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Bramble. This one is a doozy. It was viral in China and it all kind of unfolded January 2023, so like four or five months ago. A guard was patrolling the high school grounds. He worked for this massive boarding school and when I say massive, I mean I think they owned close to 600 acres of land. So it's a big chunk of land that he's guarding. He had to take his little guard dog, patrol through the woods, make sure that there's no trespassers, make sure no students are setting up a meth lab, no rogue chicken running about and he would go through the stone paths. So it's not like the woods are completely uncharted territory. It's not like it's overgrown the forbidden forest. You know there's paths, there's trails to take and he would just walk along and some days he would be out there cutting down Bamboo before it got a little impossible. But today his guard dog had completely other plans. His guard dog would not budge. First the dog was frozen on the path and then slowly it turned its body towards off path and starts yanking at the guard. The guard gives it one tug like come on let's get back on the path but the dog absolutely refuses to stop barking. The dog is pulling towards the trees. The guard is you know kind of curious. Only his job is very calm, very peaceful even but recently the disappearance of a high school student at the school, things had been different since then. So even walking through these woods it made him feel a bit unsettled it sent a chill down his back. He took one step off the path onto the crunchy leaves. The dog pulled on the leash until finally both of them were walking off the path and towards this abandoned shed on campus. Okay it's not necessarily a shed per se it's more like four brick walls that were set in place and inside it was used to storage things so that they wouldn't be in plain view. And outside the four walls there were linings of trees like think privacy trees but they're really tall they're really big they've got these humongous branches. It's honestly kind of confusing so I'm trying to simplify it to make it digestible. The guard dog stops abruptly at this shed and his leg and tail is stiff like all of his legs, his whole tail, his whole body is stiff. His head is pointed upwards like an arrow and the guard stares at his dog, follows his gaze to see where is my dog looking and at first he just sees trees. And then he's like wait what is that? In between the wall and the trees in the small little gap there was a body hanging. The 15 year old student that had went missing three months ago had just been found on campus hanging from a tree by a pair of shoelaces. For the past 126 days it seemed like the whole nation of China had been looking for this student. The campus had been turned upside down by investigators. I mean it was absolutely gnarly. How on earth was he found just in the open on campus? This is a case that would bring conspiracies of a essay ring in school, a principal running an essay ring, a chemistry teacher that wanted to commit the perfect murder using chemicals and even school bullies because of just how bizarre the death of this student is, it seemed like every conspiracy made sense. This was huge. Yeah. Like I was reading news about people saying like there was organ don't oh panda blood. It was a blood donation. Yeah, there was some governor need some organ and then they caught a kid from the school and donated not donated just kidnap the kid for the organ. Yeah. It was huge. Huge and the conspiracies are wild. So let's talk about the case of the missing boarding school student and this is a case that seemed to drive practically all of China mad. As always full show notes are available at rottenminglepodcast.com. I did have a Mandarin speaker help with this research not in a Mandarin researcher and especially in regards to all the public theories, the threads that just catapulted this case into mainstream media. I wanted to make sure that we covered the most of it and a lot of netizens they were invested in this case. This received a ton of media attention in China and there's just so much mystery speculation, conspiracies about what's going on. So we're going to cover the most popular ones but just a reminder myself included it's easy to get swept up in these conspiracies but you know this is a case that affected and still affects the lives of real people. So I think while speculation is fine as long as it's done with compassion and grace but let's just be mindful. So with that being said let's get into the story. This story takes place in a boarding school in China. It's called the ZHI. G. Yuan High School which boarding schools, okay we know one person that was in a boarding school for a few years and it's completely anecdotal but they said it was pretty creepy. Like I don't know maybe it's all the movies and books that make boarding schools feel like something is lurking in the background but it's not just a big sleepover you know that's what they said. The first few nights feels like a big sleepover and then it's no longer fun. That's exactly how they describe it. It's just got an eerie sense. Now today's story slowly takes place in a boarding school so I have to give you the rundown of the campus. There are two main buildings in this campus. There are a little bit of like small little one story buildings here and there but these two buildings are the most important ones. They're technically side by side. They're 0.06 miles away from each other. So it should take like a minute or two to walk from one building to the next right? A 0.0 sets. Oh yeah that's super cool. Yeah that's like really close. I mean there's some treason between but it's so close. Now they're technically side by side but like I said there's a small little park that you have to cross. So one building is reserved for all the classrooms and most of the administrative rooms like think your principal's office, all of these things. Teachers offices, HR. Then you take a quick little walk. Then you've got the other building. This is reserved for student dorms. And the campus is reminiscent of a college campus but on a tiny or much smaller scale. I mean outside of these two main buildings they had a gym, two parks, soccer field, basketball court, tennis court, I mean it's a pretty big school. And since it's a restricted boarding school one of the appeals is that it is completely gated and fenced off from the general public. And students were not allowed to leave the campus without getting explicit permission from teachers or staff because these are high school kids. These are not college kids. So this way parents feel a lot safer about sending their kids to this school because it's not some sort of free for all. The kids are still under very constant strict supervision. Everyone is treated like a high schooler and not like a college student. And this is all kind of important later. So anyway, the school has these three massive gates. Now the biggest one is the main gate. It's huge, it's fancy, it looks grand and it's used for big celebrations like welcoming day, graduation day. And then you have a second gate, you know, a much smaller one. And this one is used for outsiders to come in. So when you have parents visiting, maybe potential deliveries, they come in through this gate. Those types of instances, outsiders coming into the school. Then you have the last gate, the smallest gate. This was typically used solely by staff and students. Staff when they're coming in for work and students when they have permission to leave or for whatever reason. And side note, okay, this boarding school is kind of unique. This is the absolute first time that I've ever heard of this. And I don't know if it's common in China. But parents could board with their students. What do you mean? So each dorm room typically has a bunk bed and two students are placed in the room. So one gets the top bunk, one gets the bottom bunk. But sometimes one parent will choose to stay with their kid at the school. So they share rooms and they share the bunk beds. That's weird. And a good amount of parents chose to do this at this particular school. I think there was 90-something parents who lived on campus. That's my biggest nightmare. It's giving China's parents are so obsessed with kids grades. It's almost like, let me live with you so you don't have to worry about your day to day. So all you can do is study. Yes, that's exactly why. So while the kids focus on studying, the parents will focus on tidying up, cooking meals, running errands, cutting up fruit, just making sure that their kid is actually studying. Yeah. So back to the setup of the school, it's gated. And the fact that the most of the school was fenced off was pretty impressive, considering the fact that the school had two parks on the property. Students were allowed to use them. And this is, again, not like some sort of forbidden forest type of scenario. One of the parks is about four acres, very, very small. And the largest one was about 589 acres. Geez. So to put it in perspective, how massive that park is, it takes an average student about two and a half minutes to walk through the four acre park. Right. It takes about six hours to walk through 589 acres. 589 acres. Yeah. Central Park is 843 acres. Oh, yeah. This one is like more than half of that. That's crazy. Wow. Yeah, yeah. So it's huge. I mean, the big park is huge, but again, don't get me wrong. It was designed to be somewhat usable for the students. There were these pavesstone walkways. There were these trails that led through it. So if you want to go hiking or if you wanted to go sit on a bench inside the woods, students could do that. It's not like this wild, haunted, overgrown, uncharted territory that's just looming behind the school. Like, oh, I'm going to kidnap you. Students would actually frequently wander through the park looking for a quiet, peaceful place to put down a blanket and to study. Now on October 14th, a 15 year old student by the name of Hushin Yu. Hushin Yu. Hushin Yu. Let's call him Xing. He was not looking for a peaceful place to study. Instead, on October 14th, he walked into those woods and he never came back out alive. The last time that he was seen alive was October 14th, 2022 at 5.49 pm. Xing was seen walking into his dorm building. He checked the time. He had about 10, 15 minutes max before his next study hall class. So his next study hall was at 6.20 pm and the class technically starts at 6.20 pm, but the teacher wanted all of the students to arrive 15 minutes early. So truly, he only had about 10 minutes before he had to make his way over to the school building. He did not go into his room. Maybe he didn't want to lay down if he has to get right back up. So instead, he goes to the fifth floor of the dorms and walks out onto the balcony. So they've got this little mini rooftop area. Wait, where is he walking from? So he walked from the school building back to his dorm building. And he's got like 10 minutes left, you know? So he's supposed to walk back to the school building because he has a class in 10 minutes. A study hall. But instead, he walked all the way to the dorm building, walked to the fifth floor and went out onto the balcony. Now, this balcony overlooks the forest slash park behind the dorm building and he's just standing there alone, staring out into the woods. Is this all like CCTV or? So it's, we'll get into it. Yeah, it's very complicated. So he spends about two minutes there and CCTV does see him heading out at 5.51 pm. So we see him walking to the balcony and then walking out at 5.51, he was just there for like two, three minutes. That's it. So now he's like, okay, I got across the small park to get to the main school building to show up from my study hall. And he's seen walking on the CCTV cameras at a somewhat leisurely pace. He doesn't seem rushed, which he's not late, so he doesn't have to be. He doesn't seem angsty. He just seems like he's enjoying his nice little walk. He turns into the park and that is the last time anyone has ever seen him. It took a little while for people to start panicking. The students were expected to be at the study class 15 minutes early because there were always late students. So usually the students would even be late for that. The students would come five minutes before the class, which is fine as long as the teacher can start the class on time she didn't care. Now, she was not early. He didn't even make it when the class was supposed to start. But even then, teacher A, this is a fake name. She always knew that there's at least like one student who shows up super, super late, like 20 minutes after class has already started. So teacher A thought it was just strange though because she was never that student. He was never the one that showed up late. He was always early to class. She tries to focus on her lesson and didn't really start worrying until about 30 minutes into her lesson and she realizes, wow, he's still not here. Now like I said, this is not college where students can opt to not show up for certain classes or study halls. She ain't supposed to be here and he's not. So there's a problem. She knew something wasn't right. She excused herself, went into the hallway, pulls out her phone and starts talking. She starts placing calls to administrators, other people. She's like, hey, can you guys go check for a shing in his room? Maybe he fell asleep but he's supposed to be at study hall. For whatever reason, the students in the class said that they felt something was off. They felt like something was a miss. The way that she was outside for so long talking on the phone, the energy was just strange. I mean, often times you can imagine that kids skipped class because they took a nap. They fell asleep or they lost track of time, whatever excuse. But this just felt a miss, okay? It was announced to the class and administrators that shing was missing. He wasn't in class. The administrators went to his room to check for him there. He wasn't there. Found it empty of shing. Nothing was moved or packed. In fact, all of shing's belongings were still there. So his phone, money, wallet, watch, everything valuable and important was left in that room. The only two things that they could consider missing were his student ID and the recording pen that he took everywhere. So this little recording pen was something that he recently bought and he would bring it into all of his classes and record all of the lectures so that he could bring it home, import it and listen to it over and over and over again as a form of studying. That was it. Those two things were gone. Oh, and shing was gone. Now the school does not immediately call shing's parents right away because I mean, imagine they call every parent to tell them that their child is missing when in reality, they're playing hooky, they're taking an extra long bathroom break, they're making out in the woods like you don't know, right? Instead, they focused a ton of their energy in searching all of his friends' dorms and all over the dorm building and the school building for shing. And it wasn't until they were absolutely certain that he was nowhere to be found that they made the call to his parents. He was last seen at around 6 p.m. His parents received a call at around 11 p.m. Mr. Who? This is teacher A, your son's study hall teacher. Shing didn't make it to study hall today and he's not in his room either and we couldn't find him anywhere on campus. He did attend the last classes so I'm sure wherever he went, it can't be too far, you know? But it's just been a few hours so we wanted to alert you. Now shing's family, they lived three hours away from the school. His dad and his aunt, they get into the car they rush over. They get there around 2 a.m. That's as fast as they could be. Shing's mom on the other hand, she worked in a completely different province so think working in a completely different state. She couldn't get to the boarding school until about 11 a.m. the next morning. So the whole family, they arrive and they're rightfully nervous, they're rightfully upset. I mean, like what do you mean he's gone missing? I mean the whole reason that we sent him to a private boarding school and pay money every single semester, like isn't that part of what you guys are supposed to do? Make sure that the kids are safe or at least accounted for like what on earth are you talking about? He's gone. So the family speaks to everyone, shing's teachers, his classmates, friends, anyone that might have seen them that day and nobody was a great amount of help. All they mentioned was, I mean it was fine. Yeah, I mean nothing out of the ordinary, you know, I didn't notice anything strange. He didn't seem like he was acting strange. I didn't see anyone following him. I didn't see anything alarming. Yeah, just seemed like a normal day. His family, they started getting frustrated because there is a lack of information here that teachers are like, we don't know, he just didn't show up anymore. They're like, we are not communicating. I feel like we're not even speaking the same language. So they proactively, they print a ton of missing posters for shing, place them all over the school. They had his picture in big, bold red letters at red, missing person, 15 year old male. No device with him that can help him communicate, only has a recording pen with him. He was last seen wearing a white t-shirt and a black zip up hoodie. Short hair glasses and was wearing black pants with white stripes down the side. If you have any information that leads to him being found, we have a reward of $7,000. No, shing's family, they stand at the massive gates of the boarding school and anytime a staff member, a student, a parent, anyone, a passer by a regular civilian, they would pass out these posters. They placed these posters all over the outside of this boarding school so that just regular civilians with no association to the school would also be on the lookout. The family was desperate. The police do get involved pretty quickly and, okay, even though the police get involved, the way that they're looking for shing is very different. I think that the parents wanted them to look for shing with such urgency and it'd be classified as like a criminal case. Shing's family is like, you need to look for him as if someone kidnapped him. However, the police went in there and looked for shing as a missing persons case. So they did this with a little bit more leisure. But missing persons is... Yeah, so I guess in China it's classified as a missing person just means we don't know where they are. Does not mean that something bad happened to them. In order for it to be classified as missing persons criminal case, it means there needs to be some sort of hint that someone kidnapped them, someone took them, they got in trouble and something happened. Versus missing persons is just straight up, we don't know the location of this person. They could have willingly run away. Yeah. I guess it's all very similar, huh? To the US, yeah, I mean we just classified as like a run away versus a missing person's but same thing, right? So the teacher, police and shing's family, they searched the entire school property with the help of civilian volunteers. They look in every single room on the grounds. They check the pools, add-x, roofs everywhere. I mean, they went the extra mile. They drained septic tanks just in case. A team of searchers flew drones over the grounds to run 3D imaging in scans. They brought in drones that did thermal scanning to look for him in the woods. Again, nothing showed up. You guys seeing where I'm getting like, that's weird, okay? It's weird. Civilians volunteered to search and the local community, they really came together to help. A lot of people said people searched as if it was their own son that had gone missing. It could be pouring down rain and people would be bringing in their own resources. They would come in with parkas, rain jackets, walking sticks. It was said that at the biggest size, the search party was like 2,000 people big. So clearly, this is not a half-ass search. I mean, keep this in mind because his body is found in a place that should have been so easy. So I'm going to show you a map for the visual people. And if you guys are just listening to the audio, it's like the next building over. The shed, I know it sounds like it's way out in the woods. I think it was 0.2 miles away. No, okay, it was less than a mile away. I mean, it's really not that deep into the woods. And it's a building. It's like right there. People know of its existence. It's not like this forbidden, like, oh, nobody knows what the shed existed. The students had no idea this shed was there. So they search everywhere. They're draining tanks. They're combing through school security footage, but nothing seemed to miss. When they see Xing, he's wearing a white shirt, black zip up jacket, walking out of the dorm building at 5.51 pm. He heads to his study class, and that was the last footage of him. Then poof, nothing. He's not seen ever again. He's not seen at the campus gates. He's not seen leaving the grounds. He's not seen coming back to grab something. He's just gone. The leader of the rescue said, it's as if he vanished into thin air. We're not going to give up, but we have no clue. They had already conducted four cross searches covering 90 acres of land, 12 buildings, 884 rooms, 11 underground pipes, 10 septic tanks, 10 water heaters, 9 water reservoirs, 2 lakes, 2 parks, 2 sports centers, 1 garbage dump, 2,238 residences near the school, 589 acres of woodland south of the campus, 226 temples, 159 businesses, 124 miles of riverbank, 72 ponds, 16 miles of railroad, and 25 nursing homes. They followed and eliminated 378 tips and cleared all the school personnel and students, including the 98 parents that were residing with their children on campus. They did not find a single trace of Xing. They didn't even find a goddamn clue. They found nothing that suggested foul play or even a runaway. I mean, that's the thing. They didn't find evidence of either thing. They found no evidence. None. Which meant that it was going to remain a missing persons case in the eyes of the law, which is not what the family wanted. Missing persons cases in China, like I said, are equivalent to runaway cases in the US. They are not treated with nearly the same amount of urgency that criminal missing persons cases get. Which, you know, it's like that here. So the Hu family, they're broken from the lack of, I mean, nothing has happened. Their son is missing. They're doing all of this and nothing was found. Like the lack of findings and progress made it so difficult for them to even feel hope. To them, it just didn't make sense. There's a lot of anger there too of like, I sent my kid to this boarding school to be safe and now you're telling me you have no idea where he went. Xing's mom was also dealing with a lot of guilt. She said originally she wanted to be in the boarding school with Xing. She practically begged to him, but he turned her down. And it's not like they had a bad relationship. They got along really well. But he's 15. And for the first time ever, he's like, mom, I just want to experience a little bit of something different. Maybe next year you can move in. But it's my first semester here. I just want to see. So the month leading up to the move in his mom would ask, are you sure I could come through while you study and I could clean up for you? It's fine. Your three hours away, I'm going to be good. So even though Xing's mom was a little bit sad, she let him have his base and there was nothing that made her concerned for him or worried for him. Like Xing was a good kid. Both his parents, his older brother Tao, they adored him. Side note, his older brother is like 15 years older so it's like his second dad basically. Tao was adored, adored Xing. Anytime he made a little bit of extra pocket money with his job, he would buy Xing new clothes, new shoes. I mean, they got along so well. Everyone that knew Xing, not just his family members, they said, yeah, that's the type of kid that you would trust to be alone in a boarding school. Like other kids, you'd be like, oh, I don't know if they're going to study. I don't know if they're going to listen to the teachers, but Xing, yeah, neighbors remember seeing him walk 30 minutes to his grandmother's house a couple times a week on a regular basis so that because she was wheelchair bound and he would take her on these long scenic walks. He would run in bi groceries for her. He would clean up the entire house. He would do all the chores and when he wasn't doing that, he was typically perpetually hunched over a math textbook. He's like every parent's dream kid. For example, one time their town was completely flooded. The water was coming up to people's knees. It was really flooded. So school for some reason was not canceled? Do you guys not cancel school off in in China? If it doesn't affect the study then, no, yeah. Really? If it snows and the roads are a little icy. It depends on the city. Some city are used to it, you know? Yeah, I just remember growing up in the south, it's like one snowflake falls. School is canceled for a week. Yeah, for Georgia, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now school for some reason was not canceled and all the other students are trying to talk to their parents about this newfound discovery of the dangers of floods. They're like, Mom, Dad, I'm going to sit you down and tell you floods are so dangerous. We walk out there. Do you know how much bacteria is in that water? We can't go to school. We can't. I know it's not canceled, but I can't go to school. They're like trying to tell their parents that. Not Qing! Qing put on his backpack and his neighbors said they were shocked to see him splashing onto the streets running to school. Same as always. He was like one of the few students that showed up. Even when his parents gave him allowance, he would just put it away into this little box and they're like, please, just use this money. Go watch a movie with your friends. Like you got to put down the math textbook. We're thinking that you're becoming a little bit anti-social and he refused. When he felt like he had saved up enough, he would present this little box of cash to his grandma and she would be so upset. Absolutely not. I'm not taking that money. So when his grandma refused, he would use the money to pay for his own school fees. Like what kind of kid is selfless enough to do this? And it's not like the family was financially struggling at the time. It wasn't a situation where they were emptying out the last of their pockets to send their son to school. He just felt really guilty to use it. I mean, they just had a little bit of extra and gave it to him. That's it. So it really doesn't seem like the type of kid to run away or skip boarding school because he doesn't like the studies or get involved with the wrong type of groups. The extent of his wild streak or his rebellious teenage years was watching anime and that's not even rebellious. It's just called destressing. And of course, he never watched so much that it would affect his grades like he would finish all of his studies before he watched anime. Like this was their son and now he's missing. And the authorities were hinting at the fact that maybe Xing had walked off the campus by his own free will. They argued that maybe Xing just got tired of school and left. He's over it. He doesn't want to study anymore. He snapped. Those are the best explanations that existed and the family was like, no, absolutely not. They argued that is logically incomplete. You can't just say that because you can't find anything else. You can't be like, because we can't find evidence of anything else, we think this is the theory. If you want to argue that he walked out of campus, you need a witness or you need evidence to make you believe this theory. Something that would bolster this waterless, baseless theory and it's, what are you saying? It doesn't make sense, okay? This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I wish I could just get my therapist in this video with me because she's much more eloquent than I could ever dream of being. But sometimes I forget that I am in a relationship with myself. Like I can actually take care of myself and I can show myself love, compassion and grace even when I'm not doing great. And that perspective changed things for me. I've just always been someone that is super fixated and focused on maintaining relationships with everybody else, how much time I can spend with others, how I can show others that I appreciate them. 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And you can switch therapist at any time for no additional charge because, yeah, sometimes you just want to find the one that you click with. So find more balance with better help. Visit betterhelp.com slash rotten today to get 10% off your first month. That's better help h-e-l-p dot com slash rotten. Swing for the fences with BET MGM, an official sports betting partner of Major League Baseball. Sign up using code champion and receive up to $1,000 back in bonus bets if you don't win your first bet. Bet MGM's wide variety of parlay selection features, live betting options, player props, and boosted odds, specials all season long. Find out why BET MGM is the King of Sports Books. Sign up today with bonus code champion and get up to $1,000 back in bonus bets if you don't win your first bet. BET MGM and game sense remind you to play responsibly and offer resources to help you make appropriate choices. Visit BET MGM dot com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to a wager. Virginia only, new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. First online real money wager only. Rewards issued is now with drawbook bonus bets. Bonus bets expire seven days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly. Gambley problem call 1-800-Gambleer. So a month into the search the whole family loyered up and released a statement. The statement was titled suspicion of a campus burial case in Shangxi. So they were requesting immediate criminal investigation. A campus burial case meant that the family was terrified the school was trying to bury his case and that Xing was literally buried on campus. They believe that his body was being hit on campus because it's like a locked room situation. Nobody saw him leave, no cameras caught him leaving so he must still be on campus. Now side note, there was a campus burial case that had taken China by storm recently. In 2019, a body was found buried in a high school's field track. It was discovered that a supervisor for doing the school renovations he had gone missing during work one day. Those like years ago, decades ago, they found his body. So the case reminded people that schools are not as safe as we think they are or even want them to be. Are you talking about the playground case? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay. That's a different case. That's a different one. That's a different one. Okay. So there was a Shanghai playground. I think there's Shanghai. Or, okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but there was a playground where they were doing renovations and they dug it up and they found a body. Yes. Yeah. And just the idea that these kids are like bouncing around hanging out, having fun on top of a dead body. Like how does a dead body even end up buried under a playground at a school? I think it was a construction they were doing years ago and then there's a conflict between was it a principal or a teacher or something? Yeah. And the contractor. Yeah. They just go out, went ahead and pushed them into the ground and piled it up for like 20 years. I believe the principal was working with the construction company and overpaying them. So they were saying, oh, if the construction actually costed like $50,000, they would overpay them to $100,000 and then split that extra profit. What are the teachers found out? And they killed it. Because the construction company and the principal had relations. Wow. Yeah. Now, the Hoophamely and their legal team felt like there was no way that she could have just walked off campus without one of the security cameras catching it or even without a witness. And if that's what the school and authorities were alleging that that's what he did, then there's some corruption. There's some sort of foul play involved. They believed that the security tapes from the school had been edited. And they were already upset because the camera situation at the school was bizarre. This school had over 100 cameras, but only six family hosts. So think of a camera host as a big family. Every single one of those 100 plus cameras belonged to a host camera. So they all clump together and each host would cover a particular area of the property and some host might be in the school building. Some of them are in the dorm building. Some of them are outside. Some of them are in the park area at the gates. The one host that conveniently wasn't recording at the time covered the area around the main entrance of the school. The family believed if the administrators believed that she walked out on her own free will, show us the footage. But maybe they can't because the footage would show something else entirely. So that's why it wasn't working. So the family had a lot of distrust. The family suspected that someone had messed with the cameras before they were turned over to the authorities. Why would they think that? So each person that signs to watch the CCTV cameras or to review them, they have to sign into a monitoring log. And this is like a in the system. So it's not like a piece of paper, right? It's in the system. And out of the six camera hosts, five camera host logs were missing. What? It had been wiped. Meaning like we have no idea who signed into view or alter any of those five camera hosts. And those cameras stopped recording due to a glitch. So after he was seen walking out of the dorm and into the park where there's no security cameras, the cameras stopped recording. And they don't start recording until around 1 a.m. the next morning. You're kidding me. Yeah. From the moment he went missing. Pretty much. How did they explain that? Yeah, they said it was a glitch. Okay, it was like an hour after he went missing. They're like, it's a glitch. That could mean that someone could have tampered with the footage from at least dozens of cameras, but we don't know because these logs are gone. And even the camera, the one camera that still had their logs left, that's the one that wasn't working. The one near the main entrance. And that one didn't even start recording until way later on. So I mean, are you kidding? Like we can't even see who is going in and out of this school at the time that he goes missing. And is that just a weird coincidence or something else going on? And another thing, there are no cameras in the campus parks. A lot of netizens just felt like that was strange. If anything, that's like a big amount of space you would want monitors, especially when you have high school students, right? I mean, yeah, you want to monitor the classrooms, but the parks, come on. So the family's attorney argued and begged for the public to pressure the school and police into finding shing. They said there is no video footage of the school entrance and no sign of him climbing up school walls and escaping. It's like he evaporated into thin air. It's hard not to suspect that this is a criminal case and not just some sort of disappearance. It is possible that this is a school burial case. We hope that the offender can turn themselves in because that is the last and only way out. Both of shing's parents quit their jobs to focus on finding their son. They argued, yes, there are no signs of foul play, but there's no evidence that he left on his own accord. We need to push this to be a criminal investigation so we can find out where he is. Things are not adding up. Mrs. Who held a press conference and it was very hard to not sympathize with her. She had shing at 40 years old and she just wanted to do everything to give him the most happy upbringing. And then this happens. Netizens came together and they start publicly supporting Mrs. Who. They even push her to start her own TikTok doying account. The account was called shing's mother looking for her son. She just posted video after video begging the public to help her. She wanted to bring her son home. And in the beginning everything was very understandable. And of course, in desperate moments, I think that humans have a tendency to do things that are a bit, maybe out of character, maybe a bit questionable. I think everyone understood where she was coming from. It didn't necessarily make it okay, but Mrs. Who starts accusing random teachers of being involved in her son's disappearance. She was originally pointing the finger at the study group teacher. Teacher A. She explained that she had left the room with her phone for a long period of time and the students claimed that she was acting strangely. She also stated that teacher A not calling shing's parents immediately was a very strange thing to do. But I don't know. I find that a pretty reasonable reaction. Like I said, you can't just call parents every time a kid doesn't show up to class because you would have a lot of disgruntled parents. I don't know if I would have waited five hours, but I think it's not too unreasonable. Now, Netizens disagreed with her slandering a teacher without any concrete evidence. But it's hard to turn on the Hugh family. I mean, they would camp outside the school gates holding up signs that read, give me back my son. Like it was a heartbreaking. If you see the deterioration, Mrs. Who looked like she had lost 50 pounds in a month. I mean, she looked frail. She looked weak. Bystanders could do nothing but watch. I mean, she was fixated on finding her son. The family hired professional rescue K-9 teams from the other side of China to come and search the campus. The dogs only signaled near the stairs of the dorm building. Keep that in mind. But I mean, otherwise it checked out. It cleared. It looked normal. The security footage in that area didn't show any sort of weird happenings either. The family hired a security engineer to help them go through the school security system to see if it was tampered with to get some sort of clue. If her son walked out fine, which way did he go? Did he leave with someone? Did someone stop and talk to him? Like was he taken? That's what she wants to know. Once it was revealed that she was going around hiring her own detectives, people start speculating. Wait. Why would she have to hire her own detectives if the school is helping? Maybe the school is not helping. Maybe they're not cooperating. Why would the school not want to cooperate? Netizen started spreading a rumor that Mrs. Who was offered $300,000 to keep quiet about the case. The rumor started because she stopped posting on doying. It's unproven to this day if this offer was made, but it's clear that she never took it if it was because she continued to post later on. She also said that she spent her own savings to hire these third party professionals. It was also discovered that there were 13 cars that were in and out of that school around the time that Qing vanished. They were all cleared by the police. But one of them was an SUV that was parked near the cafeteria, near where Qing was walking, and the Who family believed that this SUV could be the answer to all their questions. Qing was put into that SUV, driven out of the school, and that's why you don't see footage of him leaving. Again the police tell them, listen, we cleared every single driver including the SUV driver, but the Who family do not trust the police. Like what was the car doing there? Fine then tell us, what if the car was the one that carried our son off campus? Like how do we know? Finally, near Christmas of 2022, Mrs. Who post on doying. She ran about the only way that she could talk to the principal was through social media because he refused to get in contact with her to even talk to her. Yeah, you better believe that set off netizens, okay? It was like a bombastic sight. I like what are you talking about? The principal where your son went missing on his campus refuses to cooperate with you? Very strange. She publicly asked the principal a series of questions. One principal, you were off the day that my son disappeared. So you were not on campus. But at 5.51pm, you were seen rushing back to the school. Did you rush back to the school to mess with the security tapes? Two, why was there an SUV parked near the cafeteria? The SUV was in caught on your security cameras, but did you know that the SUV was caught on a different camera? The SUV was sitting there for about six minutes, was she taken away in that SUV? Three, this is to the SUV driver. I want to ask you, did you take my son? Four, do all the teachers here still even have a heart? I believe you carried my son to the cafeteria gate and into that SUV. So I think what the who family at this point were believing was that something might have happened to shing at the school. Maybe bullies had had him, maybe an accident had occurred, maybe a teacher had abused him, maybe he died suspiciously and they wanted to get rid of all the evidence. Because a death on campus is probably worse than a disappearance because a disappearance, you could say well as a troubled teen who wanted to run away. Whereas a death, I mean a lot of parents would pull their kids from this private school. You have to remember, it's not even a public school. They get all their funding from two wishes. They need parents to trust this establishment. Five, question to the principal and the SUV driver. Where did you take my son? Now, most netizens were supportive, but it felt like Mrs. Who was unraveling online. They commented, Mama, who just please take care of yourself. I leave it to the police. Side note, the police did investigate the SUV driver and they said that it was completely normal. He's cleared. But that doesn't stop the internet from doing what the internet does best. Random accounts start popping up alleging some sort of relationship to the investigation and stating that the SUV driver was guilty of murder and was currently confessing to the crimes. Social media ran with it, reposting that one random person's video and that video got about 800,000 views in an hour or two. Wow. Yeah, it was later proven to be false. But the impact was massive. Even mainstream media started running with it without fact checking, just stating that the SUV driver was the killer. The case flew to the top of online public attention. This is really when it catapulted because not only did mainstream media say they found the killer, but they also had to backtrack and be like, just kidding, the SUV driver has been cleared. So now all of China is like, wait, what is going on over there? Why is the even media forking it up so bad? Now, most netizens are good people that just want to help. There's going to be a few rotten ones in the mix. So with this case, there were two primary rotten ones, one man who claimed to know privileged information about what happened to Xing. He stated that he was trying to bring Xing home and he just needed to get in contact with Xing's family to pass along all this vital information. Xing's tagged the who family till finally, Xing's uncle got in contact with this strange man on the internet. The man was looking for five minutes of fame. He told the family the only way he could help bring Xing home was if they told him everything about the investigation. All the confidential privileged information. The family and the rest of the public had an inkling that this guy just wanted all this privileged information so he could be the first one to break the news online and become some sort of breaking news crime reporter. Just one of the views. The family rejected his help and this man lashed out. He went from being a pro-hue family to the biggest hater of the who family. He went online to a ledge and accused the family of faking this disappearance so that they could get some sort of money or compensation from the school. He even accused the family of being the reason that the son disappeared. They were willing to sacrifice the son so that they could get paid out from the school. Another really shitty situation to come out of this was and this makes me really scared for the future. Someone deep faked Mrs. Who. Using her videos online they deep faked her face and voice and started multiple new accounts where they were using the AI deep fake asking netizens for donations. A lot of people donated. Mrs. Who had to come out and state on the record we did not ask netizens for donations. We will never ask netizens for donations. Thank you all for supporting this case but do not be fooled. We want to establish this as a criminal case. That's what we want. We want the truth. That's it. So the whole case was turning into a mess. But regardless of the public attention to the case there was a lot of pressure on the school, the city and the government to figure out what the hell happened to shing. Netizens started doubting even the efficacy of the searches. They wrote online. Usually when a search party is that large like 2,000 people large they already have some sort of clue or purpose for the search. It's well organized. It's not just hey guys we're just going to go out into the field and look around. But as for shing's case there's no leads, no proof, no organization. It feels like he went missing inside the school. If they really wanted to search they should start from the teacher, students and parents that were in the school. There are still suspicions that the CCTV camera was tampered with. They should start with the security guards. Plus the places that were searched besides all the houses or all the public places that people passed through each day. Shing has been gone for almost 90 days. If traces of shing were there they would have been discovered a long time ago. So basically saying even right now the police are searching random ass places that don't even help the search. To make matters worse, at the end of the year, at the end of 2022 when shing's mom went to the campus to search more for her son they were not let her inside. She told netizens my son is in that school and I want to bring him home but now we can't even enter the school. I want to see the principal but I can't even do that. They won't pick up any of my calls. This enraged the public even further which resulted in reporters and civilians lining up at the school gates to get information and to protest. The boarding school went into intense lockdown. Absolutely no outsiders were allowed inside the school gates. Reporters noted that the school was putting up new barbed wire fences along their eastern fence. Which I get it. Other students but overall not great for optics. The school just kept finding itself in hot water. Immediately after students had leaked messages that they were getting from administrators of the school and the school was telling all the students and family members keep quiet about this case. They stated rather bluntly that any student found disgusting this case even amongst each other would be expelled. What? Which feels like they're hiding something to netizens. Fans took to wayboat to argue if we don't find this kid all of China will come through this school. The police and the school kept arguing that Xing must have left school because he was unsatisfied with school. He was a runaway. Netizens argued, okay give us clear footage of him leaving or else we don't believe you anymore. Now, we slowly start charting into the conspiracy territory here but Xing's mom posted a few pictures of notes that Xing had written in the margins of his school books. Most of it looked like random scribbles or doodles like the kind that you would draw when you're bored in class but some netizens went overboard in trying to analyze every single piece of writing like every single scribble suddenly became a clue. It became certified evidence like literally every clue. I'll give you an example. On one page he wrote, lamb skewers. So netizens suspected that he had skipped class to eat lamb skewers and that he was kidnapped at a lamb skewers shop. They all tried to figure out where all the lamb skewers shops in the general vicinity were and like, okay as far as investigative work that one isn't that bad. I can see where you're going with it. It makes sense but then there were the weird ones. Like he had written down numbers and some of the numbers weren't that clear but there was a four and a seven close to each other. So a sichi which apparently if you use word play it can also mean period of death. Sichi. Oh yeah, okay. So they thought that maybe he was being stalked or he knew that he was going to die soon that someone was creeping him out. The other numbers were 140, 50, 7000 and 6000. For some reason netizens started speculating that he was burned to death and those were the temperatures of the furnace that he had been burned in. Yeah. I think it was around this point that netizens caught themselves going too far and they start reminding everyone let's reel it back in and stop these baseless rumors because we're becoming unhinged. But because everybody is getting so wrapped up in these conspiracies the case becomes bigger than it ever was before. I mean it was getting so much attention that it started back firing and harming the investigation. The who family was asked by the police department to sign a confidentiality agreement meaning that they cannot release any more new information about the case unless the police released it first. The family agreed. They did not care. They just want to find their son. It's not like they're doing this for social media clout. And for a while it was crickets. Until Chinese American detective Lee Chang-yu gave his two cents on the case and the media went into this feeding frenzy. So if you don't know Chang-yu is a huge huge name in the detective field. He is a famous criminal forensic expert in America. He's Chinese though. He's a legend. In China? Yeah he's a legend here too. He's a legend. I think there's many cases we talked about in the past. He was a part of it. Okay, he completed his PhD in biochemistry in just one year. Usually it takes people four years to complete it. He was the first Chinese American to hold the highest position in the state police department in the entire US. He investigated more than 6,000 criminal cases in more than 17 countries. He worked on JFK's assassination. Nixon's Watergate scandal. Clinton's impeachment. Oh, Jason's murder. The John Bene Ramsey case. He worked on that one. 911 attacks and those are just some of the cases that he's worked on. He is famous even in China, even though he's an American detective. He's been nicknamed the number one Chinese detective. Yeah, if something happens, he's the one to solve it. He was asked about this case. Okay. And he said, first of all, I've never been to the crime scene. So I just want to clear the error. I don't want to start false rumors. I am just going to you tell me what you know. And I will tell you my expert advice. So he's not saying this is what happened. He's not saying I investigated. I talked to people. It was literally just a question and someone was like, okay, so this student went missing and like blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, from that information, you just gave me. He said, I've been in the detective field for many years and I've seen all sorts of crimes. According to the past cases, the possibility of a 15 year old boy leading the campus on his own like this, very unlikely. The security cameras on campus also did not catch him leaving. So how could the police give out such a conclusion without evidence to support it? Yeah. I've never been to the crime scene and I can't spread false rumors, but from my experience, I believe that she had already been harmed and it happened inside or around the school promises. He's probably hidden inside the school. Another possibility is that it was organized crime and everyone is giving the same verbal evidence. So for the offender, what I've learned is this is crazy. The most dangerous place is usually the safest place. So to commit a crime at a school where you're familiar with or your home, it's the most dangerous because that's where the police will search, but it's the safest. Netizens took that to mean that there is a possibility of this being an inside job. That meant that the personnel in the students on campus weren't cleared even though they were cleared by the police. They took it to mean that multiple people could have faked a story and convinced everyone to share that story over and over and over again until it became the truth. This dangerous place is usually the safest place. He's hinting that the culprit being someone at the school had heard him at the school and he's still at the school. He also went on to question the police and he stated, my analysis comes from similar previous cases more than this specific case in particular, but she is a minor and according to the footage and information that the police do have, there is a possibility that he was harmed or harassed and could be in a life-threatening situation. According to the law, it should be classified as a criminal case. At this point, the police have not done so. I don't see why there are reasons behind this. Unfortunately, there are in fact reasons behind this. And I don't think there are good reasons. This is not in the police defense. I think this is goofy and this is like everywhere, even in the US it's goofy. But in China, in order for missing persons case to be classified as a criminal case, you have to meet multiple criteria. The place of disappearance has to have clear evidence of violence, like gone girl style, coffee table turned over, blood. A person must come forward stating that the missing person was harmed. I saw that person get pulled into that van. The missing person must have disappeared with a vehicle or large amounts of money that doesn't even apply to a 15 year old. The person is under the age of 14 and has been missing over 48 hours. The person had conflicts or disputes with any other party before their disappearance. Or no one knows where they've been for the past three months. So no one knows where she's been for the past three months, three months had passed. But because you didn't check off multiple boxes, it was not a criminal case. Which feels contradictory. Okay, it feels dumb. It's a bit of a huge double standard. The police state that the security footage evidence had not been cut or edited. But it was too late. You know, the public, they were having a whole media frenzy with this one. Netizens yelled at the police. If he's alive, we want to see a person. If he's dead, we want to see a body. Ultimately January 28th of 2023, the police would have an entirely new problem on their hands. Scheng's body would be found. A security guard was about 0.18 miles away from the main school building. 0.2 miles. I think I said it was under a mile. It's 0.2 miles. Oh wow. Yeah. And the guard dog was barking. He followed his guard dog up to a big red brick wall and there were overgrown trees in front of it. Hanging from one of the tree branches between the red brick wall and the trees was a decomposing body. Police rushed to the scene and immediately stated that they knew that this was Scheng. They stated that his black zippa putty was still on him. His shoes were on the ground below him and, curiously, his recording pen, the one that he used to record his lectures, it was on the wall. This wall, the red brick wall, had little ledges that technically he could climb up to so that he could hang himself or to put a pen. A lot of his students were seen climbing up and down these walls before. Which is suspicious because that means everyone knows that this shed exists so why didn't they search it. So at first glance, the police believed that he committed suicide. There's conspiracies on why the police might lie about something like this, but let's explore the route, shall we? In order to do that, we have to take it back to 2019. His body is found in 2023, but the story starts in 2019 according to the police. COVID was a rough time for Scheng. His grade started dropping. He was like the ultimate student until COVID. And not because he was watching too much anime, but COVID hit China sooner than it did the US obviously. So, Scheng was already doing online school in 2019. And for the first few months, he did okay, but like a lot of other students, the lack of routine, communication, motivation, even the lack of interpersonal connections, Scheng starts declining in his performance. It was just so mundane he couldn't focus. He spent the last two years of middle school like this until June 2022. He took the high school entrance exam. In China, there's not just a college entrance exam. There are high school entrance exams. The higher you score, the better the high school that you get placed into. Which is insane because the high school kind of sets you up for the college that you go to which sets you up for life. So by the time that you're in eighth grade, your whole life is in the trajectory of this one freaking exam. Insane. I can't even, so most middle schoolers in China are probably more stressed out than a 40 year old in America. Like the amount of pressure they face is astronomical. So Scheng knew his grades had been slipping recently with all the online classes, but he had been preparing for these exams since like the beginning of his life. He was stressed, but he was ready until he wasn't ready. The stress weakened his immune system and just a couple days before his exam, he came down with a massive fever. But you can't just skip it because you got sick. You got to be like hospitalized for them to even allow you to retake this exam later. It's that serious. So he shows up, takes the test and ends up getting a 531 out of 850 out of the 1300 students in his school that took it, he ranked 650th, which is kind of like smack dab in the middle. He was an average student. He was devastated. The high school that he had been fixated on his whole life since he was an elementary school. He's like, this is the high school I want to go to. He had just missed the cut off by like 19 points. So instead of attending his dream school, his parents got him into a private boarding school in a different province, which is why they were like three hours away. I believe for the tuition for this place was about $5,000 a year. And his parents asked him multiple times if he wanted them to stay with him, but he declined every single time. He just wanted to experience something different, something new. So when this semester starts, they get him settled in his room. They meet his roommate, and then tearfully, they leave. Now they told him you got to call us any time, okay, all the time. Sching stayed true to his word. He called his parents very often and he had typical teenager responses to everything. Classes are fine. Schoolwork is fine. Homework is fine. Yes, mom, I'm eating. And for a while, Sching was able to hide the truth from his parents. The fact that he wasn't doing well, not just academically, but mentally. Sching was in a precarious situation. So the way that he was ranked in this new high school was he was ranked high enough to be placed in all the top classes. But because he had just made the cut off, he was constantly falling short and ranking the absolute lowest in all of his classes. So you're saying, let's say there's 1,000 people in grade eight. He's like top 200. But each classroom has 200 students. So he's like the last person in that first 200 class. Which is what he sees on a daily basis. Isn't that sad in the ironic? Like you do well, but you're actually it's bad for you to do well. You might as well have been placed in the class right underneath so that you could be at the top of that class, right? Yeah. So it was really hard for him. And unlike a lot of the kids that went to the school, Sching was born to a very, very average family. And one of the main things that they tell you no matter what country you're in, one of the easiest ways to escape your socioeconomic class is to get a high education. I'm sure he heard this over and over again and believed he was taking this one and only chance for not only helping himself, but also his family, his parents. It felt like no matter how hard he studied, he just couldn't improve. And then slowly it started feeling like what is the point of studying if I can't even improve at all? Like what is the point to any of this? By September 2022, Sching was allegedly so frustrated and helpless. He told his mom all of these things. He just asked, can I please just drop out? Sching, you've only been there for a couple of months. And of course it's going to be hard. It's going to be an adjustment period, but you've always been a good student. You're going to get better with time. And drop out, just give it a little while longer. Sching was not having it. He told her passionately, I hate studying. I don't want to be here. I hate it here. His mom reassured him that the beginning of October was a national holiday so that they're going to pick him up, go home. He's going to have a few days at home and it'll be great. Like maybe you just need a week off to take your mind off of things. Now on this visit home, everyone noticed that Sching was not acting like himself. I don't think that he was acting so abnormally that warranted people to be like, oh my god, I'm so worried I need to do something about it. But for example, he was talking to his grandma on the phone and she's like, oh my god, I didn't know you were in town. What are you going to come visit me? And he snapped on her. He said, I don't have to come visit you every time I'm in town. You know that, right? It was so out of character. But people forgot about it because just two days later, he visited his grandma, helped with the chores and everything seemed normal. Everyone seemed happy. Once break was over, he went back to school. That was the beginning of October, like the first week. October 14th, he went missing. So they're confused. I mean, Sching's family, they're confused on how quickly things might have developed. It didn't even cross their minds that he could have heard himself or that he even wanted to. They never suspected a single thing. Now authorities believe that he climbed the little ledge of the outer shed walls to tie both of his shoelaces to a tree branch and then around his neck to sustain his weight. And he jumped from the wall ledge, letting gravity do its work, and effectively ending his life. He would have to climb 15 feet up the wall, which is not impossible. Witnesses have stated sometimes students would climb up the shed walls, not often, but it's been done before. The police believe that he put his recording pen down on the wall ledge, then jumped. That was the initial working theory. But just because something looks like it doesn't mean it is, right? That's what the family and the internet argued. The family argued he was going through a hard time, but he would never do something like this. And with the amount of distrust the netizens already had for the police in the school, everyone wanted concrete proof that he did this. They're like, where's the letter? Where's the note? Things just aren't adding up. You guys are recording pen. Oh, we're going to get there. So the netizens, they're like bombarding the police with all of their suspicions and there's a lot of suspicions. First of all, the location of the body, you guys are so close to the school's main building this is less than 0.2 miles away. And after that long list of searches that I purposely read to you guys because that was released by rescue teams to be like, look at how much we've searched. How the hell was his body not found? And sure, you could argue that his body was hidden by trees, but like how the hell was the search that bad then, that inefficient. And what about the smell? Trees don't hide decomps smell. The police stated that the body's decomps was so bad, his skin had practically turned into leather. How could nobody smell that? There were even dogs brought in to sniff out cadavers. Netizens speculated that she was killed elsewhere and his body was brought here after the search parties were done. Then there were other things. Sheeng's body had no signs of a white t-shirt on, but he was seen on CCTV cameras wearing a white shirt underneath his black jacket. And speaking of black jacket, his black jacket, oh, this is weird, it was on backwards and zipped all the way up. So imagine you have a hoody zip up. You put the arms in and the hood is in front of your face and you don't put the hood on your face, but you put your arms to the back and you zip up all the way. Oh, that is so weird. And nearly impossible. I mean, I guess it'd be possible if you put it on like a connect. Yeah, I was situation would you do that? Yeah. That is so unnatural. So unnatural. I mean, maybe he wanted to put the hood on to cover his face and then it fell off, but it's still very, people tried to do it at home and netizens found it nearly impossible to zip it all the way up in the back. Even the most flexible people were struggling to do this and you're telling me that in his last moments, that is what he chose to do. And then you have the shoelace. Netizens do not believe that one or two shoelaces can withstand the wait for not just his death, but for months and months. We don't know Sheeng's exact way, but looking at CCTV, he looks average to thin sized, so this one, I don't know what to think. So even though his body was found, it looked like there were more mysteries, more questions, and it was only getting deeper. Netizen starts to scream online. We need to figure out where his feet were pointed. Netizen's argued that if his feet were pointed downwards, like his toes were pointing to the ground, then he must have died via hanging. But if they were parallel to the floor, then he might have died in a separate position when rigor mortis had said it and then his body was hanged. Yeah. To this day, it was never released where his feet were pointing. Which is pretty easy to prove in 2023 with crime scene photos. I mean, you don't have to release the photos, but you could just tell people where the feet were pointing. But because of these questions, the police had failed to answer immediately and satisfy the online theories, you know, these theories spread like wildfire. So let's explore some of the biggest conspiracies before the police come back with their own theory. This is Flea for this little, like, a podcast about falling in love with music. I started a nonprofit music school about 20 years ago called the Silverlake Conservatory of Music. The reason that I started doing this podcast was music education. I'll be speaking with Rick Rubin. Thundercat, Stuart Copeland, Margot Price, Corey Henry, Cynthia Arevo, Sheila E, and Patty Smith. Please listen and follow this little light, a presentation of cadence 13 on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. The Evil Chemistry Teacher. Let's call him Teacher B. Teacher B was not only Scheng's chemistry teacher, but also his home room teacher. So this is going to be the teacher that is most intune-wishing, like the most they're work inside by side. The internet hates this guy. A lot of it is pretty privilege. I'm dead serious. People literally hated the way he looked, stating that he didn't look like a good person. He didn't look like a good teacher. He was bald, had small eyes, and a big build, which many netizens deemed to not be a morally nice person look. I don't even know how to unpack that one, but from there it was just confirmation bias. They found all these things about him online that they didn't like about him, and to be fair they were pretty bad, okay? But I don't know if it makes him capable of murder. Teacher B graduated from one of the top universities in China, which is why it was easy for other teachers to overlook the fact that he was the principal's nephew. He had the education to back up his position, and he apparently did so well that he was quickly promoted as vice principal. I'm sure it had nothing to do with his relation to the principal. He took the role, but he also kept teaching Kim, and he kept his home-room class. People said he was a genius. People said that he could have easily found a way to kill shing in a way that would be undetected in Qing's body. And maybe he did it to prove to, like this guy seemed egotistical, that's what people said. Maybe he did it to prove that he could commit the absolute perfect murder. Their evidence, quote, evidence, if you will, to back it up, is shing's family came to record at the school to show the public that nothing was being done about their son. So they're like filming around the school, and teacher B was there, and he's like, hey, can you stop filming me? Asking the who family. And the way that he spoke to the family was very heartless. Most people felt compassion for the parents, but the way that he was doing it was like, hey, legally you're not allowed to film me. And technically, teacher B was in his legal right to ask the who family to stop recording, but they refused, and they were very upset. They were saying things like, okay, well, if you don't want to be filmed, then you can stand away from the camera. Like, we're not trying to get you. You can stand over there. We're not trying to film you. Get out of the way then, if you don't want to be in the video. Teacher B said, no, I'm going to stay right here. Why should I move? Netizens didn't like it. I mean, it wasn't a good look for teacher B. And like, technically, it doesn't make him guilty of murder, but I will say it's a very strange reaction. Netizen said, as Xing's home room teacher, a student from one of his classes was missing, shouldn't he be actively cooperating with the parents? Or I don't know, have at least a little bit more compassion? But it seemed like he just was very like, no, legally you're not allowed to film me. It's just weird. Later, Netizen found an online forum from students who went to that high school and apparently teacher B got into a fight with another teacher one time, and that other teacher got into the hospital and had to get 10 stitches because of this fight. Remember how the police had professionals look through the security tapes to see if the footage had been tampered with and they said that it wasn't? Well, after the professionals came back saying that they hadn't been edited, the whole family lawyer got a hold of the tapes and took it to their own professionals. They were able to recover some footage. And that footage showed the chemistry teacher and the school principal entering the CCTV camera monitoring room. So even though the logs were deleted, we do know at least they were in the room where you could monitor the CCTV cameras. So they did delete stuff? It could be very easily argued that they did not delete stuff, but they were trying to look at the CCTV camera to see where he had gone, because he went missing. Which is a very normal response. I imagine if someone went missing on it. But then why would you delete that then? But the police are saying it wasn't deleted, it was faulty. Like it was a glitch. Okay. So I mean, you could argue both ways and it would make complete sense both ways. So it's very hard to say. Now they allegedly stayed there until about 2 a.m. the next day about the time that Scheng's father first got to the school. Now you could argue that's a lot of time to delete an alter footage and come up with the story. Other people could argue, yeah, because they're probably so panicked about looking for answers because the dad is about to show up and demand answers. And to be fair, it is the principal and the vice principal, so it kind of makes sense. But I don't know. Do I think he's a good person? No. He made another teacher get stitches, but I don't think it was right for the internet to drag him through the mud and accuse him of murdering a 15 year old. There were headlines that just had his picture and wrote murderer of student Scheng. Or headlines that read, Scheng was evaporated by chemicals made by his chemistry teacher. And a lot of the comments were like, yeah, you could just tell he's evil. Just by looking at him. Just pretty privilege. And you have the principal theory. So remember the principal is the chemistry teacher's uncle. So these two theories are about to merge. According to some of Scheng's classmates, Scheng had a girlfriend. And there was a rumor that Scheng went to visit his girlfriend in her dorm room at around 10.30 a.m. October 1st. So two weeks before he vanished. And he found the principal in there with his pants around his ankles. Classmate said, Scheng saw the principal quickly pull up his pants and push past Scheng as he left the room. His girlfriend started crying and told him through her sob that she had been are worded by the principal. Allegedly the next day, the principal had a little chat with Scheng to force him to keep quiet about what he saw. And the principal had to make sure he kept his mouth shut because if not, not only could he lose his job, but the principal would find himself in prison for three to ten years if this ever got out. So maybe just maybe the principal asked the chemistry teacher, his nephew, to help him, you know, a piece of evidence to support this theory is that apparently Scheng had called his mom on that day crying and just said that he really wanted to cry, but no matter how much he asked, he refused to tell her the reason why. The two of them, potentially the theory is, plotted for Scheng to go missing and they asked him to meet with them on the night of October 14th. And that's why the cameras were scheduled to be shut off. So they scheduled for the cameras to all go down. They were going to meet with him. So instead of him heading to studying class, he was going to go meet with the principal and vice principal. Other things that support this theory was that there were rumors that the school had mistreated students and let them to take their own lives. Three years ago, a female student ended her life by jumping from the roof. The school allegedly gave her family over $100,000 to keep quiet. A few months before Scheng died, another girl died. And the story was that she was caught cheating on her test and her teacher wanted her to pay money. What? It sounds like blackmail, like, hey, pay me money and I'm not going to report it type of thing. She was very stressed and ashamed and she ended her life. Now some students said that's not actually what happened. She was as saved by administrators and that's why she took her life. Again, these are all internet speculations. There are two students that did die other than Scheng, but the reason why it's all speculation. Now in the end, the police cleared the chemistry teacher and the principal of any wrongdoing. So then we have the blanket theory. The what theory? So some deleted footage from CCTV cameras were recovered by the hired professionals from the family. And one of them was from the stairs of the dorm building. Remember where their professional sniffer dogs came in and also signaled? And the footage shows around the time that Scheng disappeared, there was a white blanket that fell down the stairs. And the white blanket, like imagine throwing a white blanket down the stairs. You kind of can already picture how it's going to tumble down the stairs. This white blanket looks like Casper, the friendly ghost. Like the way that it falls down the stairs, it looks like there's something in the white blanket. I'm going to be honest with you, it looks like something's in the white blanket. But the theory gets a little crazy, okay? They said that someone had to throw this white blanket over Scheng and throw him down the stairs and then cut off the CCTV cameras and then disposed of his body. Personally, the strength shaped to it, the way it falls, it's weird. But we've already seen Scheng walk out of the building. But it is weird. It's a very strange coincidence. Now the blanket theory goes cold for a while. And in comes the theory you were talking about. The Pand blood theory. This is perhaps the most outlandish theory, but there was a rumor that Scheng had a very, very rare blood type. The rumor was that only 1% of the population had this rare blood type, hence the name Pand blood. The school might have known that he had this blood maybe from his past medical records that were submitted or from a nurse's visit. But people speculated that an illegal organization must have been after his blood. Why would they kill a student for this type of blood? I mean, a student in a boarding school, you're going to get so much attention. Well the theory was that a very powerful person, a government official of some sort, needed this blood to survive. The principal and the chemistry teacher were in on it to make a profit. So they shut down the security cameras. They helped with the kidnapping of the kid. And yeah. Now the thing is, Netizen said that he had RH blood. But RH is not a blood type. It's a protein. So either you have this protein or you don't. There's only four known blood types. There's A, B, A, B, and O. And if you have the RH protein, you're typically a positive blood type. Like you're either A plus B plus A, B plus or O plus. So it's not really rare at all. Yeah. Pand blood is not really a thing. Yeah. I mean, I believe there are rare, rare blood types. Like O blood is highly sought after because, you know, it's common. Yeah. And people said it was for his organs, but I mean, you know, you would imagine that his entire body would have been drained of blood completely if it was a rare blood type or that his organs would have been missing. And there is no indication of any of that. In the end, the police did find evidence that he had taken his own life. So remember the recording pen that he had left behind. They were able to retrieve all the audio and, you know, the police handed over the audio recordings to the family, but they, the police did not release them to the public. It's just really dark. The transcripts were released. October 14th, the day of the disappearance at 5.40 pm. So this is when he's on that fifth floor balcony. He turned on his pen and he said, now that I'm standing here, I feel so nervous. My heart is beating so fast. To be honest, I don't really have a reason why. I just feel like life has no meaning. What would happen if I jump? I don't know. Probably no one would notice for now. But after a few days, people will definitely notice. Why didn't I jump? I really want to jump? No. No, maybe I don't. The second recording was taken the same day at 11.08 pm. It speculated that this was when he took his own life. And he said, there's no more meaning. It's almost midnight. I met as well just wait a little bit longer and die. I can do it because today I just feel so unsure. Now I just want to die. I really feel like there's no longer any meeting in life. Fellow students and teachers came to state that he expressed on multiple occasions that he was stressed. He had insomnia. He was struggling to stay focused on his studies. It's believed that the tipping point for a 15-year-old Qing was just three days before his disappearance. He ranked the lowest in his class on his geography test. Other notes were found in his notebook that were not just random scribbles and doodles and he wrote, if I feel useless, I should think about where to go and bring up the idea of going back home. First, I should consider how to tell teacher A. It's best to be specific. I'm worried about how this will affect others. I don't want to bother her. I'll just adjust my emotions myself. I care a lot about how others feel. But I'm not unsociable. Another one said, shit, it's so hard to adapt to this new environment. My introverted personality is so annoying. Maybe I can't blame it all on my personality. This is just me. I can write to calm down my emotions, though. Another one. I finally understand those people with insomnia. At night, you just think about all these random bizarre things. I finally know why my eyesight is getting worse. I keep staring at the book on my table. I don't even dare to look up at the blackboard. I'm scared the teacher might notice me looking with a blink and confused expression on my face. And then she'll get annoyed. I hate seeing people get annoyed at me. But at the same time, I treat people with such negative attitude too. I haven't changed my habit of procrastination. I do this every time. I leave my homework till the very last minute and just simply complete it the next day. I'm not super rushed. At least I can get some sleep. Psychologists who studied this case stated that she was a people pleaser. She was introverted, yet a very delicate personality where if someone was disappointed or annoyed with him, he took it very, very harshly. He took it personally. He seemed really, really depressed at the fact that he only ranked 58th. And it's not just the ranking that was so psychologically impactful for him. It was the fact that he felt like his parents were disappointed. Even his teacher, who he had just met a few months ago, he hated seeing them being disappointed. In autopsy was released that showed Qing's body had no blunt force trauma. All of his bones were in place and there were no abnormal bone fractures or other damage to his bones identified. His organs were all there and they showed no signs of internal bleeding. There was no traces of drugs or poison in his system. As for the other questions, the white shirt, forensic experts came out to state that when you are that far in decomposition, your skin starts to decompose. And oftentimes there's almost like a bubbly acid, like a liquid that will start to form and it seeps out of the body. I don't, okay, it's not acid, but it does have like a, not a, not a disintegrating texture. But for example, it's like if you were wearing a shirt and you got wet in the rain and it starts sticking to your body. Like that could potentially happen during decomp and it caused the white shirt to stick to his body and then the further along that he got in the decomposition and being exposed to the outdoors and exposed to the elements as well as other organisms like maggots and flies and wild animals, basically his body blackened and rotted and so did the white t-shirt. They stated that this was nothing new or strange in the decomposition process. What about the shoelace? It was argued that because there were two shoelaces it held his weight and he was a little bit on the frailer side. Now why didn't they find his body sooner? The police argued that because there were usually stationed guards at this abandoned shed 24-7, when rescuers came to search the area, the guards just let them know that nobody had gotten in or out of the shed recently. So they just visually combed the area and left and a thorough search was never done. Now this one feels iffy but it kind of reminds me of people being incompetent. Like I think the way that he got into that area there probably wasn't a guard paying attention or maybe there was never a guard there but the school was supposed to have a guard there. So they faked it later and was like oh yeah the guard was there. But I guess he just missed him. In the end ultimately it did seem like all the roads lead to him making the choice. The Hool family they were devastated at their loss and I'm sure there was a lot of emotions turned pack. I think with cases like this there's like a lot of guilt. It didn't help that the netizens turned on the Hool family. A lot of netizens completely switched sides and went from giving support to Mrs. Hool to asking her how did you not know? Were you just a tiger mom that only cared about grades? Maybe you pushed your son here. They were saying things like how do you not even notice that he's struggling? Sching's mom cried and said you know I didn't have a high education level. I didn't even know what depression was. I thought providing food, clothes and education to my children was everything I needed to do. The online hate got so bad that Mrs. Hool deleted the post about her son. They also had to move out of their family home. The case was not completely shut and done though. There are some still loose ends and theories floating around. First of all, netizens still have questions about how the body was when it was found. The jacket being on backwards is a big detail. I mean, even just the fact that they didn't find the body sooner is a big detail that puzzled the internet. But as for the jacket, a psychologist came out and argued sometimes people who are making this decision. They will do strange things that are hard for other people to understand. It shows their dissatisfaction in certain areas of their life. And then Sching's case coming from a bit more superstitious background. It could mean that wearing his jacket backwards or throwing his, you know, things backwards means that he hopes that in the afterlife things would be the opposite of how they are in this life. They also stated that some people choose to leave a letter by stating their grief, but others choose to leave quietly. And the psychologist stated, sometimes people deliberately leave in a way that is mysterious, almost as their own sort of revenge on the world. I don't know. All I can say is from his notebook and writing, it seems like he was deteriorating mentally. And oftentimes people don't notice how others are doing until it's too late. All we can do is just hope Sching is in a better place and that his family is able to slowly recover from their loss. I will say about the conspiracies on this case. I saw online discourse about it and I found it fascinating. But for a lot of netizens in China, they said that it was easier to come up with these conspiracies than face the harsh reality that the education system in China is so competitive and so cutthroat it can even drive a 15 year old to do or want to do unthinkable things. And sometimes coming up with these bizarre theories or conspiracies are just a way to cope with the depressing reality of this case. And I can sympathize with that to a degree. But I don't know. What are your thoughts? Please stay safe and I will see you guys on Sunday for the mini-suit. Bye!