LOS ANGELES — Three decades before he shot 11 people to death in a Monterey Park ballroom, Huu Can Tran told police he believed relatives of a woman he’d been dating had threatened to kill him and were trying to lure him into a trap.
Tran’s suspicions — which were apparently groundless — were laid out in documents obtained by The Times from the San Gabriel Police Department. The records provide some insight into what appears to be his paranoid worldview. Just this month, authorities said, he went twice to the police station in Hemet, where he’d moved into a trailer park, and claimed his family had defrauded and tried to poison him.
Twelve days later, Tran, 72, opened fire in Star Ballroom Dance Studio on Garvey Avenue, killing 11 people on the eve of the Lunar New Year. He killed himself the next day as police closed in on his van in a Torrance strip mall.
