By Patti Weaver
(Stillwater, Okla.) — In an unusually quick verdict in a trial last week, a Payne County jury deliberated only 47 minutes before convicting a man of sexually battering three female clients at a Stillwater nail salon where he was working in July of 2020.
The jury composed of seven men and five women recommended a 25-year prison term for Nam Huu Nguyen, 48, who remains jailed pending his sentencing on March 15 before Associate District Judge Stephen Kistler.
Nguyen had been sought for months before being arrested in New York City on Nov. 5, 2020, and transported to the Payne County Jail where he was ordered held on $75,000 bail.
Nguyen had been fired from Royal Nails Salon as a contract worker on July 15, 2020, by the owner after she was approached by a customer about her experience, Stillwater Police Detective Mary Kellison wrote in an affidavit.
During the prosecution’s closing argument in the three-day trial, Assistant District Attorney Erica Garuccio told jurors, “What happened here was not proper. Mr. Nguyen was using waxing as a guise or ruse to touch these women whereever he wanted.”
Nguyen’s court-appointed defense attorney Royce Hobbs questioned how one of the victims, a 33-year-old tall heavy-set woman, who was then 20-weeks pregnant, could be vulnerable to the defendant, who was 5’5″. He suggested that the three victims were attention-getters.
“First, you have to determine whether you want to believe these three women at all,” Hobbs told the jury.
During his hour-long defense closing argument, a victim — who had been crying as Hobbs spoke — left the courtroom, after which the judge called for a recess to allow a break for the jury and a Vietnamese interpreter.
When court resumed, the defense attorney concluded with “They just want you to take their word for it.”
In her closing argument, lead prosecutor Debra Vincent told the jury, “This case, like many if not most sexual cases, happened in private. The assaultive behavior that was described is not on any video” — adding that there was not a camera in a room used for waxing at the nail salon.
“Not one of them went into that salon even thinking about waxing. He got them in that back room — as quickly as it could happen, he fondled them in a very private area.
“We do not agree that a man can take them back in a room and touch them just because they are in a nail salon.”
Since the defense attorney had pointed out to the jurors that one of the three victims was in the courtroom, the chief prosecutor concluded her closing argument with, “One thing I thought I’d never have to answer is what right did (a victim) have to be here.”
During a court recess, that victim was sobbing uncontrollably as she told this reporter, “I have a right to be here.”
