Police are looking for a suspect described as a "white woman in her mid-20s" who ran over a Las Vegas nail salon manager after skipping out on her $35 manicure bill.
"Police are doing everything they can to find the woman…but we still don't have any answers," Sonny Chung, the longtime boyfriend of manicurist Nhu "Annie" Nguyen and co-manager of Crystal Nails and Spa, told The Daily Beast on Monday.
On Saturday afternoon, the suspect drove over Nguyen while fleeing the salon in a rented black Chevrolet Camaro. Police said the suspect's credit card was declined when it was time to pay for her manicure.
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She then told Nguyen she was going to get another form of payment from her car, but instead got behind the wheel and started driving away. Nguyen and Chung tried to stop her from leaving without paying, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Lt. Ray Spencer told The Daily Beast.
"She and I both ran outside to stop her after her credit card had been declined and she was trying to drive away," Chung said. "But she continued to drive toward my wife. I tried to stop the car with my hands, but she just kept moving."
The suspect "drove over her and dragged her about 50 feet," according to police, who arrived at the scene about 15 minutes later. The 51-year-old mom of three was taken to University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, where she was pronounced dead, according to the Clark County coroner's office. The death was ruled as a homicide.
Police said they don't believe the person who had originally rented the car is the suspect. The car had been reported stolen by a rental agency three weeks before, and a few hours after the incident, police found it abandoned at a nearby apartment complex.
Nguyen's family was in town visiting Nguyen and Chung for the holiday season when she was killed. The nail salon has been closed until further notice.
"She was so proud of our nail salon and even though her family was visiting, she couldn't stay away," Chung said. "We just want justice for her and answers as to why someone [would] kill her over a billing dispute."
Her family, who established a GoFundMe page for her funeral expenses, wrote about Nguyen, who was a refugee from Vietnam: "She had been constantly putting in 12-14 hrs a day, 7 days a week to send her daughters to college and to support her mother, siblings, and grandchildren. Allowing them to have a greater opportunity in life, she worked endlessly to the point where she would skip eating until after hours so they would not have to work as hard as she did."