Is death penalty likely for mom charged with killing kids? What the prosecutor says

The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office may seek the death penalty against an Upper Makefield mother charged with killing two of her sons and attempting to kill a third person last year.

Bucks County First Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Schorn filed a notice of aggravating circumstances May 31, against Trinh Nguyen, 39, who is accused of the May 2, 2022 shooting deaths of her sons, Jeffrey and Nelson Tini, ages 13 and 9 respectively, and the attempted murder of her ex-husband’s nephew.

The notice must be filed with the court before a defendant is formally arraigned to certify a capital punishment case, and it signals the presence of aggravating circumstances that could result in harsher penalties against a convicted defendant.

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In Pennsylvania, aggravating factors that make a defendant automatically eligible for the death penalty include a killing involving a child under age 12, and multiple killings, which are both present in the Nguyen case.

Nguyen, who waived her right to a preliminary hearing last month, is scheduled to be formally arraigned at the Bucks County Justice Center on Friday. It will be her first court appearance since her arrest.

A trial date has not been scheduled.

A decision on whether the prosecution will pursue the death penalty isn’t expected until sometime after arraignment when prosecutors will get access to discovery material from the defense, said Schorn, who is prosecuting Nguyen.

Prosecutors will typically file notice of a potential death penalty case where there are automatic aggravators present, Schorn said.

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Schorn said her office has also filed notice it may seek the death penalty against a former Bristol Township drug dealer and confidential informant Robert Atkins. He is accused in the 1991 murder of his former neighbor, Joy Hibbs, which remained unsolved until his arrest last year.

Prosecutors will typically seek to preserve the ability to seek the death penalty in cases where there are eligible aggravating factors, but that does not automatically mean it will follow through, Schorn said.

In 2021, the DA certified the murder case against Miles K. Jones, of Philadelphia, who was convicted of murdering two men at the Homestead Family Campgrounds in October 2019.  But the office later dropped its pursuit of the death penalty. Jones is serving life in prison.

There are currently five Bucks County inmates on death row; none are women.

In 2006 prosecutors sought the death penalty against Heather Lavelle, a Bensalem woman convicted in the torture murder of her ex-boyfriend, but ultimately a judge sentenced her to life in prison.

The most recent case where Bucks County prosecutors pursued the death penalty was in 2019 against Jacob Sullivan for the rape, murder and dismemberment of 14-year-old Grace Packer, his girlfriend’s daughter. A jury agreed, but but Sullivan died a year later of a cardiac aneurysm.

Alfonso Sanchez, who was originally convicted and sentenced to death for double murder in 2009, was retried, reconvicted and sentenced to death a second time last month.

Will Trinh Nguyen face death penalty?

Nguyen remains in Bucks County Jail without bail.

Until last month, she had been involuntarily committed to Norristown State Psychiatric Hospital for treatment after she was found to be mentally incompetent shortly after her arrest.

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Prosecutors allege Nguyen shot her sons in their heads as they slept in their rented Timber Ridge Road home. The boys succumbed to their injuries on May 6, 2022.

She was arrested the same day as the shootings in a nearby church parking lot hours after the boys were found by police and the aunt who owns the home.  Authorities said Nguyen had heroin in her system in what police described as a suicide attempt.

Prosecutors have provided no motive for the shootings, which occurred the day before Nguyen was to be evicted from the home for failing to pay more than $11,000 in rent.

Authorities found a handwritten note dated a week before the murders that Nguyen allegedly wrote with information on what to do with her and her sons’ ashes. She also allegedly left a note in the minivan revealing that her sons, both Council Rock District students, were dead and the address of the home with a request to call 911.

Records show that Nguyen was also involved in a custody dispute with her former husband, Edward Tini, of Philadelphia. The couple separated and divorced in 2021 and Tini had opposed Nguyen’s plans to take Nelson to visit her family in Vietnam over summer vacation.

Nguyen had sole custody of Jeffrey Tini, whose father she divorced in 2009. She has a third son, who is 17, and lives on the West Coast with his father, Nguyen’s first husband.

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This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Prosecutors could pursue death penalty for Trinh Nguyen in murder case