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Police say the five young men had come to suspect that Tay, whom they had only just met through mutual friends, was going to betray their robbery scheme and had thoroughly rehearsed their response. According to investigators, while Tay was looking into a metal box (it supposedly contained a gun), Chan motioned to Acosta to pick up one of two baseball bats resting against the wall. Acosta struck Tay in the head, while Chan picked up the other bat and began beating Tay on the head and body. Kang and Choe, waiting in the next room, heard Tay scream and ask, "What did I do to you?" Chan, apparently angered that Tay was still alive, poured rubbing alcohol down his throat and forced his mouth shut with duct tape. Tay died within minutes from his own vomit.
Chan took Tay's wallet and, according to police, the boys later divided the money among themselves. They buried the body in a shallow grave they had dug under a rubber tree in the backyard. Kim wore gloves to drive Tay's car away from the house, and left it with the keys in the ignition in the largely working-class city of Compton, near Los Angeles. By 9 p.m., the Tays had begun to worry and called their son's friends looking for him. Just an hour later police found his stripped car in an alley. By this time the teenagers had gone their separate ways; Acosta and Kang were said to have turned up at parties later that night. It took the police three days to track the suspects down and arrest them.
Though the police and prosecutors are in the early stages of their investigations, they have dismissed theories that Chan was a member of the Chinese Mafia or that competition for a girlfriend led to the horrible crime. The death of Stuart Tay may come down to a case of distrust and "bad blood," according to Deputy District Attorney Lewis Rosenblum. "What is clear is that Robert Chan did not like or trust Stuart Tay. Why that was so is still very unclear." But Rosenblum is less concerned with the motivation of Chan and the others than with the events that took place on New Year's Eve. It is merely the rest of Orange County that is still trying to figure out the why.