Cafe owners reveal reason behind kidnapping
Two café owners say they were provoked into kidnapping a former employee and holding him for ransom.
The owners say they abducted the man after catching him with his hand in the till.
Popular Vietnamese restaurant Mama Hong’s on Sydney’s lower north shore was owned by Dominic Tran and married couple Nathan Yeung and Ann Ngo.
Tran was sentenced in the NSW District Court last month.
Yeung and Tran found their former kitchen hand trying to take money out of the register after they were alerted to a break-in in 2022.
The kitchen hand used a copy of the café keys over a two-week period to steal $2500.
Yeung and Tran caught the man and assaulted him, before tying his hands with cable ties, cutting his hair and further assaulting him. They then shoved him into a car, picked up Ngo and drove to the victim’s mother’s house to demand their money back.
Ngo told police they had hoped to “resolve it, you know, without having to go to the police”.
As his mother wasn’t home, they forced the victim to call her.
“He has taken a lot of money. If he don’t (sic) give it back, I will take him to the police now,” Ngo told her.
The mother agreed to pay and asked for video footage. The owners then sent bank details and a CCTV image.
The victim spent three days in hospital.
Yeung and Ngo were sentenced by the NSW District Court in June last year.
“My Yeung acknowledged his actions were impulsive, reckless, and disproportionate to the situation,” Judge Andrew Scotting said.
The judge took into account several glowing references.
“All of the references described the offending as out of character,” Judge Scotting acknowledged.
The court found the kidnapping had been an “unplanned and spontaneous response to the victim stealing” and noted Yeung and Ngo were living with post-traumatic stress disorder at the time.
“The victim provoked the offenders by abusing their trust and taking advantage of them on multiple occasions,” he said.
“I am satisfied the offenders would not have committed the offences absent this serious provocation.”
Judge Scotting took their remorse into consideration.
“They have learnt a significant lesson from the events and they are unlikely to offend again,” he said.
Yeung was sentenced to an intensive corrections order lasting one year and nine months.
Ngo was handed a 10-month intensive corrections order and has already completed her sentence.
Tran was last month sentenced in the NSW District Court over his role and was given a 15-month community corrections order.
Jonathan Jackson, 14th May 2024
