FOUNTAIN VALLEY — Kent Hinkson settled into the sofa in his parents' living room and glanced over at his two younger sons playing with Masters of the Universe figures on the floor.

He clasped his hands under his chin as if in prayer. Then, calmly and evenly, he recounted the events that led to the death of his wife and daughter last month in Saudi Arabia.

"It was a Tuesday, Aug. 14," he began.

After more than five idyllic years living in the capital city of Riyadh, where he had been working for the Saudi government, Hinkson and his wife, Kim, were planning to move back to the United States on the first of September.

Then the unimaginable happened.

Two weeks before they were scheduled to leave Saudi Arabia for Provo, Utah, the Hinksons and four of their six children were returning from a trip to the supermarket when their car was commandeered at a stoplight by a gun-wielding drug dealer who was running from the police.

At the end of a 45-minute drive at gunpoint through city streets and onto a desert highway, the gunman shot Courtney Hinkson, 10, in the neck, killing her. And in the hail of police fire before the gunman's surrender, Kent Hinkson, 36, suffered a wound to the head, and Kim Hinkson, 32, four months pregnant with twins, died.

More than 300 family members and friends gathered in the chapel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Westminster in late August for the memorial service for Kim and Courtney Hinkson, who were later buried in Salt Lake City. Hinkson and his five children--four boys and one girl, ages 3 to 13--returned to Orange County 10 days ago to tie up loose ends and visit relatives. They left last Monday for a new life in Provo.

When Kent Hinkson was first offered a job as a computer programmer-analyst for a U.S. company in Saudi Arabia in 1982, he and Kim said: Forget it. Like many Americans, they envisioned Saudi Arabia as being no more than a desert of camels and tents.

But as Mormons, "very used to asking for guidance," Kent Hinkson recalls, he and his wife prayed for the answer to the question of whether to uproot their family from Garden Grove. Afterward, they both felt in their "minds and hearts" that moving was the right thing to do.

And for nearly eight years--not counting the year and a half back in the United States after his first job was completed in 1984--it \o7 was \f7 the right thing. In fact, to the Hinksons, Saudi Arabia was more their home than the United States.