COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — An Oberlin College professor and his wife are dead, and the educator’s 31-year-old child is being held on $3 million bail and facing murder charges in their deaths.
The bodies of Pipo Nguyen-Duy, 64, a renowned art and photography professor and fine art photographer, and his wife, Tran Thi Nam Phong, 56, were found shot to death Wednesday in their home a few blocks from campus, according to police. The professor was on the first floor of the house, his wife on the second.
Asia Nguyen-Duy, formerly known as Daniel Jones, of Ashland, Oregon, was arraigned Thursday on charges of murder, felonious assault and tampering with evidence, according to court filings. The motive has not yet been revealed.
The young Nguyen-Duy, his face tattooed and bloodied, was first transported to the municipal courtroom before being then brought seated in a chair. The suspect said they were gender neutral and no longer called Daniel Jones. Identification documents found in a car police found burned near the college’s music conservatory, which led them to the crime scene, listed the name Daniel Jones.
Oberlin City Attorney Zachary Simonoff told the judge the defendant offered confessions to the crimes and took them to the father and stepmother’s address.
Simonoff also told Oberlin Municipal Court Judge Farah Emeka that the defendant’s mother had been in contact with police to let them know that her child was “currently psychotic” and in need of medication. A message was left for Asia’s lawyer.
The case was bound over to Lorain County Common Pleas Court, where it will next go before a grand jury. The suspect is being held at the Lorain County Jail.
The deaths shook the private liberal arts college, where students were just returning this week from fall break.
Studio art classes were discontinued or modified following the teacher’s death. An exhibition of his internationally renowned photographs was presented at the campus art museum to provide students, alumni and collaborators with a place to gather and reflect. A memorial tribute to Nguyen-Duy, who arrived in Oberlin in 1998, is also planned.
Digital forums for sharing condolences and memories have also been created by Oberlin and some regional institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
Carmen Twillie Ambar, president of Oberlin College and Conservatory, called this “a profoundly difficult moment for our community.”
“Tragedies like this intrude into our lives in jarring ways,” she wrote in an open letter. “I am simply overwhelmed with sadness and am deeply concerned about the impact of the devastating loss of Pipo on our community.”
Pipo Nguyen-Duy was also mourned by the Guggenheim Foundation, where he was a photography fellow in 2011. The foundation said he immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in 1975 and took up photography in his late 20s. He held a bachelor’s degree in economics from Carleton College and a master of arts and master of fine arts from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
“In his extensive work, Nguyen-duy considered immigration and emigration, intimacy, abandonment and decadence, cultural assimilation and the cost of war,” the foundation said on Instagram.
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