Father Kills, Chops Up 12-Year-Old Daughter For Disappointing Family Honor


A pre-teen girl was having a difficult time in school, but instead of doing the normal fatherly thing by helping his daughter, her father did the unthinkable. He killed her, chopped her up, and threw the pieces of her body in a public toilet.

Young Sutain Li’s severed hand was found by a maintenance worker when he went to clean out the toilets in Wenzhou City, in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province. She had been missing for three days, reports the Daily Mirror.

Neighbors found Zhang Li’s behavior odd when his daughter went missing. The psycho-father didn’t even make a show of looking for her, and only reported her missing after his wife put pressure on him to do so. According to the New York Daily News, the police were disturbed by the reports from the community of his bizarre behavior, as well as by the fact that Li “seemed more angry than upset,” leading them to suspect the father as having something to do with her disappearance.

“Neighbors we spoke to said he hadn’t bothered to look for her and seemed quite happy she was gone.”

His happiness was short-lived, because police arrested him after discovering pieces of Sutain’s body in the public restroom across the street from the Li’s house, where Zhang had disposed of his daughter.

Upon questioning, “Daddy Dearest” confessed to murdering his daughter. Sutain was a disappointment to him, he told police. It was all her fault, he said, that he strangled her because she wasn’t good enough and had let down his family honor.

A police spokesman said, “After questioning, he confessed to the killing and blamed it on her for failing to be a good daughter and letting the family down.”

It is unknown how honored the rest of the Li family feels now, knowing that one of their family members brutally murdered a young member of their family because he couldn’t handle his own feelings of disappointment.

China is the home of the one-child policy, where, despite claims by the Chinese government to the contrary, forced abortions of second children still occur. Last year, The Inquisitr reported that 20 members of the Shandong Province Family Commission kicked down the door of one family, and forcibly removed a 6-month pregnant mother to be taken for a forced abortion.

Father Kills Only Daughter

One of the numerous problems that has arisen from China’s one-child policy is that girls are less valued. Many first babies are aborted if they are discovered to be daughters. According to Life Site News, “Infanticide, late-stage abortions, forced abortions, forced sterilizations, sex-selective abortions, and the trafficking and kidnapping of girls are all tools used to further the effective Gendercide of girls [in China].”

“… the policy has also broken families. It instills fear within each family member, and with that fear, people act out in awful ways.”

The Economist reports that the system has resulted in neglect of daughters. There is also tremendous pressure on the one child to be “the perfect child.” Pressure is also felt by parents to produce “the perfect child.”

Could it be that the cultural attitude that values boys more than girls because of the one-child policy led to this father’s disappointment in the child he had, because she failed to live up to his expectations? Was the extreme of that mentality what led him to kill own daughter? Did he believe that, with Sutain gone, he and his wife could try again, this time for a “less disappointing” child?

Zhang Li now faces life in prison for the murder of his daughter Sutain.

[images via Daily Mirror and China Aid]

Share this article: Father Kills, Chops Up 12-Year-Old Daughter For Disappointing Family Honor
More from Inquisitr