New York Chinese family killed for being 'better off', police suspect
The suspect in the murder of a Chinese family of five in New York tells police he is upset that everyone else appears better off than him
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 Chinese cousin, who had been staying with their family only a few days, was not acting right.
But by the time her family members could stop by her home in Brooklyn on Saturday, it was too late. Inside the apartment, the woman, Qiao Zhen Li, lay unconscious in the kitchen, next to her five-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, the Police Department's highest-ranking uniformed officer, said of 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.
A police source told the New York Post that the youngest child, aged one, was decapitated.
Chen, the cousin, was charged on Sunday with five counts of murder. He was also charged with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest; authorities said he had attacked an officer in the 66th Precinct station house while being processed.
The killings tore through the family like a fire: sudden and complete. The five murders in the three-room home in the Sunset Park neighbourhood, where the children and their parents enjoyed a seemingly ordinary life, the police said, stood out for their brutality and magnitude.