Before leaving for a weekend in Ocean City, Md., in the summer of 2020, Man Nguyen gave a friend the keys to his Bowie home and his car. He later recalled telling Ibrahim Bouaichi to stay out of trouble. Nguyen knew his friend was facing sexual assault charges. It was Nguyen, a bondsman, who paid the bail to get Bouaichi out of Alexandria jail.
Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight
Nguyen also knew Bouaichi was angry at his accuser, an ex-girlfriend named Karla Dominguez, and that he had been kicked out of his parents’ home after getting violent.
Yet Nguyen left his two loaded guns, his handcuffs and his badge in a duffel bag in a closet — “hiding in plain sight,” as he acknowledged during a January bench trial in Alexandria Circuit Court. By the time Nguyen returned from the beach two days later, Bouaichi, driving the bondsman’s Nissan Altima, had tracked down Dominguez and killed her with the bondsman’s gun. Before police could arrest him, Bouaichi killed himself with the same gun, in the same car.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
“My only bad judgment was to trust this individual,” Nguyen argued in court in January, defending himself against a charge of contempt after firing his attorney midway through trial. He was charged with contempt of court for willingly allowing Bouaichi to violate the terms of his bond.
As a condition of his release, Bouaichi was supposed to remain at his parents’ home in Maryland unless he had a court appearance or meeting with his attorneys. Nguyen’s defense was that his violations were “innocent” because he never read the paperwork that came with bonds he signed.
He called Dominguez’s killing “tragic,” while admitting he had forgotten her name. He had not forgotten, however, that between killing Dominguez and committing suicide Bouaichi damaged the Nissan.
Story continues below advertisement
“I’m also a victim,” he had told the judge. “Someone crashed my car.”
Advertisement
On Thursday, Judge Charles Sharp sentenced Nguyen to a year in jail on the contempt charge, with all but a month suspended if he remains on good behavior. “You’re not being tried here for murder,” he said, but for ignoring “serious malfeasance … almost on a daily basis.”
The conviction caps off a case that was made complicated by the pandemic’s effects on the criminal justice system and questions about how Bouaichi was being tracked after he was released from jail on the assault charges.
Bouaichi was first arrested in October 2019 after Dominguez accused him of a violent sexual assault. He was supposed to go to trial in March. Then the pandemic arrived, and his attorneys successfully argued that the evidence was not strong enough for Bouaichi to be held in jail indefinitely while jury trials were suspended.
Bouaichi had no convictions on his record, but he had been arrested several times and was the subject of a protective order from a 2017 domestic violence incident.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Bouachi’s sister called Nguyen, a friend for over a decade. The bondsman posted the $25,000 surety. A couple of months later, he gave Bouaichi a job at his side business running a mall kiosk in Arundel Mills.
“There was a conflict of interest,” said defense attorney Sean Sherlock, a new attorney Nguyen had representing him at sentencing. Nguyen, Sherlock said, was making “an attempt, however misguided, to help Bouaichi.”
Bouaichi was supposed to leave his home only for court-related matters. But he was not put on electronic monitoring, and Alexandria had a very small staff devoted to monitoring people on pretrial release. In May, Bouaichi was arrested in Greenbelt, Md., after an altercation with police in a Wendy’s drive-through. He was accused of hitting a police car and charged with reckless driving, driving under the influence, assault, harming a police animal and other assorted charges.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
He was initially held without bond by a commissioner, having been diagnosed after his arrest with “altered mental status, alcohol abuse and suspected substance abuse.” But at a bond hearing days later, prosecutors did not oppose his release. There was no indication they were aware of the Alexandria case, and authorities in Maryland never notified Alexandria of the arrest.
Nguyen claimed he was also unaware Bouaichi had been arrested again.
But he acknowledged knowing that in June, that Bouaichi got in a fight with his father and became homeless. He testified that he would pick his friend up for work at a tent in the woods nearby. When he went on vacation, he asked Bouaichi to watch his dog. Before leaving, he moved his gun bag from his car to a bathroom closet and threw a towel over it, he testified.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
He couldn’t reach Bouaichi that weekend but did not call police until he realized the guns and car were missing.
“Obviously I violated the bond conditions, but I wasn’t aware,” Nguyen said at trial. “I just sign it, I don’t look at it — I just swear, and I never pay any attention.”
Dominguez was with her new boyfriend when she was killed; a police officer testified at trial that he tried and failed to save her life. The mother of Dominguez’s new boyfriend, Yumeira Gonzalez, said that Dominguez came from Venezuela and had no family in the United States.
“She was a wonderful person,” Gonzalez said. “I really knew her for a few months only, but it was enough to see how wonderful she was.”
Released prisoner accused of raping, killing Virginia woman has died
The tragedy became national news, seized on by those who warned against the release of inmates from jails during the pandemic. Inmate populations in local jails across the country dropped 30 percent between January and March of 2020, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Nguyen’s former boss, Dave Gambale, testified that bondsmen are “not responsible for the behavior” of the people they help release from jail. “We’re not with them 24/7,” he said. He conceded that bondsmen who subcontract with him are required to “maintain professionalism” and “know the conditions of the bond.”
The Virginia Bail Association, which argues that bondsmen are a superior free-market alternative to pretrial officers, did not return a request for comment on Nguyen’s case.
“The outcome of this trial established that when officers of the court sign their names to official documents, the terms of those official documents matter,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Bryan Porter said. “It’s not just a mindless exercise.”
Story continues below advertisement
Pretrial services in Alexandria were subsequently moved out of the sheriff’s office. But there are still only four pretrial and probation officers for the city, which people who have worked in the criminal justice system say makes constant monitoring of everyone on release impossible.
Advertisement
Meghan Guevara of the Pretrial Justice Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for fewer people to be held in jail before trial, said the pandemic “created an unprecedented situation” for the criminal justice system, and that such tragic outcomes were exceedingly rare.
“To say that we should let thousands and thousands of people stay in jail with a high chance of contracting covid because of these handful of high-profile cases, it just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “These extreme and tragic circumstances often relate back to intimate partner violence, and it’s a reminder that as a society we don’t have an answer to that problem.”
Story continues below advertisement
Nguyen’s license as a bondsman was suspended after Dominguez’s death. The magistrate who reported him for violating his oath, Elizabeth Fuller, has filed a federal lawsuit saying she was illegally fired for discussing the case with the Alexandria Times.
“I am not sorry that I did the right thing, and that I know I did the right thing,” she told the newspaper at the time. “I was the only person in a position to speak up for this woman.”
Katie Mettler and Tom Jackman contributed to this report.