In a case that has captured public attention across South Australia, a 34-year-old mother of three has avoided a custodial prison sentence despite being convicted for possessing a massive cache of stolen Lego worth an estimated $320,000, hidden in the garden shed of her former Adelaide home.
Dai Truong, a Vietnamese national currently residing in Devon Park, entered guilty pleas last week to four criminal charges brought against her: one count of unlawful possession of stolen property, and three separate counts of dealing with property without the owner’s consent. The charges stem from a police search warrant executed at Truong’s former Dudley Park residence on March 31 this year. When officers arrived at the property, they uncovered an enormous stockpile of unopened, brand-new Lego sets spanning popular franchises from Star Wars to Disney, all stashed out of sight in the backyard shed.
The sheer scale of the stolen haul was extraordinary: authorities required 15 full pallets and two large horse boxes to transport all the seized Lego sets away from the property. While the court did not receive evidence detailing the full origin of the entire massive cache, Truong confessed to direct involvement in three individual thefts carried out at the same Kmart location, and admitted that all the Lego found in her shed was stolen property.
Court documents outline that Truong carried out the three small-scale thefts weeks apart from one another, sneaking Lego boxes out of the Kmart branch at Marion Shopping Centre by hiding them in the bottom storage compartment of her child’s pram. She only took a small number of sets per incident, and the combined value of these three thefts amounts to just $1,774 – a tiny fraction of the total $320,000 worth of Lego seized by police.
One week after entering her guilty pleas, Truong appeared before Port Adelaide Magistrates Court for sentencing. Despite prior warnings that a prison term was a likely outcome, Magistrate Aaron Almedia opted to grant a home detention order instead of immediate custody, allowing Truong to serve her sentence at her current Devon Park residence.
For the charge of unlawful possession covering the entire cache, Truong received an initial seven-month prison sentence, which was reduced to four months and six days to account for her early guilty pleas. In addition to the home detention order, the magistrate ordered Truong to pay $1,774 in compensation to Kmart Marion to cover the value of the three sets of Lego she directly stole, plus an additional $1,112 in victim-of-crime levies to the court.