One by one, they were brought out of the van, and stabbed again on the riverbanks, sources said. The two brothers’ throats were slit and their legs were chained to buckets filled with tar before they were tossed into the shallows.
The two brothers were being held, bound and beaten, in a garage behind a Southwest Philadelphia house when their captors allowed one to make a phone call, law enforcement sources say.
They needed $100,000, he told the friend who answered, or they would be killed.
Their captors – members of a violent Vietnamese drug crew, law enforcement sources say – had given them the money to buy drugs, but the brothers had instead gambled it away at a casino.
The friend, a 23-year-old Northern Liberties man originally from Vietnam, said he could muster only $40,000. That, the brothers said, would be enough to save their lives.
But when their friend arrived at the house on the 2400 block of 72nd Street early Wednesday, he was robbed, bound, gagged, and stabbed alongside the brothers, sources said.
In the pre-dawn hours on Wednesday, sources said, all three men, still alive, were loaded into a van and driven to a parking lot on Kelly Drive, near the rowing grandstands on the Schuylkill.
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