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The School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. | Photo courtesy of Allyunion/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Two people who died in a murder-suicide at UC Irvine were identified Wednesday as a mother and son.
The victim was 77-year-old Thao Thai Nguyen of Irvine, and the suspect was her son, 36-year-old Andrew Nguyen Doan of Irvine, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and Irvine Police Department Sgt. Karie Davies.
UC Irvine police were called to Social Science Plaza B at 3:52 p.m. Tuesday after receiving emergency calls about two bodies on the ground outside a multi-story building, campus police said.
Investigators characterized it as a suspected murder-suicide. Irvine police said Doan threw his mother from the “landing of a multi-story building,” from about the fourth or fifth floor and then jumped to his death from the same landing.
Davies said police had contact with Doan multiple times in the past, the most recent in 2019 for a service call regarding mental health concerns.
Doan was a student of the university from September 2017 through June 2019, majoring in biological sciences, according to UCI spokesman Tom Vasich. Doan did not graduate, Vasich said.