“There were guys and girls hitting her,” a woman tells a dispatcher in a frantic 9-1-1 call from outside The Crosby nightclub in Santa Ana on Jan. 18, when 23-year-old Kim Pham sustained the vicious beating that took her life.
The dispatcher had just asked why the woman on the ground was lifeless after the witness reported, “There's a fight right here off Broadway and 4th Street. There's a girl that's unconscious.”
The Santa Ana Police Department just released audio of the emergency call to the media.
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Here is the version KNBC4 posted on its site:
Key points:
* After the dispatcher informs that paramedics are on their way, the witness who would later identify herself as “Priscilla” says of Pham, “She's breathing now. She just took a deep breath.”
* The people who beat up Pham are reported to be “Asian men and women. … They were probably 23 or 24.” Murder defendants Vanesa Tapia Zavala, 25, and Candace Marie Brito, 27, are Latinas.
* Priscilla said club security took off after those who beat Pham and ran onto Fourth Street heading toward Main Street.
* She did not know either group involved in the fight and did not see the actual beating, having just exited the club. (Making one wonder how she knew their ages, sexes and nationalities, hmmm …) Priscilla explains she took the cell phone of one of Pham's sobbing friends and called 9-1-1.
* About halfway through the 5:37-minute call, Priscilla says Pham is “OK” and “breathing.” She describes the victim as about 23, Vietnamese and named Kim (all correct; it should be noted you could hear people in the background providing some details to Priscilla).
* “One of the security guards picked her up and she pissed herself,” Priscilla reports near the end of the call. “I don't know if that matters. She's still breathing.”
* No security guards stayed with Pham. “They didn't even know what to do, they didn't even know what to do,” Priscilla repeats.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.