Man Sentenced for Killing Mother, Younger Brother

A man convicted of killing his mother and younger brother in the Diamond Bar home the three had once shared was sentenced Wednesday to 40 years to life in state prison.
Jurors found Eric Kwan, now 32, guilty April 2 of first-degree murder for the May 21, 2021, shooting and stabbing death of his brother, Edward Kwan, and found him guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter for stabbing his mother, Loretta Ho, 55, the same day.
Kwan — who testified in his own defense — said he walked into the home and fired gunshots at his sibling, who had yelled, “Die” and pulled out a knife as he passed by his brother’s bedroom. He told jurors he grabbed the knife and was tackled by his mother in the hallway in a scuffle in which she was stabbed as he tried to get her off of him.
“So, were you afraid for your life?” defense attorney David Fujimoto asked the defendant.
“Yes,” Kwan responded.
The defendant said he subsequently thought about what he could do to help his mother and brother, but told jurors he opted against calling police because he didn’t want anyone involved in an illicit marijuana cultivation business at the house to know that he was the one who notified authorities.
Kwan testified that he eventually moved the bodies to another bedroom and folded them into plastic bins because “I got scared that the spirits of my mom and brother would come and attack me.”
He said he began efforts to clean up the killings, saying “I thought their spirits could travel along the blood trails.” He said he also changed the shoes he was wearing because he “felt like something was clinging to me.”
Kwan said he tried to explain to his father what had happened when he arrived at the home, but told jurors that his father “just kept shouting.”
He said he subsequently drove around, threw out the knife because it was “something my brother tried to kill me with” and then returned to the home, where police had been called by his father. Kwan said he subsequently told an investigator that he had killed his mother and brother, but explained that he was protecting himself at the time of the killings.
In her final argument, Deputy District Attorney Laura Uyeno called the killings “a planned ambush” and urged jurors to convict Kwan of first- degree murder for both killings and to find true a special circumstance allegation of multiple murders.
The prosecutor contended that Kwan quietly unlocked the door to the home and that he “knew what he was doing” as he approached his brother’s bedroom as his younger sibling slept and shot him and then “executed his mother” by inflicting 10 sharp force injuries on her as she ran for a phone.
“We don’t have self-defense,” Uyeno said. “There was no threat. Sleeping people are not threats.”
She told jurors in her closing argument that Kwan stabbed his brother eight times as he was dying on the floor after being shot six times and then folded their bodies up like “trash” and dragged them to a back bedroom.
The prosecutor told jurors the defendant thought his brother was evil and that he resented his mother.
“This was not self-defense. This was an ambush,” the deputy district attorney said, adding that he spent weeks — if not months — planning the killings.
Kwan’s attorney countered, “Assassin, Mr. Kwan is not.”
The defense lawyer told jurors that the events happened when his client’s life was “in danger,” and that Kwan had gone through “all sorts of traumatic events as a child” with tensions remaining high as he and his brother were involved in a fight just over a year earlier that resulted in both brothers being taken to separate hospitals by their parents and Kwan moving out of the home he was sharing with his mother and brother.
“Ladies and gentlemen, as you sit here, it was a justified killing. It was self-defense,” Fujimoto told the panel, maintaining that Kwan had “no option but to defend himself.”
“He was engaged in legitimate self-defense for his life,” Kwan’s attorney said. “There was no premeditation.”
The defense lawyer questioned the prosecution’s explanation of how the events likely occurred that day, and said Kwan had bought a gun for protection because of anti-Asian sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic.