Police say at about 7:00 PM,
three men burst into the business.
Their motive was robbery,
but it soon turned into murder.
It was one of those seeds you don't
forget because there's wailing involved.
The store has been ransacked,
the cash register and stuff like that.
It appears that it's been a
robbery that that went bad.
You know, my recollection is
that the the cash drawers ajar.
He's down obviously injured plenty
of people helping him already,
but the main thing for me is,
is to preserve for what
possible evidence we have.
You never forget it.
It's you reverberating out
of the store into the alley,
and it's just a sound
that you never, ever forget
because you know that's that's
the sound of guttural human pain.
You know, when you know your community,
they always say you're more
connected to your community.
And that was the case with me in grocery.
In 1995, man is in his 30s and he says
that immediately he was very confident
that Kim's killer would be caught.
The problem he describes is that
witnesses immediately went quiet.
Nobody wanted to talk to police.
This is just terrible,
very nice gentleman, very polite,
two types of people, those who love
the police and won't talk to them,
and those who hate the police and won't
talk to them. The Kim family was very
well known in what was then referred
to as the Tacoma Portland Ave Corridor
Mine Grocery is still there today.
The old sign is still there.
It is under new ownership as we found out.
It's a family that over the last
couple of decades had at least two
bouts with very serious crime.
The name of the robbery
suspect has not been released.
My mom pointed to the guy
that was driving away.
That's when I fired.
That's 15 year old min.
Kim Jong Nam. Kim son.
He's speaking to KING5 in 1988.
That's seven years before
his father is murdered.
Pretty amazing story.
The teenager.
He actually stops a robbery in progress.
His mother was tending to
soar when armed men came in.
He grabbed his father's rifle,
chased them out of the main
grocery store shooting and.
Hitting one of the robbers, I feel.
They did the right thing.
My mom was out there and the
guy had a gun out the window,
so she would probably got
hurt if I wasn't out there.
Store regulars, men and women
that knew the Kim family,
will tell you that not much has
changed since the mid 80s, the 90s.
They say that the neighborhood
is pretty much the same.
Everybody's getting murdered and not
getting investigated these days.
It's like nobody cares anymore.
It's gotten worse. It's gotten,
I mean only it's comma. What goes on
here stays here. But it's gotten worser.
KING5 made several attempts to contact
the Kim family about this case.
Though they're silence makes
it clear that they want to
move on and close this chapter.
Yeah, just the introduction one more time. OK
Fernando, who was one of the
first police officers on scene.
It's clear that this case is very much.
Still alive in his dreams and
in his nightmares, it's just
horrible to see a hard working
family make a business succeed
and then to have the street level
creatures take that all away from them.
It's the opposite of the
the so-called American dream.