Bucks County woman sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for killing her sons last year

An Upper Makefield woman who killed her two young sons and attempted to kill her nephew last year was sentenced Wednesday to two consecutive life sentences in prison.

Prosecutors said that Trinh Nguyen, 40, had given into her “simmering rage” over her divorce and pending eviction, and had planned to execute her children and kill herself to enact revenge against the people she blamed for her misfortune.

But Nguyen’s attorney said that her client had long suffered from declining mental health, the result of a childhood filled with abuse.

Both sides brokered a guilty plea to two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder that spared Nguyen from the death penalty, a decision that First Assistant District Attorney Jen Schorn said was made with the approval of the victims’ family.

Bucks County Court Judge Raymond McHugh accepted the plea, expressing sympathy for the family and also disbelief at what had transpired on May 2, 2022.

“This is a crime that I don’t think anyone can understand,” McHugh said. “It was for the wrong purpose, and it shows a true hardness of heart and wickedness of disposition.”

Nguyen shot her sons, Jeffrey and Nelson Tini, 13 and 9, in the head as they slept in their beds. Investigators said Nguyen had planned her sons’ deaths at least a week in advance, editing her will to include instructions on what to do with their ashes and hers.

A year before the murders, Nguyen and her husband, Ed Tini, had gone through a hotly contested divorce, in which he accused her of being a “flight risk,” fearful she would take their sons to Vietnam for a planned vacation and never return.

Nguyen and her sons were set to be evicted the day before the shooting from their half of the duplex they shared with Corrina Tini-Melchiondo, Tini’s sister. Court records showed that Nguyen owed her former sister-in-law more than $11,000 in unpaid rent, and that Tini-Melchiondo had accused her of being abusive and harassing.

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In what Schorn described as a “manifesto” discovered after the murders, Nguyen raged against her ex-husband and his sister, saying they had mistreated her.

“I’m still in this prison cell because of him,” Nguyen wrote of her ex-husband, according to evidence presented in court. “This is the only way I can free my children. This is the only way I can free myself.”

Tini-Melchiondo said Wednesday that Nguyen had caused thousands of dollars in damage in her home leading up to the eviction, including damaging its septic system. And while she said that Nguyen was initially a caring and loving mother, she clearly had a dark side.

“Behind her meek exterior is a calculating, destructive individual who would do anything to get what she wants,” she said.

Nguyen’s attorney, Deborah Weinman, told McHugh that Nguyen had suffered from years of trauma, starting in her childhood in Vietnam. She had been forced into an arranged marriage when she was 18, and sent to America where she didn’t speak the language or know anyone.

When that first marriage failed — after she gave birth to her oldest son and Jeffrey — she met Tini. And when that second marriage failed, Weinman said, she experienced great shame and embarrassment.

“Her mental health declined to such a point, she became so depressed, she felt the only way to be free was to end her life,” Weinman said. “And she believed the only way to save her kids was to take them with her.”

As Nguyen fled the house after the shootings, she encountered her nephew, Gianni Melchiondo, who was preparing to leave for work.

He found Nguyen on the front lawn, holding a box of photos. She asked Melchiondo if he would take the photos to her ex-husband, who works with him, investigators said. Melchiondo agreed, and when he took the photos from Nguyen, authorities said, she pulled out a Ruger .38-caliber revolver that she owned, aimed it at him, and pulled the trigger twice.

The gun did not fire, and Melchiondo was able to wrestle it away from Nguyen, who then fled in her minivan, Schorn said. The Ruger was functioning and loaded at the time, but because Nguyen had disposed of the two empty shell casings from the shots she fired at her sons, the gun misfired.

Melchiondo, in a statement he read in court Wednesday, said he still suffers from anxiety and depression from his near-fatal encounter. He wonders what would have happened had he been unable to take the gun away from Nguyen.

“I’m at peace with God,” he said, “and I know she’ll have to face him when the time comes.”

After fleeing, Nguyen drove to New Jersey to buy heroin, then headed to the parking lot of a church near her Upper Makefield home, prosecutors said. There, unfamiliar with drugs, she ingested it by dissolving it in water and drinking it. She hastily scrawled a note, saying “Please call 911! My children are Dead in their bed” and giving her address.

Police arrived in time to take Nguyen to a nearby hospital. Her sons, meanwhile, remained on life support for four days until their organs could be donated through the Gift of Life program.

After Nguyen was sentenced, Schorn said Tini and his family could continue the difficult journey of healing.

“This day was a long time coming for this family,” she said.