The King County Superior Court sentenced a 54-year-old Kent man on Aug. 23 to 18 years in prison in the October 2022 scissor-stabbing murder of his wife.

Hong Tien Pham, 54, pleaded guilty one month previously on July 23 to a charge of murder in the second degree for the stabbing death, with scissors, of his wife, 48-year-old Thuyen Thi Hoang, at the family’s Kent residence.

According to an affidavit of probable cause, responding to a welfare check on Oct. 6, 2022, Kent police discovered Hoang lying flat on her back on the ground in the master bedroom with “blood splatter all over the walls and on the carpet.” In the bedroom near Hoang, officers located a pair of bloody scissors.

Officers found Hoang and Pham’s 10-year-old daughter at the scene after she stepped out from her bedroom.

An autopsy of Hoang found two stab wounds on the right side of her neck, one lacerating her jugular vein, and numerous stab wounds to her chest and right arm.

Kent police arrested Pham at the scene without incident. According to the affidavit, in an interview with police following his arrest, Pham “cried almost the entire time.”

“I know what I did was wrong,” he said in the interview.

“[Pham] said if he could take a pill and be dead in two or three minutes, he would have done this,” the affidavit stated. “[Pham] continued by saying he knew what he did was wrong, and God and Buddha would not forgive him.”

King County prosecutors charged Pham with murder in the second degree the following day on Oct. 7.

On July 23, 2024, Pham pleaded guilty to Hoang’s murder.

At his sentencing, Judge Kristin Ballinger sentenced Pham to 18 years and four months in confinement — in the custody of the Department of Corrections — in addition to three years of community custody following his release.

A victim advocate served as present at the sentencing on behalf of Hoang’s surviving family members.

According to the obituary for Hoang from the Greenwood Memorial Park and Funeral Home in Renton, Hoang was an immigrant from Vietnam.

Judge Ballinger ordered Pham to have no contact with his daughter — now 12 years old — until her 18th birthday in 2030.