‘A senseless and selfish act’: Judge sentences couple who murdered neighbour, discarded body over BBQ smoke

A Liberty Village couple has been handed stiff sentences for killing their upstairs neighbour, disposing of the neighbour’s body in the garbage and trying to cover-up the killing in the weeks that followed.

Khoa Tran, 36, has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 16 years after being found guilty last June of the second-degree murder of 53-year-old Reeyaz Habib .

Tran’s wife, 30-year-old Quynh (Isabelle) Nguyen, has been sentenced to six years in prison after being found guilty of accessory after the fact to manslaughter and offering an indignity to a dead body.

Superior Court Justice Philip Campbell rejected defence lawyer Tyler Smith’s suggestion that a conditional sentence for Nguyen would be appropriate. Smith argued that because Nguyen is not a Canadian citizen, a custodial sentence over six months would mean almost immediate deportation back to Vietnam.

Campbell said in his reasons for sentence that a conditional sentence would be entirely unfit and in no way proportionate to the gravity of her offences, calling Nguyen’s actions “truly despicable.”

In June 2023, Tran and Nguyen owned a condo on the main floor of a Liberty Village complex at 26 Western Battery Way. Linh Hua, a longtime friend of the couple, was staying with them at the time.

In a townhouse unit directly above the couple’s condo lived Habib, a filmmaker, who lived alone.

During the five-week trial, court heard Tran liked to barbecue in his backyard however smoke from the barbecue travelled up into the windows of Habib.

Tran and Habib had a number of discussions about Tran’s barbecue smoke and Habib told Tran he repeatedly didn’t want the barbecue smoke coming upstairs into his unit.

Habib also told Tran he knew he was involved in some type of sexual relationship with Hua and said he was going to report to the condominium board that Tran and his wife were in violation of the condominium board rules by permitting Hua to live with them.

The Crown argued that in the early morning hours of June 6, 2023, Tran went upstairs into Habib’s unit while he slept and killed him. Many neighbours heard screams from the direction of Habib’s condominium.

In the days that followed, Habib was not seen and concerns about his whereabouts began to grow. Police entered the unit and discovered that someone had nailed blankets over the window and carefully cleaned the apartment,

Furthermore, after the killing of Habib, but before his body was discovered, a concerned neighbour saw Tran leaving Habib’s unit, locking the door and entering his own unit.

Tran was also captured on video surveillance cameras disposing of Habib’s bike and computer into a nearby above ground dumpster.

“A few days after he’d been killed, a dead, decomposing body of Mr. Habib was gratuitously found wrapped in blankets and taped up with handles in a trash compactor in an underground garbage dumpster. Handwritten notes describing the contents as trash were attached to the body. One of these notes disclosed the fingerprint of Mr. Tran,” said Campbell.

The judge noted that had the body not been discovered by the worker responsible for the trash compactor, the dead body of Habib would have been compacted as if it were trash and likely transported to the compost site likely never to be found again.

The taped handles, made with duct tape and attached to the wrapping, also revealed the combination of Habib, Tran and Nguyen’s DNA.

“In short, as the jury could have only have reasonably concluded the two accused sought to cover up the killing of Mr. Habib by Mr. Tran by disposing of his dead body in the trash,” said Campbell.

A cause of death was undetermined because the body was significantly decomposed. A forensic pathologist testifed that Habib had suffered 35 external injuries including 24 prior to his death and said some of the internal injuries were consistent with being beaten to death or, in some way, strangled.

Campbell found that there were elements of planning given that on the night of the killing Nguyen knew her husband’s plan to go upstairs and kill Habib.

The judge pointed out that the couple invited Hua to sleep in the bedroom instead of a mattress on the living room floor where she normally slept, so that Tran could work in the living room.

Hua heard loud footsteps and someone yelling help from upstairs around 3 a.m., but Nguyen told her to just ignore the noises and to go back to sleep, telling her Habib was likely filming upstairs.

“Of course, these comments were nonsense. They had discussed what to say so she would not worry,” said Campbell who pointed out that Nguyen was clearly interested in avoiding arrest for her husband’s killing and became an accessory after the fact.

The judge also pointed out that Nguyen told Hua to tell police, if they asked, that all three were sleeping together in the bedroom thus creating an alibi for Tran.

“Mr. Tran decided to kill Habib in order to end his consistent and bothersome interference with the way the accused used the barbecue and to prevent Mr. Habib from making a complaint with the Liberty Village condominium board that the accused had a third party living with them in their condo unit in contravention to the condo rules,” said Campbell.

The judge called the murder “a senseless murder of a good man” who was discarded following his death like a piece of garbage in order to hide the senseless murder.

“The killing of Mr. Habib was a senseless and selfish act by Mr. Tran that had devastating consequences for his family and friends,” said Campbell.

Campbell said after Tran callously decided to kill Habib, he further sought to distance himself from the killing by carefully cleaning the scene and cover it up by disposing of the body.

The judge was equally scathing in his criticism of Nguyen saying that not only did she help dispose the body like a piece of garbage, but over an extended period of time, she tried to help her husband avoid prosecution and the arrest for his murder of Habib.

“These were callous and selfish acts taken to shield and protect her husband, the murderer,” said Campbell.

Campbell also noted that neither accused have expressed an instant of remorse or regret saying “they both declined to speak” when given a chance at their sentencing hearing in court, which the judge said was an “absence of a mitigating factor.”

Nguyen did, in fact, address court at the sentencing hearing saying, “I just want to say I am sorry to take the court time and money. I feel sorry for the family loss.”

The couple who were out on custody until the day of the guilty verdict when their bail was revoked have spent 146 days in pre-sentence custody. After enhanced credit for pre-sentence custody, Nguyen has five years and four-and-a-half months left to serve.