By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer
Thongsavanh’s sister: Don’t judge my brother by his appearance.

LEWISTON – Amy Thongsavanh says people shouldn’t judge her brother by his tattoos or his social standing.

“Looks are deceiving,” said the 18-year-old college freshman.

Brandon Thongsavanh, 22, will go on trial starting Oct. 3. He’s charged with murdering Morgan McDuffee, then a senior at Bates College, early in the morning of March 3, 2002.

Thongsavanh was convicted of the crime once. But the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled that jurors were unfairly biased by a prosecutor’s repeated references to a T-shirt bearing an obscene reference to Jesus that witnesses said Thongsavanh was wearing at the time of the stabbing.

Amy Thongsavanh thinks the jurors might also have been swayed by references to her brother’s tattoos, particularly a set of ram’s horns adorning his head and a necklace of thorns.

She also says newspaper reports alluding to her family’s social status might have come into play. Her father is a cook at Bates; her brother was described as a street tough and the unwed father of two children mothered by different women.

Happy childhood

The family wasn’t wealthy, but they had everything they needed, Amy Thongsavanh said. “A lot of local kids aren’t very rich, but we grew up happy.”

She and her brother haven’t discussed the slaying, she said. “Only God knows what the hell happened that night,” she noted in an e-mail to the Sun Journal asking the newspaper to listen to her thoughts about her brother.

In an interview Friday, she said she hadn’t discussed the incidents of that morning.

“He said he’s innocent. I believe him,” she said.

And she spoke fondly of her “big brother.”

“We’ve always been close,” Amy Thongsavanh said. “He used to bring all his friends over to see me.”

As they grew, she said, they did the things that siblings everywhere do. They played games together. The card game Spades was a favorite, along with basketball, she said.

And sometimes they’d attempt more daring activities.

“We used to jump off the (house) roof in the winter time into the snow,” the University of Maine at Farmington student recalled.

Offered comfort

Her strongest memory of their life together was of Brandon “comforting me when our parents were fighting,” she said.

The fight, she said, was over his dislike of school. He covered her ears so she wouldn’t have to listen to the bickering.

“He was a teenager, not interested in school,” she said. Brandon dropped out, but later earned a GED.

One of the points he makes most often in his letters now is his pride of her being the first member of their family to attend college. She’s taking courses in education and early childhood.

Amy Thongsavanh said that if she could ask the members of the jury who will sit in judgment of her brother next month one thing, it would be this:

“Just have an open mind. Listen to both sides” and give him the presumption of innocence that he’s entitled to, she said.

She says that she feels largely as her mother does toward Morgan McDuffee’s family and fiance.

“We do have sympathy for you,” she said she’d tell them. “But we’ve also lost.”

Copy the Story Link