On September 3, 1998, Khoua Her called 911 from her apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota, and said she had killed her children. When the first responders arrived they found her lying just inside the doorway in a ceremonial red dress, an extension cord tied around her neck. Her six children lay dead in rooms around the apartment, strangled: Kouaeai Hang, eleven; Samson, nine; Nali, eight or nine; Tang Lung, seven; Aee, six; and Tang Ke, five. There were three boys and three girls, and their names appear in the records in several spellings.
She was twenty-four. She was born in Laos on December 31, 1973, and grew up in a refugee camp in Thailand, where by twelve she had been raped and married; she had her first child at thirteen. She and her husband had all six children and moved to St. Paul before she turned twenty-one. Between 1996 and 1998 the police were called to the home at least sixteen times for domestic incidents. By 1998 she was estranged from her husband and raising the six alone, in poverty. A woman who knew her said she loved her children but was depressed by how much responsibility she carried.
Her public defender, Bruce Wenger, said she had decided to kill herself and did not want to leave her children without anyone to care for them. "She strangled her children to put them in heaven because she believed as a Christian that they were going to go straight to heaven," he said. Once she had decided, he said, she called them to her one at a time and strangled each with a strip of black cloth.
Hundreds of mourners came to the children's burial at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Maplewood on September 14. A state psychiatric evaluation found her competent, and she was arraigned on six counts of second-degree murder; Wenger entered not guilty pleas and began preparing a mental illness defense. He feared that a jury, seeing her as evil, could give her six consecutive life sentences. At the end of November she changed her plea. In a Ramsey County courtroom Judge Charles Flynn read out the name and birthdate of each child, and after each one she sobbed and said, "Guilty." Under the plea agreement she was sentenced to fifty years.
For years the children's graves had no markers, because the family could not afford them. After a Pioneer Press columnist wrote about it, a St. Paul monument company donated stones, and on September 13, 2009, about a hundred people gathered at the cemetery to mark them. The killings pushed mental health care for refugees, and for the Hmong community in particular, into public discussion in Minnesota; MayKao Hang, later head of the Wilder Foundation, described years of asking what could have been done differently.
Khoua Her is held at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee. Her anticipated release date is in 2032, when she will be fifty-eight or fifty-nine.