gets into a separate car and starts to drive away. That's when officers swoop in.

Saevang is cooperative. The package he was carrying is empty. He says he was taking it to a trash bin. Inside the suitcase that Her had carried, officers find the figurines with the opium still inside.

Just minutes after Saevang is stopped, he starts answering the officers' questions. He says his roommate's name is Sue, but the man's nickname is "Maxx," the name on the package. The package belongs to Sue Her, he says.

But when an agent shines an ultraviolet light near Saevang's hands, his hands glow, indicating that he'd handled the figurines. Her's hands glow, too.

Inside the apartment, officers seize drug paraphernalia, including a small bit of opium. They take airline tickets and boxes with shipping labels from Thailand.

Both men are charged in connection with trafficking opium.

Officers remove about 11 pounds of opium from inside the wooden ducks and balls.

It is a huge haul of opium in a city the size of Hickory. The men could face sentences of more than 18 years in prison.


Link to former wife

When Saevang was stopped, he had been driving a car registered to his former wife, Feuy Chio Saelee. A week later, investigators learn that Saelee cooked opium in the basement of her home.

Adding raw opium to boiling water allows impurities, such as plant fragments, to float to the surface. The solution is strained, boiled again and allowed to simmer, producing a liquid that can be molded and dried. Cooked opium is more pure than raw opium, and can go directly to users or to laboratories for further processing into heroin.

Hickory police later find a self-storage unit that Saelee had leased three days after her former husband was arrested. Inside officers find a 9mm pistol and nearly 12 pounds of opium.

That makes 23 pounds of opium seized, an incredible amount that could be sold for about $340,000. It is also more than enough to make a kilogram of heroin, with a street value after dilution of about $500,000.

The next day, officers visit Saelee at her home on Havenhurst Road in Bethlehem, near Lake Hickory. She tells them she had found the gun and boxes of opium in her basement after her husband was arrested.

The next month, Saevang, Her and Saelee are all indicted on felony charges related to bringing opium into the U.S. from Thailand.

Saelee will enter a plea deal, admitting to a misdemeanor of possessing opium. She is sentenced to a year's probation.

On March 6, 2006, Her admits to a conspiracy to possess and distribute opium and is sentenced to four years, three months in federal prison. The court recommends he participate in a substance-abuse program, and be allowed to serve his sentence as close as possible to his home in Green Bay, Wis.

But Her never enters the federal prison system. He also faces state charges related to trafficking a schedule I drug, a category that includes heroin. He is convicted on July 12, 2006, in Catawba County, and sentenced to a minimum of 7½ years in state prison. He is currently an inmate at Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine.


Release from prison

In a plea deal, Saevang admits to conspiracy to possess and distribute opium. He is sentenced to three years, 10 months in federal prison. A judge recommends he be allowed to participate in a substance-abuse program.

Saevang, who has been in jail since he was arrested, is given credit for a year and 10 days. He enters the federal prison system in the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Ky., on Feb. 24, 2006.

He spends more than a year there, and on May 16, 2007, he is transferred to the Moshannon Valley Correctional Center, a private Pennsylvania prison operated by a contractor.

Saevang is released from Moshannon on Nov. 11, 2007.

He will seek out friends who had helped him before he went to prison. The friends include the family of Brian Tzeo, who offer him a place to live for a time.

After Tzeo's family is killed, investigators learn that Tzeo was separated from his wife and had had an affair. Their first suspect is the former husband of the woman with whom Tzeo had the affair.

But members of the area's Southeast Asia community immediately suspect another motive: opium.

â–* Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.

â–* Richard Gould can be reached in Hickory at rgould@hickoryrecord.com.



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