‘I’ll never forget’: Good Guys hostage crisis in south Sacramento 30 years later
Some of the memories have faded in the past 30 years, but graphic images are still vivid in his mind as he remembers that 8½-hour standoff with hostage-takers at the Good Guys electronics store in south Sacramento.
The faces of frightened hostages tied-up in the store, the live TV coverage that was broadcast every minute of the crisis to a captivated national audience and the aftermath of the deadly shootout. Those images are still fresh in the mind of retired Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness.
“There are things about that day, if I live to be 100, I’ll never forget,” McGinness said about the hostage crisis at the store on April 4, 1991. “I remember that right now like it was yesterday.”
McGinness was working as a deputy at the Fair Oaks courthouse building that day, when he and other deputies were called to respond to the initial report of an armed robbery at the Good Guys store at 7020 Stockton Boulevard, just south of 65th Street near the Florin Mall.
Heading to the store, McGinness had no idea how this afternoon armed robbery would unfold to become the largest hostage-rescue event in U.S. history. By the end, three hostages and three gunmen would be dead and 10 people would be wounded.
“They had the ammunition, the willingness and the guns,” McGinness said of the four suspects. “Nobody in (the store) was in the position to defend themselves.”
Suspects entered and fired guns in the store
It began about 1:30 p.m., when brothers Loi Nguyen, 24; Long Nguyen, 17; Pham Nguyen, 19; and friend Cuong Tran, 19, entered the store with three 9mm pistols and a pump-style shotgun. They began firing shots in the store.
Good Guys employee David Risse heard what sounded like firecrackers coming from the front of the store. He called 911, and 39 people were now trapped inside.
After the gunmen took over the store, sheriff’s deputies surrounded the area as the hostage-takers began demanding a helicopter, more weapons and body armor and millions of dollars.
McGinness called the gunmen “naive” young men with an unchecked bravado who wanted authorities to deliver a helicopter to fly them back to Vietnam. He wishes now that the suspects had been older men who perhaps could be convinced to surrender through reasoning and negotiation.
He said the suspects had parked outside the store and bizarrely locked their own car’s steering wheel with “The Club” anti-theft device before walking into a store armed with guns, taking hostages and demanding a flight to Southeast Asia.
“These were not sophisticated criminals by any stretch of the imagination,” the former sheriff said. “There was a huge law enforcement presence surrounding the place. They were not going to walk out of there free.”
McGinness remembers getting on the roof of the store with a team of deputies to get a view of the area from above and make sure the suspects didn’t trying to escape through a rear door.
Good Guys hostage crisis captured on live TV
The parking lot filled with TV news satellite trucks to provide live coverage of the hostage crisis. Cameras were focused on the store, as well as on the deputies maneuvering outside.
“It looked like the Super Bowl in the parking lot, you had every live truck out there,” McGinness said. “ It was a live stage. It pre-empted all the soap operas. There were televisions on all the walls. Everywhere (the suspects) looked, they could see what we were doing outside.”
Sheriff’s officials aimed rifles at the plate-glass doors at the store’s front entrance. McGinness said the hostage-takers, meanwhile, watched themselves on the rows of television screens inside.
McGinness says he also remembers SWAT team members who crawled into small, uncomfortable spaces in the building for the duration of the crisis before they were called to intercede. Then-Sheriff Glen Craig had sent a seven-person SWAT team in through the roof to wait for the signal to move in.
As the hours passed, sheriff’s officials reluctantly accepted the reality that the siege at the Good Guys store would not end well, McGinness said.
“The odds were against everyone getting out of there safely,” McGinness said.
At one point, sheriff’s Sgt. Bob Lyons stripped to his underwear to deliver a bulletproof vest to the front of the store in exchange for the release of a woman and two young children.
“Initially I thought it was a robbery gone bad and that there were few hostages — until they fired a shot to show how serious they were and I heard women and children scream in the background,” Sgt. Gerald R. Gomez, who negotiated in the first hours, told The Sacramento Bee in 1994. “I realized it was a lot greater than what we thought.”
Communication was difficult because the suspects spoke little English. Detective Bob Currie took over negotiations and, shortly after, another female hostage and three young girls were released. A middle-aged man was released around 8 p.m.
Negotiations stalled after authorities refused to deliver more bulletproof vests, afraid that the vests would make the hostage-takers feel invulnerable. By 9 p.m., most of the hostages were bound with speaker wire. Store employee Sean McIntyre was shot in the leg and sent out to ask authorities to give in to the gunmen’s demands.
Crisis ends in deadly shootout
By 10 p.m., hostage Priscila Alvarez, who had been tethered to the store entrance with speaker wire, was sent to retrieve a vest. McGinness said he remembers seeing her tied-up and was filled with “heartache” for her and the other innocent victims held hostage that day.
As she emerged, a sheriff’s sniper took a shot at a gunman inside the store. But the heavy glass door slammed shut. The bullet hit the door and shattered the glass, sending a gunman running down a line of hostages as he fired at them. The SWAT team rushed in as other deputies rushed the front doors.
Store employees Kris Sohne and John Lee Fritz, and customer Fernando Gutierrez died in the siege. Three gunmen, Pham Nguyen, Long Nguyen and Cuong Tran, were killed.
Loi Khac Nguyen was wounded but survived and later was sentenced to 49 consecutive life terms in prison. He is now 51 and serving his sentence at California State Prison, Solano in Vacaville.
McGinness remembers walking into the store in the aftermath of the shooting and seeing the bodies of the dead gunmen. It was an eerie feeling to see the bodies of the young suspects who had terrorized and hurt so many and shut down a large shopping complex for several hours.
He said he felt that same strange feeling walking into the store a year-and-half later to respond to a reported shoplifting. The store is no longer there. The chain that took over Good Guys, CompUSA, shut the store in 2005. The location is now home to a Dollar Tree store.
“It could’ve been so much worse,” McGinness said about the number of people killed and injured that day. “The suspects were equipped with the resources and the capacity for extreme violence.”
This story was originally published April 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
