A 35-year-old Montgomery County man sentenced to 12 years in prison for a string of home invasions is a Vietnamese immigrant who fell through society’s cracks after his family fled communist persecution in the wake of the American withdrawal.
Hung Tam Lam moved to the United States from a Thai refugee camp when he was 10 years old, court documents said. He was born in February 1975 during the Vietnam War and just two months before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army. Lam’s aunt was an interpreter in the U.S. Embassy, and when the communists took over she and her family were persecuted. The family survived in horrid conditions for 10 years, then fled to Thailand and six months later moved to Montgomery County.
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Earlier this year, Lam admitted to his role in four armed home invasions in which he and others tied up residents and robbed their homes. Their first target was in October 2004 in St. Mary’s County. Lam provided his co-conspirators with information on the house and got a portion of the cash, but he didn’t go with them, he said. He was there, however, when they robbed the home of a beer and wine distributor in Silver Spring on Dec. 10, 2004. They invaded the home of an Asian supermarket owner five days later.
For the next two years, the group was quiet. Then on June 26, 2006, they invaded the Falls Church home of a Laundromat owner, Lam admitted. Lam was arrested in September after authorities linked him to guns stolen in the Falls Church robbery. All told, Lam and his friends stole about $20,000 in cash and loot.
The seeds for the home invasions were planted when Lam was in high school, his attorney argued in court documents. Lam couldn’t speak English well, and found school and making friends difficult. He fell in with a gang that called itself “Vietnamese Pride.”
“From his high school years onward, underneath a facade of a tough guy enjoying a great deal of popularity among his peers, there was a very insecure individual,” Lam’s psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Leung, wrote in an assessment. The only support group Lam had was “mostly composed of young criminals and drug addicts of the not-so-glorified side of the Vietnamese community in the Washington, D.C., area.”
