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Mingdong
CHEN
Classification: Mass murderer
Characteristics:
Chen confessed that he went on the rampage because he envied the
family’s income and lifestyle
Number of victims: 5
Date of murders:
October 26, 2013
Date of arrest:
Same day
Date of birth:
1988
Victims profile:
Qiao Zhen Li, 37, and her children — Linda Zhuo, 9; Amy Zhuo, 7;
Kevin Zhuo, 5; and William Zhuo, 1
Jealous Chinese immigrant who 'killed cousin's
wife and four kids' in Brooklyn was shunned by family for gambling and
drugs
Mingdong Chen, 25, had a tendency to gamble at
illegal parlors and do drugs, which caused a rift in the family, his
friend said
Tony Chen, 37, said he bumped into the younger Chen
on Friday afternoon and chatted but 'he was agitated'
Mingdong Chen was arraigned on five counts of
murder on Monday and did not enter a plea
The one-year-old victim was reportedly decapitated
The suspect had only been staying with the family
for a week
Victim Qiao Zhen had made numerous failed attempts
to warn her husband that Chen was acting strangely before calling her
mother-in-law in China
DailyMail.co.uk
October 29, 2013
The man accused of butchering his
cousin's wife and four children on Saturday night was a family outcast
who spent his unemployed days gambling and smoking marijuana, a friend
of the suspect has revealed.
According to Tony Chen, 37, who has known
Mingdong Chen for several years, the 25-year-old was often agitated
and when he played the electronic gambling machines at illegal parlors
he'd pound his hand against it angrily if he lost.
His wayward behavior had caused something
of a rift between the young man and his family who disproved of his
tendency to 'gamble and smoke marijuana,' Tony Chen said.
Tony Chen last saw his friend on Friday afternoon
when they ran into each other on 57th Street and chatted, the man told
The New York Times.
'He seemed agitated,' he said. 'In recent days, he
didn't have so much money.'
The new details about the alleged killer's
character comes as it's revealed his first words when he opened the
door to his cousin's sister and her husband after the attack were, 'I
know I am done.'
Chen, who has flitted between Chicago and New York
since arriving in the U.S. in 2004, was arraigned on Monday for the
grim killings.
He said nothing as he was charged with five counts
of murder for the deaths of the four children — Linda Zhuo, 9; Amy
Zhuo, 7; Kevin Zhuo, 5; and William Zhuo, 1 — and their mother, Qiao
Zhen Li, 37, who died from cuts to the neck.
He was also charged with assaulting a police
officer while being questioned at a precinct after the grisly killings
on Saturday evening.
Judge Jane Tully ordered him held without bail.
Meanwhile on Monday, Public School 105, where three
of the Zhou children had been students, mourned the weekend's shocking
events that took place only blocks away.
'It is with great sadness that I must inform you
that three of our students have passed away,' Johanna Castronovo, the
school principal, wrote in a letter to parents on Monday, in English
and Chinese, according to The Times.
'In school, our staff members are working already
with the children to provide them with information and to help them
express the pain and sadness they might be experiencing.'
A classmate of fourth-grade Linda described her
friend as a 'kind and helpful student.'
'She always shares things with other people,' the
friend said. 'When I need pencils, she lets me use her pencils.'
Wearing over-sized blue sweats with his hair
disheveled, Chen was quiet in the Brooklyn Criminal Court Monday as he
heard the charges against him without entering a plea.
His attorney, Danielle Eaddy, said her client had
been injured while in police custody and appeared to have two bruises
on his forehead. She did not immediately request a psychiatric
hearing.
Chen's next court date was set for Friday, where a
grand jury is expected to determine whether to indict him in the
gruesome deaths.
Police said Chen stabbed and slashed the victims in
their necks and torsos. The one-year-old boy was so badly butchered
that he was decapitated, according to reports.
The family was found in various rooms in their
apartment on the first floor of a two-story brick house. Some were
hospitalized and pronounced dead; others died at the scene.
'It's a scene you'll never forget,' said Chief of
Department Philip Banks III.
The children's father and Chen's cousin, Yi Lin
Zhuo, was working at a Long Island restaurant when the grisly murders
unfolded in his home.
The mother tried to call him because she was
alarmed about Chen's behavior earlier in the evening, police said -
but she was unable to get through to him.
She then called her mother-in-law in China who
reached out to her daughter in the same Brooklyn neighborhood of
Sunset Park, asking her and her husband to drop by the house.
When they went to check, they allegedly found Chen
with a knife and dripping in blood amid the carnage.
The children's father learned the horrifying news
though a police interpreter of Chinese.
'The father was freaking out,' May Chan, a
neighbor, told the New York Daily News. 'He just came home from work
and saw the police and they told him. He was hysterical.
'I always see (the kids) running around here,' he
added. 'They run around by my garage playing. They run up and down
screaming. They're little kids ... that's so heartbreaking. Innocent
kids, my God.'
Chen had been staying with the family for about a
week. He was a transient and illegally in the United States, Assistant
District Attorney Mark Hale said. An immigration hold was also placed
on him.
Police said Chen apparently was envious of fellow
immigrants' successes in America.
'He made a very soft comment that since he came to
this country, everybody seems to be doing better than him,' Banks said
Sunday.
Chen was unemployed after being fired from a string
of restaurant jobs he held for just a few weeks at a time, according
to neighbors and relatives in the working-class Brooklyn neighborhood.
Neighbors also said that days before the brutal
killings, loud, late-night arguments could be heard from the street.
Chen remained 'bizarrely calm' as he was dragged
past his family's corpses and during his confession to police in which
he said he was jealous of his victims' money.
He was taken barefoot, his feet caked in blood,
from the home in handcuffs by police.
'The family had too much. Their income (and)
lifestyle was better than his,' a source told the New York Post.
The family did not appear to be better-off than
those who lived around them in the working-class Chinese neighborhood
near Ninth Avenue in Brooklyn.
They sent their three school-age children to a
local public school, according to the Education Department and Li
stayed at home with William.
‘He is coming with the knife’: Mom’s last words
By Kevin Sheehan, Kirstan Conley and Bruce Golding
- NYPost.com
October 29, 2013
“He is coming with the knife.”
Those were the terrified last words of the Brooklyn
mom who was butchered along with her four kids on Saturday, The Post
has learned.
The bloody slaughter erupted after mother Qiaozhen
Li screamed at the accused killer for hitting one of her children,
according to a chilling account obtained exclusively on Tuesday.
Murder defendant Mingdong Chen “was getting into
arguments with the children on Saturday,” said a housemate of Li’s
sister-in-law.
“Then he hit one of the children and (Li) shouted
at (Chen) and that is when he got really angry,” the woman said
through a Chinese interpreter.
The frightened mom tried in vain to call her
husband and other relatives in the area before finally contacting her
mother-in-law in China.
“When she called the mother in China, she told her
what was happening, and when she said, ‘He is coming with the knife,’
the phone went silent,” the housemate of Li’s sister-in-law said.
The mother-in-law then called her daughter, who
raced with her husband to the Sunset Park apartment.
“When she got to the house, three were dead
already. Two were still alive,” the elderly housemate of Li’s
sister-in-law said.
“She was so scared. She was scared to death. She
didn’t know what to do, so she called the police.”
The woman’s account echoes the official version of
the killings that cops have previously provided — but adds new details
about the argument and desperate phone call that preceded the Saturday
night massacre, which took place while the victims’ husband and
father, Yi Lin Zhuo, was at work.
Chen — a transient who is a cousin of Zhuo’s — had
been staying in the family’s Sunset Park apartment for about a week
before he allegedly used a butcher knife to commit the grisly
killings.
Sources have said two of the children were
decapitated — including a baby boy — and that the mother had several
fingers chopped off as she tried to protect herself.
Chen, 25, confessed that he went on the rampage
because he envied the family’s income and lifestyle.
Also Tuesday, sources told The Post that Chen has
been dodging deportation since June 17, when a federal immigration
judge in Chicago ordered him removed from the US.
In 2004, Chen arrived in the country as an
unaccompanied minor and applied for asylum as soon as his plane
landed, but his application and a series of appeals were all denied,
the sources said.
In a statement, US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement said Chen became an “immigration fugitive” after
“absconding” from Chicago, his last known address.
“ICE had no information about his whereabouts until
his most recent arrest in New York,” ICE said.
“ICE has lodged a detainer against Mr. Chen. After
the full adjudication of the current pending criminal charges — to
include a conviction and any potential prison sentence — Chen will be
remanded to ICE custody for removal from the country.
The woman who spoke to The Post said she learned
about the incident on Sunday morning from the dead mom’s
sister-in-law.
She said the sister-in-law and her husband began
renting the lower half of the house where she lives after moving to
the US in September and answering a classified ad in a
Chinese-language newspaper.
Because of the murders, the landlord no longer
wants to rent to the sister-in-law and her husband, she added.
The woman refused to give her name, saying she
fears being deported because she — like everyone else tied to the case
— is an illegal immigrant.
Meanwhile, the grieving widower and father of the
victims returned Tuesday morning to the scene of the slayings, where
he was overheard making funeral arrangements for his wife, 37, and
kids: Linda, 9; Amy, 7; Kevin, 5; and William, 1.
Zhuo, who works as a cook, then ran from the
apartment with two community-affairs cops and a young man and a woman.
The group hopped into an unmarked police car and
drove off.
Inside the building, a shoe rack outside the
apartment door held children’s little pink sneakers.
The floors inside the apartment were covered in
dried blood, and a sign on the wall outside the door ironically reads
“Safe outside and in” in Chinese, with cartoon figures of four kids
over the Chinese characters.
Three families who lived in other apartments inside
the brick row house at 870 57th St. were in the process of moving out.
“We live upstairs. We are scared. How can we not be
scared?” one woman said in Chinese.
“No good to stay. Everyone knows death is here.”
Additional reporting by Charlotte Fu
Stabbing Suspect Silent; Grieving Goes On
By Julie Turkewitz and J. David Goodman - The New
York Times
October 28, 2013
His dark hair spiked and his gaze fixed, Mingdong
Chen appeared in a Brooklyn courtroom on Monday, saying nothing as he
was charged with five counts of murder in the stabbing deaths of his
cousin’s wife and her four young children. But the reverberations of
the tragedy could be keenly heard in Sunset Park, by the family’s home
and at an elementary school, suddenly confronted with the deaths of
three of its students.
In a criminal complaint released after the
arraignment, prosecutors provided a chilling, if brief, description of
the brutality of the crime Mr. Chen is accused of committing, saying
each of the four children — Linda Zhuo, 9; Amy Zhuo, 7; Kevin Zhuo, 5;
and William Zhuo, 1 — and their mother, Qiao Zhen Li, 37, died from
cuts to the neck.
The father’s sister and her husband were the first
to arrive at the house Saturday night, finding Mr. Chen amid the
fallen bodies, covered in blood. “I know I am done,” he said,
according to the complaint.
Judge Jane Tully ordered Mr. Chen, 25, held without
bail.
An assistant district attorney, Mark Hale,
described Mr. Chen as a “transient” and an “undocumented alien.” The
police said Mr. Chen struggled to find a steady life in the United
States. He bounced between Chinese neighborhoods in New York and
Chicago before returning to the city a little more than a week ago to
stay with his cousin in Sunset Park — the father of the children he is
accused of killing.
At Public School 105, where three of the children
had been students, administrators provided counseling and tried to
ease the shock among students and teachers over the killings only
blocks away, as well as help parents guide children at home.
“It is with great sadness that I must inform you
that three of our students have passed away,” wrote Johanna Castronovo,
the school principal, in a letter to parents on Monday, in English and
Chinese. “In school, our staff members are working already with the
children to provide them with information and to help them express the
pain and sadness they might be experiencing.”
In a fourth-grade classroom where Linda would have
been on Monday, classmates gathered to create a memory wall dedicated
to the little girl. “It’s a big wall, and then we write the things
that Linda did to us,” explained a 9-year-old classmate. The students
brainstormed together, and then plastered messages across one large
area, she said.
“She’s a kind and helpful student,” said the
student, remembering her friend. “She always shares things with other
people. When I need pencils, she lets me use her pencils.”
After school, students streamed out of the school,
on 59th Street in Sunset Park, a five-minute walk from the scene of
the tragedy.
Police officials said Mr. Chen harbored resentment
over his difficulties, but it was not clear what caused him to lash
out against his relatives, most hailing from the Fujian province in
eastern China. He had no arrests in New York or Chicago.
Mr. Chen had been a regular presence at employment
agencies in Manhattan’s Chinatown during past stays in New York, said
a friend of several years, Tony Chen, 37. The two passed the time
gambling together in illegal parlors with electronic gambling
machines, he said.
He said that Mr. Chen was the kind of person who
was often agitated, pounding his hand against the electronic machines
when he lost, and that Mr. Chen would occasionally use drugs while
they were together. He added that Mr. Chen’s family disapproved of him
because of his tendency to “gamble and smoke marijuana.”
Mr. Chen also faces charges of assaulting two
police officers who acted as interpreters during his interrogation.
At his arraignment, a lawyer appointed to Mr. Chen,
Danielle V. Eaddy, pointed to two marks on Mr. Chen’s forehead,
calling them “good-size bruises that I believe happened while he was
in custody.”
She did not elaborate further, or discuss the
killings, and declined to comment after the proceeding.
None of Mr. Chen’s relatives appeared to have
attended the proceeding. The last time Tony Chen said he saw his
friend was at 4 p.m. on Friday; they ran into each other on 57th
Street, said hello, and chatted.
“He seemed agitated,” Tony Chen said. “In recent
days, he didn’t have so much money.”
Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.
Mingdong Chen Arrested For Murders Of Mother,
Four Children; Police Describe Gruesome Stabbings
By Verena Dobnik - HuffingtonPost.com
October 28, 2013
NEW YORK (AP) — When relatives of a Chinese
immigrant mother of four young children banged on the family's door,
it opened to a grisly sight: a man dripping with blood who is now
charged with stabbing the five to death with a butcher knife.
Mingdong Chen, 25, faced five counts of murder
Sunday, a day after the brutal killings of his cousin's wife and her
four children in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood.
Two girls, 9-year-old Linda Zhuo and 7-year-old Amy
Zhuo, were pronounced dead at the scene, along with the youngest
child, 18-month-old William Zhuo — all found in a back bedroom, police
said. Their brother, 5-year-old Kevin Zhuo, and 37-year-old mother,
Qiao Zhen Li, were found in the kitchen and taken to hospitals, where
they also were pronounced dead.
The five "were cut and butchered with a kitchen
knife," said Chief of Department Philip Banks III, the New York Police
Department's highest-ranking uniformed member.
The victims died of stab wounds to their necks and
torsos, and Chen has implicated himself in the killings, Banks said.
"It's a scene you'll never forget," he said.
Chen had been staying with the family on the first
floor of the two-story brick house for about a week.
He was unemployed after being fired from a string
of restaurant jobs he held for just a few weeks at a time, according
to neighbors and relatives in the working-class neighborhood dominated
by a large community of immigrants from China.
Almost a decade after coming to the United States
as a teenager, he still was fluent only in Mandarin Chinese, Banks
said.
"He was bouncing around," said Banks.
Chen apparently was jealous of fellow immigrants'
successes in America.
"He made a very soft comment that since he came to
this country, everybody seems to be doing better than him," Banks
said.
The children's father, his cousin, was not home
late Saturday evening; he was working at a Long Island restaurant, one
neighbor said.
The mother tried to call him because she was
alarmed about Chen's "suspicious" behavior earlier in the evening,
Banks said.
When she couldn't reach her husband, Li called her
mother-in-law in China, who also could not immediately reach her son.
The mother-in-law then reached out to her daughter in the same
Brooklyn neighborhood, Banks said.
The sister-in-law and her husband went to the house
at about 11 p.m. and kept banging on the door till someone answered,
police said.
It was Chen, "and they see that he's covered with
blood," Banks said. "They don't know who this person is."
The couple fled, called 911, and detectives
investigating another matter nearby responded quickly, Banks said.
Yuan Gao, a cousin of the mother, came by the house
Sunday and stood on the tree-lined street with well-tended row houses,
half a block from the neighborhood thoroughfare, its open air markets,
Chinese restaurants and shops bustling with Sunday morning shoppers.
Many walked over to the house, milling around and discussing the most
horrible crime they could remember.
But almost none spoke English, and the few who did
remained tight-lipped.
Some said that at Chen's last temporary home, days
before the killings, late-night arguments were loud enough to be heard
outside.
Gao said he had moved to the area recently and was
staying with whoever would take him for brief periods of time.
Bob Madden, who lives a block away, was walking his
dog on Saturday night when he saw the young man being taken away in a
police cruiser.
"He was barefoot, wearing dungarees, and he was
staring, he was expressionless," Madden said.
The suspect was in custody Sunday, but is still
awaiting arraignment. It was unclear whether he had an attorney.
Banks said Chen had at first resisted arrest and,
while being processed, assaulted a police officer.
Neighbor May Chan told the Daily News it was
"heartbreaking" to learn of the deaths of children she often saw
running around and playing.
"They run around by my garage playing. They run up
and down screaming," Chan said.
"The father was freaking out," she said. "He just
came home from work and saw the police and they told him. He was
hysterical."
Before Carnage, Frantic Warnings of Relative’s
Odd Behavior
By J. David Goodman - The New York Times
October 27, 2013
The phone calls came in rapid succession,
each call more frantic than the last, made by a woman intent on
warning her relatives that her husband’s 25-year-old cousin, who had
been staying with their family only a few days, was not acting right.
By the time the woman could get any of her family
members to stop by her home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on Saturday, it
was too late. Inside the apartment, the woman, Qiao Zhen Li, lay
unconscious in the kitchen, next to her 5-year-old son, Kevin Zhuo;
both were mortally wounded. The bodies of her three other children,
all stabbed to death, were in a rear bedroom.
“They bang on the door and they bang on the door,”
Chief Philip Banks III, the Police Department’s highest-ranking
uniformed officer, said of Ms. Li’s relatives. When they finally got
inside on Saturday night, they came upon the carnage, and the man
believed to be responsible, Chen Mingdong, covered in blood.
Mr. Chen, the cousin, was charged on Sunday with
five counts of murder. He was also charged with assaulting a police
officer and resisting arrest; the authorities said he had attacked an
officer in the 66th Precinct station house while his arrest was being
processed.
The killings tore through the family like a fire:
sudden and complete. The five murders in the three-room home on 57th
Street, where the children and their parents enjoyed a seemingly
ordinary life, the police said, stood out for their brutality and
magnitude.
It was “not something that has been seen before in
recent memory,” said John J. McCarthy, the Police Department’s chief
spokesman.
Chief Banks said the scene was one that was seared
into memory. He called the crime an “unspeakable act” visited upon a
“normal family.”
That very New York normality appeared to grate on
Mr. Chen, who lived an impoverished and itinerant life between
Chinatown in Manhattan, Chicago and most recently, his cousin’s home
in Sunset Park.
Under interrogation by detectives, conducted in
Mandarin, he told of his disillusionment with life since coming to the
United States in 2004 and of his jealousy toward those who had found
success here. The police listed him as unemployed.
But it remained unclear what prompted him to turn
his rage on his cousin’s wife, Ms. Li, 37, and their four children,
identified by the police as Linda Zhuo, 9; Amy Zhuo, 7; Kevin; and
William Zhuo, 1.
The police said Mr. Chen appeared to have stayed
with them before without incident. The family did not appear to be
better-off than those who lived around them in their Chinese enclave
near Ninth Avenue in Brooklyn, neighbors said. They sent their three
school-age children to a local public school, the Education Department
said. Ms. Li stayed at home with William. The authorities had no
record of troubles in the household.
May Chee, who is a neighbor of the family and grew
up on the block, said she would often see Ms. Li outside with her
children, who would chase one another and play with the other children
who live along 57th Street, a block teeming with young people.
Ms. Li watched over them from her front stoop,
often chatting on her cellphone, said Ms. Chee, who added that the
mother did not speak much English.
Few in the area recalled Mr. Chen, who had only
recently arrived there.
A woman who lives next to the family and gave her
name only as Ms. Zheng said she had seen the cousin in recent days
standing outside the two-story, two-family home, smoking cigarettes
and talking on the phone.
A cousin of the mother, Yun Gao, 29, told reporters
near the home on Sunday that Mr. Chen was emotionally unstable; she
did not elaborate.
The only weapon used in the killings, the police
said, was a large kitchen knife, described by the authorities as a
meat cleaver. Chief Banks said that the bodies “were cut and
butchered” and that most of the wounds were to the neck and torso.
Ms. Chee said she saw the children’s father, Yi Lin
Zhuo, 31, arrive after the police cars on Saturday night. “He was
crying,” she said. “He was screaming.”
Two women arrived with him, one of them weeping.
“It’s so sad,” Ms. Chee said. “The only thing I can
do is pray for them, pray for the family. It’s crazy. You don’t kill
kids. Don’t take it out on the kids.”
The nature of the attack, using a kitchen
implement, pointed to spontaneity, and the number killed surprised
even veteran investigators.
“I just can’t think of anything like that,” said
Vernon J. Geberth, a retired homicide commander who dealt with
thousands of murder investigations. “I’m going to call it a family
annihilation, because that would be the technical term that you’d use,
and most involve firearms.”
It was a gun that was used by an Amityville, N.Y.,
man in 1974 to kill his parents, two brothers and two sisters in their
home. Similarly, John E. List, a New Jersey accountant, shot his wife,
mother and three teenage children to death in 1971.
But in terms of mass family killings using a knife,
“we just don’t have any history of that,” Mr. Geberth said. Multiple
stabbing deaths are uncommon in general because people have time to
escape, he added, though children are often the victims because they
are less able to do so.
Indeed, the killings recalled the stabbing deaths
on the Upper West Side last year of two children, 6 and 2; the police
arrested the family’s nanny, who was said to have harbored anger over
her treatment by the children’s parents.
It was not clear what may have precipitated the
killings in the Sunset Park apartment or what caused Ms. Li to become
alarmed.
Mr. Chen had no prior arrests in New York, the
police said, and did not appear to have had trouble with the law in
Chicago. Investigators believe that Mr. Chen, who does not speak
English, has not left the United States since arriving here nearly 10
years ago.
During the interrogation, Mr. Chen spoke in general
of feelings of resentment, the police said.
“He made a very soft comment that since he’s been
in this country, everyone seems to be doing better than him,” Chief
Banks said.
“We’re not really sure what that means,” he added.
“But that is the only thing that we have now. We’re still looking into
it.”
Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Mei-Yu Liu and Julie Turkewitz
contributed reporting.
Brooklyn stabbing suspect did it because his
life was miserable: cops
Mingdong Chen allegedly became angry when his
relatives tried to kick him out of her Sunset Park apartment. He had
been 'bouncing around' and was out of work prior to the killings.
By Rocco Parascandola, Edgar Sandoval,
Simone Weichselbaum and Tina Moore / New York Daily News
Sunday, October 27, 2013
He hated his life — so he took theirs.
A 25-year-old transient from China slaughtered his
cousin’s wife and four children with a meat cleaver because he was
envious of what they had, a police source said.
A seething Mingdong Chen revealed his chilling
motive in a remorseless confession to cops about Saturday night’s
bloody Brooklyn massacre, the source said Sunday.
“He felt they had everything and that he had
nothing. They were doing well and he was struggling just to get by,”
the source said.
The suspect’s rage was still boiling over at the
precinct, where he punched one police officer in the chest and threw a
pair of glasses at another, according to police.
Qiao Zhen Li, 37, and her children — Linda Zhuo, 9;
Amy Zhuo, 7; Kevin Zhuo, 5; and William Zhuo, 1 — were killed in the
horrific Sunset Park attack.
Chen, who speaks no English and talked to cops
through a Mandarin translator, was charged with five counts of both
first-degree murder and second-degree murder and with assaulting a
police officer, cops said.
He left the 66th Precinct stationhouse flanked by
police Sunday night with his head held up, showing no emotion.
The mayhem unfolded at the apartment on 57th St.
near Ninth Ave. while the father of the family was out.
The mother, Li, tried to call her husband Yi Lin
Zhuo, 31, to voice fears about Chen’s behavior but couldn’t reach him,
cops said. She then called his mother in China, who called a
daughter-in-law in Brooklyn.
The daughter-in-law and her husband went to the
flat to check on the family.
“They bang on the door,” NYPD Chief of Department
Philip Banks said. “At some point, he opens the door and they see that
he is covered with blood.”
The family members called 911 from the
blood-spattered scene around 10:45 p.m. and detectives arrested Chen
at the home.
The bodies of the mom and her 5-year-old son were
found in the kitchen, where cops also found the weapon. The three
other children were found dead in a back bedroom.
All of the victims had wounds to their necks, a
police source said.
Xiaowe Yang, 31, said she spoke to a cousin of
Li’s, who told her the mother recently tried to kick her husband’s
cousin out of the house.
“She told him to go home,” Yang said. “The guy is
very poor. He had no home. He had no place to live when he came to New
York. She told him, ‘You just leave my house.’ ”
Chen had been “bouncing around” and had only been
staying with the family for eight to 10 days, Banks said.
He came to the United States in 2004, and his last
known address was in Chicago, police said.
Family members were overwhelmed with grief.
“He’s crazy,” Gao Yun, 29, who identified herself
as Li’s cousin, said through a translator. “He came here illegally
from China. He was living with them. He’s not stable.”
Yun said the man had a job at a restaurant out of
state about two weeks ago until he was fired.
Neighbor Amy Chang, 15, said she heard the sirens
and ran out to see first responders trying to save the little boy.
“He was wearing yellow pajamas,” she said. “He was
bloody. They were trying to help him. But he wasn’t moving . . . to
kill a kid, it’s the worst.”
Chen, who had no criminal record in New York, has
stayed in various places throughout the city since coming to the
country and may have stayed with the family before, cops said.
