Thirty-five years after four gunmen stormed the Good Guys electronics store on Stockton Boulevard in south Sacramento, survivors say they still replay the sights, sounds and split-second decisions from that spring afternoon. On April 4, 1991, roughly 40 employees and customers were held at gunpoint for about eight and a half hours, until a chaotic rescue effort around 10 p.m. left six people dead and more than a dozen wounded.
Former manager Chris Lauritzen, salesman Al Bodnar and other survivors have recently shared fresh details about what they saw and thought inside the store, while 911 dispatchers who fielded whispered calls from people hiding in closets say they can still hear those voices. Those interviews and recollections were gathered into a new retrospective as the city marked the milestone, according to The Sacramento Bee.
How the Siege Unfolded
Shortly after 1 p.m. on April 4, 1991, four young men walked into the Good Guys and quickly turned an ordinary shopping trip into a live-television crisis. They took roughly 40 people hostage, demanded a helicopter and cash, and spent hours negotiating by phone with law enforcement. The standoff played out in real time on local and national newscasts and dragged into the night before a police assault finally ended it. Contemporaneous reporting describes the siege as one of the largest hostage-rescue operations ever carried out on U.S. soil, with Los Angeles Times coverage detailing the long negotiations and massive law enforcement response.
Who the Gunmen Were
Investigators later identified the attackers as brothers Loi Khac Nguyen, Pham Khac Nguyen and Long Khac Nguyen, along with their friend Cuong Tran, all in their late teens or early 20s. Authorities said some of the firearms used in the takeover had been legally purchased in the weeks leading up to the attack, and negotiators reported a string of unusual demands from the group as the hours ticked by. Names, approximate ages and those demands were laid out in wire service accounts at the time, as reported by UPI.
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