“Sorry, I took the two sons away without your consent. The disaster of these past 10-plus years was brought by me, so I can only take them away myself. Thank you for always staying by my side through everything. Facing days of despair over our sons being unable to care for themselves, it would be better not to spend such a long time enduring it any longer. I do not resent anyone. After we are gone, you must live your life well again. Do not resent and do not hate. Let the three of us, mother and sons, leave quietly. Please take good care of yourself. In the future, we will be reborn as new people.” This was a suicide note written by a wife to her husband.
The woman who wrote this suicide note was named Han Qunfeng, a native of Liaobu Town, Dongguan City, Guangdong Province. On the night she wrote this suicide note, she did something shocking: she personally drowned her 13-year-old twin sons in the bathtub, and then took a large amount of sleeping pills and pesticide to commit suicide. Her husband, who had returned from outside, discovered all of this in time and pulled his wife back from the brink of death, but their twin sons had already passed away.
Why would a mother drown her twin sons? All of this has to start from 1996.
On September 20, 1996, Han Qunfeng and Huang Zhuolin married. Both of their families were in good financial condition, and both of them had respectable jobs. Han Qunfeng was a client manager at the Liaobu Town Construction Bank, and her husband, Huang Zhuolin, worked at a local public institution.
More than a year after marriage, Han Qunfeng became pregnant with twins, and the whole family was overjoyed.
However, during a prenatal checkup on June 5, 1998, a medical report quickly plunged the couple’s mood to rock bottom. The examination showed that the intrauterine oxygen supply to the fetuses was relatively weak, and the doctor strongly recommended an immediate cesarean section to terminate the pregnancy, maximizing the avoidance of the risk of neonatal brain damage.
But Han Qunfeng stubbornly believed that artificial premature birth would certainly damage the children’s innate physical constitution, and she firmly refused the cesarean section. She chose to rest at home to protect the pregnancy, relying on her own conditioning to stabilize the fetuses’ condition.
One day a month later, she suddenly experienced abdominal pain, so she was urgently admitted to the hospital. After a whole day of surgical torment, she successfully gave birth to twin sons. Hearing the cries of the two children, the whole family was very happy, but this happiness lasted only 24 hours.
A comprehensive newborn physical examination report completely shattered all the family’s beautiful hopes. The diagnosis showed that both children had congenital cerebral palsy, belonging to irreversible neurological damage, and they would be unable to stand, eat, or use the toilet independently for life, completely losing the ability to live independently.
The children’s father, who was the first to receive the report, collapsed on the spot, kneeling in the hospital corridor and repeatedly begging the doctor to find a cure. The doctor was also helpless.
After hesitating again and again, the husband still told his wife. Out of everyone’s expectations, the wife, who had just given birth, did not break down crying or making a scene. Instead, she took the initiative to hold her husband’s hand and softly comforted him, firmly telling him that as long as the couple did not give up on the children and insisted on long-term rehabilitation treatment, the two children would definitely gradually improve.
From the official diagnosis of cerebral palsy at the end of 1999, in just two years, Han Qunfeng took her two young sons to rehabilitation departments of major tertiary hospitals across Guangdong, trying various methods in turn, but none had any effect.
During this period, the couple’s savings from many years were basically used up.
As the cost of rehabilitation treatment continued to rise, the husband was the first to be unable to hold on. He privately discussed with his wife whether to slow the pace of rehabilitation treatment, let nature take its course and let the children finish their lives, and not continue to overdraw the entire family.
The wife firmly disagreed, saying that no matter how hard or difficult it was, she still had to treat the two sons.
In order to save household expenses, the quality of life of the whole family dropped sharply. The couple ate a light vegetarian diet all year round, had almost no personal consumption, social life, or entertainment, and all funds were invested in the children’s rehabilitation treatment.
Relatives and friends from both sides advised them that they could have another healthy child, who could help care for the twins in the future and also give the couple someone to rely on in old age. But Han Qunfeng flatly rejected this suggestion. She was afraid that once a healthy newborn was born, the family’s energy would inevitably be diverted, and the two children with cerebral palsy would completely become marginalized.
Moreover, if a healthy child had to bear the burden of caring for two disabled older brothers after reaching adulthood, that itself would be the greatest unfairness to the new life. Rather than creating new conflicts, it was better to grit her teeth and carry all the pressure herself.
In December 2009, the couple finally saw a glimmer of hope. During daily rehabilitation training, the younger son, for the first time, independently held onto the wall and staggered two or three steps.
This tiny progress made Han Qunfeng, who had already persisted for 11 years, extremely excited. She immediately made up her mind to resign from her well-paid job and care for the twin sons full-time, hoping to use this breakthrough to accelerate the recovery of the children’s limb function.
But fate once again dealt her the heaviest blow. In the more than half a year after resigning and devoting herself fully to caregiving, the two children never showed any further signs of improvement. Instead, in the first half of 2010, symptoms of muscle atrophy gradually appeared.
This was not a good sign. In clinical medicine, this is a precursor signal of progressive organ failure and the approaching end of life. Han Qunfeng, who had long been involved in rehabilitation care, understood all too well what this medical common sense meant.
In an instant, the spiritual pillar she had built through 13 years of gritted-teeth persistence and day-and-night rushing around completely collapsed.
After that, she developed serious mental problems and often stared blankly and remained silent. She began to blame herself, repeatedly reproaching herself for having stubbornly delayed the cesarean section back then, believing that she herself was the culprit who had destroyed the lives of her two children.
One night in the first half of 2010, Han Qunfeng revealed her suicidal thoughts to her husband for the first time. After hearing this, her husband was both heartbroken and frightened. While comforting her, he also asked relatives and friends to come to the house to counsel her.
Under the guidance of her husband, relatives, and friends, Han Qunfeng’s mental state improved a lot, and she even took the initiative to say that she had let go of her obsession and would no longer have extreme thoughts.
A few days before the incident, Han Qunfeng’s emotions fluctuated violently again. Later she said: she had repeatedly thought that if she died alone, the two children with cerebral palsy who could not care for themselves would have to rely entirely on her husband. But her husband worked all day at a public institution and did not have the energy to provide all-day care. If he later remarried and started a new family, her two biological sons would most likely be neglected and treated badly, and the rest of their lives would slowly torment them amid illness, hunger, and loneliness.
In extreme depression, she finally settled on the final plan: to personally end the suffering of her two sons, and then take poison herself, so that the whole family of four could be freed together and completely cut off everyone’s long torment.
On the afternoon of November 20, 2010, after her husband gave the twins a bath, he went out as usual to handle evening work matters. Before leaving, he reminded his wife to eat on time and rest well, completely unaware that anything was abnormal about her.
Watching her husband’s back disappear into the distance, Han Qunfeng wrote her suicide note. In the letter, she described word by word the exhaustion of caring for her sons over the past 13 years, her guilt toward her sons, and her apology to her husband, pouring out all the emotions that had accumulated inside her.
At around 22:00 that night, she fed her two sons sleeping pills one after another, with a small amount of yellow wine to aid sleep, and waited for the drugs to take effect. After the two children were completely unconscious, she first carried the older son into the bathroom and pressed his head into the bathtub water. Even though she felt the child’s instinctive violent struggle, she still mechanically maintained the pressing motion until the son’s body was completely still. Then she dried the water from her son, changed him into brand-new pajamas, and placed him back on the bed in the bedroom.
Immediately afterward, she drowned the second son in exactly the same process, also carefully dressing her younger son in neat pajamas and laying him flat beside his older brother.
After completing the entire process of killing her sons, she sat by the bed, quietly looking at the two “sleeping” children. She swallowed all the remaining sleeping pills, then drank an entire bottle of pesticide. While she was still conscious, she sent a text message to her husband, who was out working, saying: “The two children are already asleep. When you come back, do not wake them.”
As the drugs gradually took effect, Han Qunfeng lay between her two sons, quietly waiting for death to come.
At 0:45 a.m. on November 21, 2010, her husband returned home after finishing work. The moment he entered, he vaguely smelled a pungent pesticide odor. Out of the thought of not disturbing his wife and children’s rest, he simply washed up and went directly to the side guest room to sleep, and did not go upstairs to check the master bedroom.
At eight o’clock the next morning, after making breakfast, the husband called Han Qunfeng several times to come downstairs to eat, but there was still no movement upstairs. The abnormal silence made him feel strongly uneasy. He quickly rushed up to the second floor and pushed open the master bedroom door. A strong pesticide smell rushed toward him. The empty pesticide bottle on the table and the vomit on the floor made him immediately understand everything.
Looking again at the bed, the two sons had bluish-purple faces and stiff limbs, and had long since lost their vital signs. Although his wife, Han Qunfeng, still had body temperature, she was in a deep coma and breathing weakly.
Huang Zhuolin instantly panicked. He immediately called 120 for emergency help and rushed his wife to the hospital for rescue. After a whole day of treatment, Han Qunfeng fortunately escaped danger.
After waking up, the wife cried bitterly to her husband in repentance and took the initiative to ask him to punish her. But the husband did not accuse her. He only calmly told his wife: I do not blame you.
Having been together for 14 years, the husband had witnessed with his own eyes his wife’s hard work day after day for 13 years, and he clearly understood that this extreme act was a helpless outburst forced upon his wife after long-term heavy pressure had pushed her to a dead end.
After Han Qunfeng’s case was reported, it quickly set off public opinion across the country. Relatives and friends even jointly drafted a plea letter, with more than 1,000 people signing it, begging the court to impose a lighter sentence.
Parents of children with cerebral palsy in Guangzhou spontaneously formed a support group and traveled specially to Dongguan. Using their own personal experiences of long-term caregiving for children with disabilities, they testified to the mental torment Han Qunfeng had endured, saying bluntly that this mother was the epitome of guardians in millions of special families, and that the lack of social security support was an important cause of the tragedy.
At 8:30 a.m. on June 2, 2011, the Dongguan First People’s Court publicly heard the case. For the first time, the court live-streamed the entire trial via Weibo, and more than 30 mainstream media outlets from across the country attended the hearing.
The judge asked Han Qunfeng: “When you pressed your first son into the water and the child struggled desperately, what were your true thoughts inside?”
She lowered her head and responded in a low, numb voice: “I cannot recall the specific emotions at all. At that moment I was like a robot without independent thought, merely mechanically completing a set action.”
Throughout the trial, she was emotionally low and listless, repenting in court many times, repeatedly emphasizing that if time could flow backward, she would never choose an extreme method, and would certainly take the initiative to contact the disabled persons’ federation, public welfare organizations, and seek help from society through multiple channels, and would never personally deprive her own flesh and blood of their lives.
The judge held that Han Qunfeng’s behavior had violated Article 232 of the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China and constituted intentional homicide.
However, given that the defendant’s capacity for control was obviously weakened at the time of the offense, and she had limited criminal responsibility, a lighter or reduced punishment could be given.
In the psychiatric appraisal document presented by the public prosecutor regarding Han Qunfeng, it was pointed out that when Han Qunfeng committed the act, her rational judgment ability was obviously weakened, and her ability to control herself was correspondingly weakened. Accordingly, the psychiatric appraisal department held that Han Qunfeng should be assessed as having limited criminal responsibility in this case.
Twenty-six days later, the criminal trial division of the Dongguan First People’s Court formally opened court to pronounce judgment in the case of Han Qunfeng drowning her sons. At 10 a.m., Han Qunfeng was brought into the courtroom by two bailiffs. Compared with the trial 26 days earlier, Han Qunfeng’s mental state seemed somewhat improved and she appeared very calm, but she still looked haggard. The entire sentencing took a very short time, only about 10 minutes.
In the end, the defendant Han Qunfeng was convicted of intentional homicide and sentenced to five years in prison.
After the judgment was handed down, Han Qunfeng did not appeal and calmly accepted the punishment.
During her imprisonment, she continued to communicate with her husband through letters, constantly reflecting on her own wrongdoing.