Sacto 9-1-1

By Kim Minugh
kminugh@sacbee.com

Details began to emerge in court today about the reaches to which Chu Vue went in trying to find information about his wife's lover before he allegedly arranged for the man's murder.

He asked a colleague at the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department to run a license plate - which came back to correctional officer Steve Lo - under the ruse that the car had nearly run him down, according to testimony. He searched the man's name in law enforcement databases, and even consulted a store owner he thought was part of Lo's Hmong clan, seeking information about Lo, testimony showed.

Vue, who is no longer employed by the Sheriff's Department, is on trial for the Oct. 15, 2008 fatal shooting of Lo. Police and prosecutors allege that he hired two of his brothers - Gary and Chong Vue - to kill Lo because he was having an affair with Vue's wife.

Chu Vue is on trial with co-defendant and cousin Lang Vue, who is accused of aiding and abetting Gary and Chong Vue - who at the time were wanted for murder out of Minnesota - before and after the killing.

Gary and Chong Vue have since been convicted of the Minnesota murder, and will stand trial for Lo's murder separately.

Now in the trial's second week, Deputy District Attorney Eric Kindall covered a variety of topics today with nearly a dozen witnesses, including a sheriff's crime scene investigator that testified he ran a license plate for Chu Vue after the deputy said a car nearly hit him outside of a gym.

"I remember I saw the name," CSI Van Truong said of the vehicle's registered owner. "It was an Asian name."

Department of Justice records later confirmed it was Lo's license plate that Vue had asked him to run.

Truong testified that when he read about Lo's fatal shooting in the newspaper, he "made the connection" to the earlier incident with Vue and notified supervisors, who then called Sacramento police homicide detectives.

Tony Lao, who owns a market on Rio Linda Boulevard, testified that Vue once stopped in to ask if Lao knew Lo, saying he had a friend in Fresno who wanted to become a correctional officer and might benefit from talking with Lo. Vue indicated the men might know each other, Lao testified, because he thought they were part of the same Hmong clan. Lao did not know Lo, and never heard from Vue again, he said in court.

Kevin Paltzer, a senior information technology analyst for the Sheriff's Department, testified about records showing Vue had accessed law enforcement databases to run variations of the name "Steve Lo" in a number of searches spanning August and September 2008.

Vue was fired from the Sheriff's Department after he failed to cooperate with an internal affairs investigation stemming from those allegations.

As the day's testimony reached an end, Sacramento Police Officer Anne Marie Howland began discussing the "hundreds of hours" she and a handful of officers spent reviewing surveillance footage from a camera owned by one of Lo's neighbors.

Some of that video will be shown in court Tuesday, and, based on previous statements by police and prosecutors, is likely to show footage of Vue casing the neighborhood.

Also covered in today's testimony:

- The renting of Sacramento hotel rooms by Lang Vue and Chu Vue's sister, Allyssa Vue, who already has pleaded out in the case. The prosecution suspects those rooms were rented for Chu Vue's wanted brothers.

- The purchase of a black sports utility vehicle, possibly by Lang Vue and another man.

- Chu Vue's sudden closure of a bank account after he purchased a cashier's check for more than $10,000. According to Bank of America records shown in court today, that money came largely from two cash advanced Vue took from credit cards. Testimony showed only that the cashier's check was later deposited into a different bank account.

- Allegations from a man who did work for a man named "John" - identified in court as Chu Vue - that Vue had refused to pay him, saying he didn't have to pay because "I'm a sheriff." Jose Escamilla testified he had done work for Vue on a mobile home in Corning that prosecutors allege housed Gary and Chong Vue while they were on the run from Minnesota authorities.