Dr. Haing S. Ngor endured unspeakable torture in life, only to suffer ignominious death in the dilapidated carport of a Chinatown slum, his blood spilling for the last time across a concrete slab stained with motor oil.
His blood had spilled many times before, across the killing fields of his native Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge tortured and maimed him, and killed the only woman he ever loved and their unborn child.He won an Academy Award for the 1984 film "The Killing Fields," but he wasn't really acting in Hollywood's first look at Cambodia's rule by genocide under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Last Sunday about 8:45 p.m., someone pumped two .38-caliber bullets into Ngor. No one, save the killer, seems to know if it was assassination or random murder.
In this neighborhood, where purses are yanked off shoulders at midday and people live behind bars, few, including the police, are talking.
Detective John Garcia said robbery doesn't appear to be the motive. "But I'm not going to say whether it was or it wasn't. We're still working it," Garcia said.
Police questioned postal carrier Deborah Spigner on her Chinatown route, where Ngor lived in a shabby apartment behind a battered screen door and water-stained drapes.
"The detective said he didn't think it was robbery. The man's pockets hadn't even been gone through," she said.
Spigner wasn't surprised neighbors said they saw nothing the night of Ngor's murder. Few of them speak English, and most know only too well that death is easily delivered.
But in the dense configuration of apartments on Beaudry Avenue, where any number of windows look directly onto Ngor's open carport, it would be hard not to notice two shots ringing out.
"Our biggest problem is the cultural thing," Garcia said. "We had to get a crash course on what's going on today in Cambodia."
Overthrown in 1979 by Vietnamese communists, the Khmer Rouge now have an estimated force of 5,000, mostly in northwestern pockets of Cambodia, where they have declared war on the government that came to power in 1994.
Ngor's brother thinks they may be responsible for his death.
"He often told me that Khmer Rouge people in the United States were unhappy with his activities against them," said Chan Sarun, a director of forestry at the Ministry of Agriculture in Cambodia.
Though he had an Oscar, wrote an autobiography and earned good money from film and television roles, Ngor disdained Hollywood life and spent most of his last years in Cambodia.
There, he oversaw the humanitarian Haing S. Ngor Foundation and operated a small sawmill that provided jobs. He also built an elementary school.
Stateside, Ngor had many Cambodian friends and relentlessly raised funds for Cambodian aid. Yet he was a very private man who never remarried and rarely spoke of any woman besides his wife, friends said.
Police asked friend and distant relative Thommy Nou, a Long Beach businessman, if Ngor was involved in anything political.
"He tried to claim peace. That's all I know. I never heard anything about any politics," Nou said.
Ngor spent the last day of his life with Nou. They watched basketball, discussed Ngor's recent trip to Cambodia, went to dinner, had a few beers. "He was happy," Nou said.
About 8 p.m., Ngor left for the 25-mile ride home.
In English still rough around the edges, Nou struggled to describe his loss.
"He do good thing for me, I do good thing for him," Nou recalled. "He try to help my children, to keep them away from gangs, from crime, to tell them we build new life here. He told them to be in the top 10 of people, such as doctor, lawyer."
Although no longer famous by Hollywood standards, Ngor was a hero to Southeast Asians. In Long Beach, home to 50,000 Cambodians, the United Cambodian Community Center opened a 10-day memorial to Ngor last week.
"It is a great loss," center Director Sovann Tith said. "He is the man who brought the suffering of Cambodia to the world."
Ngor won the supporting-actor Oscar for portraying Dith Pran, a real-life Cambodian assistant to Sydney Schanberg, then a New York Times reporter covering the war that engulfed Cambodia and Vietnam.
Dith, now a Times photographer, was trapped when the Khmer Rouge killed their way to power in 1975. So was Ngor, an obstetrician with a lucrative practice.