Phi Huu Nguyen was 56 years old when he died on Wednesday, July 29, 2020, in the Florence neighborhood of South Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died after being stabbed near 822 E. 76th Place. His death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles Police Department case, assigned to the department's South Bureau Homicide detectives.
The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report recorded his death in a single sentence drawn from coroner's records. It described him as "a 56-year-old Asian male" who "died Wednesday, July 29, after being stabbed near 822 E. 76th Place in Florence." The entry gave a street address, but it did not say whether that was his home, a workplace, the home of someone he knew or simply the place where he was found. No follow-up story appears to have been written about his death.
Beyond his name, his age and the place where he died, almost nothing about Phi Huu Nguyen has been made public.
No obituary, memorial page or family fundraiser could be found for this story, and no news outlet appears to have reported on the death. He surely had family, friends or neighbors who remember who he was, but none of that has entered the public record. Nguyen is one of the most common family names in the world, and Phi Nguyen is shared by many people in California and across the country, including a civil rights lawyer in Georgia. None of them can be connected to the man who died on 76th Place.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public. The record does not say whether he was stabbed during a fight or a robbery, attacked by a stranger or by someone he knew, or hurt indoors or on the street. It does not say what time of day he was hurt, whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital, whether anyone saw what happened, or whether investigators ever identified a suspect.
Florence is a neighborhood in South Los Angeles, named for Florence Avenue, which runs east and west through the area. It is made up largely of modest single-family homes and small apartment buildings on numbered streets, with corner stores, churches and small businesses along the main corridors. It borders the unincorporated community of Florence-Firestone to the east. The neighborhood has long been a working-class area. A middle-aged man stabbed on a residential street there would likely have been noticed by someone.
Los Angeles recorded about 260 homicides a year in 2018 and 2019, among the lowest yearly totals in more than half a century, yet many of those killings still went unsolved.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Phi Huu Nguyen could be found in news archives or public records. More than five years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who knew a 56-year-old man named Phi Huu Nguyen, or who lived on or near East 76th Place in Florence in July 2020, may hold information that could help. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a vehicle seen nearby or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
