SACRAMENTO, Calif. — People usually see district attorneys in courtrooms putting away criminals and know little about who these prosecutors are and their journey to doing this important work.
As ABC10 continues to celebrate and recognize Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we're showing a different side to District Attorney Thien Ho, the first Asian American to ever lead the Sacramento County DA's Office. He's also not the only staff member who's part of the Asian community.
Thien Ho was sworn in as the very first Asian American Sacramento County District Attorney in 2023.
"Out of 2,400 elected district attorneys in the entire country, I'm only the 10th that is currently of API descent," he said.
His journey started like many Vietnamese Americans, escaping Vietnam by boat during the war in the 1970s, looking for a better life.
"My family and I were taken to a refugee camp in Malaysia, where I spent six months in that refugee camp. Eventually, we were sponsored and we made our way to San Jose, where I grew up," he recalled.
Ho got into law because he wanted to see more people like him and believed representation mattered. In 2019, the American Bar Foundation found only 14 Asian Americans were elected as prosecutors nationwide out of nearly 2,400.
"The more representation that you have, the more that you can then serve the community in a way that is reflective of the community," Ho said.
Representation is obvious within this very office in 2024. Rochelle Beardsley is the Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney. Born in the Philippines, Beardsley and her entire family moved to the United States when she was only six and she never imagined she'd end up having a law career.
"Six year-old me didn't know what a lawyer was. You're in the Philippines. You know, there was a dictatorship that my family lived through," she said.
After a very special internship within this very office, Beardsley was hooked.
"I interned at the DA's office. My first year in law school, I went to Davis for law school. That was the best experience," she said.
Now, after 24 years working at the very office she started as an intern, Beardsley reflects back on the DA office's history.
"Thien's an inspiration to me. As soon as he was sworn in as the district attorney, he promoted me. I was a supervisor in 2014 and then when he was sworn in, in 2023, he promoted me to Assistant Chief to run the community and government relations bureau," she said.
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Diversity also extends into the crime lab where Criminalist and DNA Technical Leader Joy Viray works. Viray remembers being one of the only Filipino American employees in the lab at the start of her career 23 years ago.
"I had one additional Asian coworker who had already been here for a while and then one who was hired like two months before me, so we were really new in this lab setting," Viray said.
Even though Viray was born in Salinas, her parents made sure she never lost sight of her heritage.
"There was definitely a difference between what you did outside school and all those normal things versus how they raised us. Within our home, I had that traditional Filipino Catholic background," she said.
Nursing was important to her family and Viray was encouraged to pursue that career. Instead, science was her calling and it was an infamous crime in the 90s that got her into forensics.
"When I was in college, OJ Simpson happened, and it really opened up people's awareness of forensic science. I was a genetics major so I decided to pursue that," she said.
Since the start of her career, Viray is one of the many AAPI employees within the DA's Office.
It's a goal Ho says he's hoping will take off nationwide.
"We're creating a pipeline of other leaders, so that Asian prosecutors, so that we have API people apply to become prosecutors, and that they then become supervisors and that they then become executives. They create that pipeline where one day they may want to become a judge, or they may want to become a DA," said Ho.
"It's about representation. It's important and I do see good things to come," said Beardsley.
Asian American representation on the federal level is also low. ABC10 research shows there are only two appointed United States attorneys out of the current 93.
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WATCH MORE ON ABC10: Voices from the AAPI community