#263: 15 Yr Old Student Vanished In Boarding School & Found Mysteriously Dead 3 Months Later On Campus

25:59Like 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.

26:31That's just called de-stressing. 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. That was the best explanation 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.

27:07You 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?

27:28So a month into the search, the Hu family lawyered 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 that the school was trying to bury his case and that Xing was literally buried on campus. They believe that his body was being hidden 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.

28:04In 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. That was like years ago, decades ago. They found his body. so the case you know 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 so oh that was a different case i think there's a lot of okay so there was a shanghai playground i think it was 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 or like bouncing around, hanging out, having fun on top of a dead body.

28:51Like 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 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 fifty thousand dollars they would overpay them to a hundred thousand dollars and then split that extra profit one of the teachers found out they killed it yeah because the construction company and the principal had relations wow yeah now the who family and their legal team felt like there was no way that shing could have just walked off campus without one of the security cameras catching it or even without a witness.

29:43And 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 this 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're all clumped together and each host would cover a particular area of the property. And some hosts might be in the school building.

30:18Some 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 believe that Shing walked out on his 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.

31:08What? It had been like wiped, meaning like we have no idea who signed in to 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 stop 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.

32:01So 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 is 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 to monitor, 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 Xing.

32:32They 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 Xing'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.

33:05Things are not adding up. Mrs. Hu held a press conference, and it was very hard to not sympathize with her. She had Xing at 40 years old, and she just wanted to do everything to give him like the most happy upbringing. And then this happens? Netizens came together, and they start publicly supporting Mrs. Hu. They even push her to start her own TikTok Douyin account. The account was called Xing'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. But of course, you know, 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.

33:49I think everyone understood where she was coming from. It didn't necessarily make it okay. but Mrs. Hu 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 Xing'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.

34:24I 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 heartbreaking. If you see the deterioration, Mrs. Hugh 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 canine teams from the other side of China to come and search the campus.

35:03The 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.

35:36Wait, 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? Netizens started spreading a rumor that Mrs. Hu was offered$300 ,000 to keep quiet about the case. The rumor started because she stopped posting on Douyin. 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 Xing vanished.

36:14They were all cleared by the police. But one of them was an SUV that was caught parked near the cafeteria, near where Xing was walking. And the Hu family believed that this SUV could be the answer to all their questions. Maybe Xing 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 Hu 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?

36:48Finally, near Christmas of 2022, Mrs. Hu posts on Douying. She rants 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 side eye. 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 5.51 p.m., you were seen rushing back to the school.

37:26Did you rush back to the school to mess with the security tapes? Two, why was there an SUV parked near the cafeteria? The SUV wasn't 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 Xing 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 Hu family at this point were believing was that something might have happened to Xing at the school.

38:04Maybe bullies had hit 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, it was 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 tuitions. They need parents to trust this establishment. Five, question to the principal and the SUV driver.

38:36Where 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, okay? 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.

39:13And that video got about like 800 ,000 views in like 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. I mean, 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?

39:49Now, 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. Netizens tagged the Hu 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.

40:28All 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. Wow. Just wanted the views. The family rejected his help and this man lashed out. He went from being pro-HU family to the biggest hater of the WHO family. He went online to allege and accuse 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.

41:06They 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 deepfaked Mrs. Who. Using her videos online, they deepfaked her face and voice and started multiple new accounts where they were using the AI deepfake asking netizens for donations. Wow. 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.

41:40We 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.

42:15But 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 teachers, 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 pass through each day, Xing has been gone for almost 90 days. If traces of Xing 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.

42:51To make matters worse, at the end of the year, at the end of 2022, when Xing's mom went to the campus to search more for her son, they would 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.

43:28Reporters noted that the school was putting up new barbed wire fences along their eastern fence, which I get it, you want to protect your 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 discussing this case, even amongst each other, would be expelled. What? Which feels like they're hiding something to netizens.

44:02Netizens took to Weibo to argue, if we don't find this kid, all of China will come for 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.

44:34But 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 lambskewers. So netizens suspected that he had skipped class to eat lambskewers and that he was kidnapped at a lambskewer shop. They all tried to figure out where all the lambskewer 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.

45:07Like 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 十七, which apparently if you use wordplay, it can also mean period of death. 十七, 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, 7 ,000, and 6 ,000. 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.

45:54But because everybody is getting so wrapped up in these conspiracies, the case becomes bigger than it ever was before. I mean, it was gaining so much attention that it started backfiring 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 release 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 Li Cheng Yu gave his two cents on the case and the media went into this feeding frenzy.

46:34So if you don't know, Cheng 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-ish years to complete it. He was the first Chinese-American to hold the highest position in the state police department in the entire U.S. 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 oj simpson's murder the john bonnet ramsey case he worked on that one the 9-11 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 and he said first of all i've never been to the crime scene so i just want to clear the air i don't want to start false rumors i am just gonna 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 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 leaving the campus on his own like this, very unlikely.

48:07The 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? I've never been to the crime scene, and I can't spread false rumors, but from my experience, I believe that Xing had already been harmed, and it happened inside or around the school premises. 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.

48:51Netizens took that to mean that there is a possibility of this being an inside job. that meant that the personnel and 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. The most 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.

49:27But Shing 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 in fact were reasons behind this, and I don't think they're good reasons. This is not in the police defense. I think this is goofy, and this is like everywhere. Even in the U.S., 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.

50:04The 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 Xing's been for the past three months.

50:39Three months had passed, but because he 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.

51:07Ultimately, January 28th of 2023, the police would have an entirely new problem on their hands. Xing'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 um 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 Xing. They stated that his black zip-up hoodie was still on him.

51:49His 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 like 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 believe 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?

52:23In 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 Shing. His grades 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 Xing 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, Xing starts declining in his performance.

53:00It 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.

53:37Like the amount of pressure they face is astronomical. So Xing 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, okay? 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.

54:15Out 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 in elementary school, he's like, this is the high school I want to go to. he had just missed the cutoff 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 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.

54:51He just wanted to experience something different, something new. So when the semester starts, they get him settled in his room, they meet his roommate, and then tearfully, they leave. Now, they told him, you gotta call us anytime, okay? All the time. Xing 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, Xing was able to hide the truth from his parents. The fact that he wasn't doing well. Not just academically, but mentally. Xing was in a precarious situation.

55:26So 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 cutoff, he was constantly falling short and ranking the absolute lowest in all of his classes. So you're saying like, let's say there's a thousand 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 yeah isn't that like sad and 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 the top of that class right yeah so it was really hard for him and unlike a lot of those kids that went to the school xing 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.

56:28I'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, Xing was allegedly so frustrated and helpless. He told his mom all of these things. He just asked, can I please just drop out? Xing, you've only been there for a couple months. And of course, it's going to be hard.

57:02It's going to be an adjustment period, but you've always been a good student. You're going to get better with time. Don't drop out. Just give it a little while longer. Xing 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 Shing was not acting like himself.

57:33I 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. Like, when 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.

58:05That was the beginning of October, like the first week. October 14th, he went missing. So they're confused. I mean, Xing's family, they're confused at how quickly things might have developed. it didn't even cross their minds that he could have hurt 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. Then 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.

58:41Witnesses 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, yeah, 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?

59:11Where's the note? Things just aren't adding up. you guys the recording pen oh we're gonna 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?

59:46That inefficient? And what about the smell? Trees don't hide decomp smell. The police stated that the body's decomp 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 Xing was killed elsewhere and his body was brought here after the search parties were done. Then there were other things. Shing'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.

1:00:24So imagine you have a hoodie 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 crew neck yeah what 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.

1:01:03And 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 weight for not just his death, but for months and months. We don't know Xing's exact weight, 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. Netizens started to scream online, we need to figure out where his feet were pointed. Netizens argued that if his feet were pointed downwards, like his toes were pointing to the ground, then he must have died via hanging.

1:01:39But if they were parallel to the floor, then he might have died in a separate position when rigor mortis had set in 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.

1:02:18The evil chemistry teacher. Let's call him Teacher B. Teacher B was not only Xing's chemistry teacher, but also his homeroom teacher. So this is going to be the teacher that is most in tune with Shing. Like the most, they're working side by side. The internet hates this guy. A lot of it is pretty privileged. 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.

1:02:53But 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 chem and he kept his homeroom 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 shing's body and maybe he did it to prove like this guy seemed egotistical that's what people said maybe he did it to prove that he could commit the absolute perfect murder other evidence quote evidence if you will to back it up is uh shing's family came to record at the school to show the public that nothing was being done about their son.

1:03:53So 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. You know, 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.

1:04:23You 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. Netizens said, as Xing's homeroom 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 netizens 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 who 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 you know i imagine if someone went then why would you delete that then right but the police are saying it wasn't deleted it was faulty like it was a glitch okay yeah the system glitched okay so i I mean, you could argue both ways and it would make complete sense both ways.

1:06:11So it's very hard to say. Now, they allegedly stayed there until about 2 a.m. the next day about the time that Xing's father first got to the school. Now, you could argue that's a lot of time to delete and alter footage and come up with a 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 shing or headlines that read shing 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 which is pretty privilege then you have the principal theory.

1:07:06So remember the principal is the chemistry teacher's uncle? So these two theories are about to merge. According to some of Xing's classmates, Xing had a girlfriend and there was a rumor that Xing 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. Classmates said Xing saw the principal quickly pull up his pants and push past Xing as left the room. His girlfriend started crying and told him through her sobs that she had been R-worded by the principal. Allegedly, the next day, the principal had a little chat with Sheen 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.

1:07:49So 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 Shing had called his mom on that day crying and just said that he really wanted to cry, but no matter how much she asked, he refused to tell her the reason why. The two of them, potentially the theory is, plotted for Shing 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 the vice principal.

1:08:28Other things that support this theory was that there were rumors that this school had mistreated students and led 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 Xing 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.

1:09:02She was essayed 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 Xing, 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 Shing disappeared, there was a white blanket that fell down the stairs.

1:09:39And 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 thrown this white blanket over Shing and thrown him down the stairs and then cut off the CCTV cameras and then disposed of his body. Personally, the strange shape to it, the way it falls, it's weird.

1:10:10But we've already seen Shing 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 panda blood theory. This is perhaps the most outlandish theory, but there was a rumor that Xing had a very, very rare blood type. The rumor was that only 1 % of the population had this rare blood type, hence the name panda 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.

1:10:46Why 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, netizens 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.

1:11:25And if you have the RH protein, you're typically a positive blood type. Like you're either A +, B +, AB +, or O+. So it's not really rare at all. So panda blood is not really a thing. Yeah. I mean, I believe there are rarer blood types. Like O blood is highly sought after because, you know. Yeah, but it's common. Yeah. Some people said it was for his organs. but I mean you know you would imagine then 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 um 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 p.m 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.

1:12:39What 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 p.m. It speculated that this was when he took his own life. And he said, there's no more meaning. It's almost midnight. I might 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 meaning in life. Fellow students and teachers came to state that he expressed on multiple occasions that he was stressed.

1:13:24He had insomnia. He was struggling to stay focused on his studies. It's believed that the tipping point for 15-year-old Ching 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.

1:13:58You know, 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. And 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.

1:14:36I 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 Xing was a people pleaser. He was introverted. He had a very delicate personality where he was very, like 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.

1:15:16And 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. An autopsy was released that showed Ching'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 ass like 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 um 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.

1:16:50Now, 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 guard just let them know that nobody had gone in or out of the sheds 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 who family they were devastated at their loss and i'm sure there's a lot of emotions to unpack.

1:17:38I think with cases like this, there's like a lot of guilt. It didn't help that the netizens turned on the Hu family. A lot of netizens completely switched sides and went from giving support to Mrs. Hu 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? Xing'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.

1:18:14The online hate got so bad that Mrs. Hu 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. You know, 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.

1:18:50It shows their dissatisfaction in certain areas of their life. And in Xing'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 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.

1:19:28All 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 Xing 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 then 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.

1:20:04And 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-sode. Bye