Elderly Chinese woman who killed disabled son after 46 years of devotion shown mercy in court
Woman, 83, said she was too ill to care for son who could neither walk nor talk, but wouldn’t burden other family members
An 83-year-old woman from southern China has been given a three-year suspended prison sentence for killing her severely disabled 46-year-old son for whom she had cared all his life.
A court in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, found the woman, identified only by her surname Huang, guilty of murder but showed leniency due to the circumstances of the case, Beijing Youth Daily reported on Monday.
“She deserves mercy even though she did break the law,” Wan Yunfeng, the president of the court and head judge, was quoted as saying.
The court heard that on May 9, Huang fed her son, Li, about 60 sleeping pills and strangled him with a silk scarf while covering his nose with cotton pads.
At her trial on September 21, she said she took her son’s life because she feared no one would care for him after she died. She handed herself in to the police the same day, the report said.
“I would never give up on him. He was my son,” Huang said when asked if she had ever considered killing Li before. “But for the past two years my own health was too poor to take care of him any more.”
