At the camp, the family made contact with representatives of American-based refugee relocation programs and, with the help of a relocation program supported by Catholic archdiocese in Milwaukee, the family moved to the city in 1980. Sinthasomphone swam the river himself, and was reunited with the rest of his family in a refugee camp where they lived for a year. Sinthasomphone built a canoe and sent his entire family across the river late one night, with the youngest children drugged with sleeping pills so they would not cry and attract the notice of soldiers near the river, Mr. Thailand, which offered a refugee for Laotians and Cambodians fleeing repressive regimes at home, lay just across the Mekong River. "They also tried to get him because they said he did something wrong, but he didn't do anything wrong." "The communists tried to get his land and that's why he escaped," Mr. Sinthasomphone's eldest daughter, Thaeone. Sinthasomphone's rice farm in a village near the Laotian capital of Vientiane, said Kongpheth Vonghasouk, who is married to Mr. The family fled Laos in March 1979 because the communists threatened to take away Mr. They arrived in Milwaukee a decade ago, a new immigrant family brimming with hope and lured to America by other relatives and friends already living in the city's flourishing Laotian community of 7,000 people. Sinthasomphone has had all the photographs in their home of her son removed, except the one that adorns a small shrine in the living room. "We don't have energy to do anything," said Anouke Sinthasomphone, a 27-year-old brother of the dead boy. His four brothers and three sisters have existed in a numb world in which they quietly reflect about their brother. His mother, Somdy, 50, has fainted three or four times since the news arrived, family members said, and early this morning was rushed to a local hospital by one of her sons because she was shaking uncontrollably. Sounthone, the boy's 52-year-old unemployed father, sits listlessly in the kitchen smoking cigarettes, unable to speak about his son's death. The family who had fled repression in Laos more than a decade ago is trying to make sense of the death of 14-year-old Konerak, said family members, whose dismembered body was among the 11 found by the police last week in the apartment of Jeffrey L. In a white, neatly kept bungalow on this city's north side, the Sinthasomphone family grieves quietly for its youngest member.
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