Murders Twice Linked to Immigration Marriage Fraud in D.C. Area

Twice this year cases of murder have been linked with cases of immigration marriage fraud in the D.C. area.

Over the last weekend we learned that an innocent 12-year-old child had been butchered in May in suburban Maryland as a by-product of a case of immigration fraud.

The girl, Jessica Nguyen, was the child of an alien woman who had paid a citizen, one David Hang, $20,000 to $25,000 for a green-card creating marriage. Later, the child's mother, Khen Kim Vu, had resisted Hang's request for a divorce; Hang then, according to what the police told the Washington Post, killed the girl with a short sword. Hang's lawyer said he had nothing to do with it.

Oddly this is the second local case of a marriage-fraud deal going sour, leading to murder later. To add to the coincidence, in each case the victim was an alien (or an alien's relative) and the alleged murderer or murderers were citizens. Despite fairly thorough coverage on the part of the Post of each event, there was no mention in the most recent story of the earlier one, nor has anyone pointed out the murder-by-citizens angle.

Nor has the Post reported on any immigration-related prosecutions; there may have been none.

In the earlier case, which was described in a blog of mine, the victim of the murder was a pizza-shop operator who had been paying a U.S. citizen "spouse" to marry his brother so that the latter could get a green card. Shababuddin Rana's payments to the citizen, Shanika Robinson, were at the rate of $500 a week until the brother could get his papers.

Rana, however, learned that Robinson was sleeping with someone other than his brother, so he cut off the payments.

Robinson then enlisted her boyfriend and her younger brother, both apparently citizens, wangled their way into the pizza parlor at 4 a.m., then killed Rana and looted the place. The boyfriend pled guilty and the sister and brother were both convicted, in their cases, of first degree murder.

The moral of the story appears to be that immigration fraud can be injurious to your health, but the Post does not make that connection.

Further, it uses the fuzzy term "sham marriage" rather than identifying it as a crime.