A tragic and horrifiying story emerged from the Boston suburbs this week. Fang Chi Xue, a 38-year-old woman living in Quincy, Massachusetts, allegedly killed her nine-year-old daughter, then turned slit her own wrists. Many accounts indicate that she then turned the knife on her own pregnant belly, stabbing until she had killed her unborn child. (her court-appointed lawyer says that's not the case). She's currently hospitalized at Boston Medical Center, undergoing a psychiatric evaluation that clearly comes too late. Another daughter, 14, ran away and survived the attack; she claims her mother tried to strangle her.
The family had been investigated by social services back in February after reports surfaced that Fang had tried to kill her unborn child by drinking a toxic substance. Despite worries that she could be a danger to the other children in the home, authorities did not remove them. Fang will be held without bail at the Worcester State Hospital pending arraignment, but the current charges of murder and attempted murder could be raised to a double count of murder if it's determined that the fetus was capable of surviving outside the womb.
Some reports have claimed that Fang's husband had been having an affair, and that she had expressed fears he would leave her and take the children, but there's no authoritative story on the cause of the crime. And crimes like this are too horrifying to really be explained, it seems to me. How can anyone ever understand why someone would kill her children? Whatever stresses Fang faced, surely the deaths of her daughter and unborn child offer no solution, only unimaginable and unendurable pain.
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Why Are We So Shocked When Women Kill?
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