NEWMARKET, Ont. – A terrified father found himself staring down the barrel of a gun after a man abruptly woke him in bed and ordered him downstairs, his daughter’s first-degree murder trial heard Tuesday.
The gun held by a stranger that evening in November 2010 was pointed right at his forehead, Hann Pan testified.
“Where is the (expletive) money? Wake up!” Pan said the man barked.
“I was very scared and I was surprised.”
In the family’s TV room, after spotting a second man holding a gun to his daughter on his way downstairs, Pan saw his wife soaking her feet in a small tub after coming home from an evening of line dancing.
A third man had a gun pointed at his wife, 53-year-old Bieh Ha Pan.
“The person who was holding me asked me another question: ‘Where’s the (expletive) money?”‘ Pan said.
“I said the money with me is not much.”
“Liar!” the man said, and struck him on the back of the head with the weapon, Pan testified.
Minutes later, Pan, 60, would be shot in the face; his wife was shot twice in the head. Somehow, he survived. She didn’t.
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Their daughter, Jennifer Pan, 27, her boyfriend Danny Wong, 28, and three other men are each charged with first-degree murder.
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The Crown alleges the young woman orchestrated the hit on her parents – which initially appeared to be a home invasion – because she was angry they had thwarted her relationship with Wong.
She had promised to pay $5,000 for each parent killed from her share of her inheritance, according to the prosecution.
Earlier in the day, Pan testified about an elaborate web of deceit his daughter had spun in the years before the attack.
Glancing impassively at her in the prisoner’s dock, Pan described how she had soaked her parents for thousands of dollars while lying about attending school or work and where she was living.
Among the lies, court heard, were a fake university diploma, a bogus hospital volunteer job, phoney part-time work at a department store complete with fake pay stub, and the fiction that she was rooming with an acquaintance.
Crown lawyer Michelle Rumble elicited that the Pans, who had paid off their home in Markham, Ont., would have left an estate worth about $1 million at the time of the killing.
Their son and daughter stood to inherit the money equally, something his wife had often discussed with their daughter, Pan told the court.
The tool and die maker said he often wanted to query his daughter about her studies but his wife would intercede, arguing the young woman was already a grown up.
“Let her be herself. Too much interference will not be good,” Pan said his wife told him.
The web of lies finally unravelled in 2009, when the suspicious father noted his daughter had no uniform or key-card for the Toronto hospital she said she was volunteering at.
“I was frustrated and I was concerned that something was not right,” Pan told jurors through a Vietnamese interpreter.
When he drove her to the hospital, she bolted and disappeared.
The following morning, after the friend she was apparently rooming with said she was not staying there, Pan came home and confessed:
“Jennifer said that she lied. She did not work at the hospital. Had not graduated from university. My daughter said she was currently living with her boyfriend, Daniel Wong,” Pan testified.
“I was very upset.”
The angry father ordered his daughter to sever her relationship with Wong and return to school.
“He had covered for my daughter to stay out of school for the last four years,” Pan explained.
She apparently agreed.
In the months before the attack, Pan discovered his daughter was still in contact with Wong and again ordered her to cut ties with him.
“If not, you’ll have to wait until I’m dead,” Pan told her.
Also charged in Ontario Superior Court are Eric Carty, Lenford Crawford and David Mylvaganam.
Before she was fatally shot, Pan’s mother repeatedly begged the intruders not to harm her daughter, the Crown alleges.
The trial under Justice Cary Boswell continues Wednesday.
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