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中文的那篇报道很多事情都没有交待
事情的来龙去脉还是要仔细阅读CTV News:
The judge asked the 23-year-old directly if he understood that pleading guilty to second-degree murder would mean a sentence of life in prison, and Chen replied that he did.
CTV's Peter Murphy reported from the courtroom that the murder was a kidnapping attempt that went wrong.
The gifted Grade Four student was snatched from her home in October 2003 as her parents slept metres away.
Chen, who was in Canada under a student visa that was about to expire, was desperate to remain in the country, Murphy said.
With his funds running out, Chen wanted to secure $25,000 that would pay for a marriage of convenience to keep him in the country, Murphy said.
"And so in October of 2003, he had known the Zhang family because he had visited boarders there, he broke into the house through the window, sneaked up in the middle of the night along the corridor looking for Cecilia to kidnap her."
Murphy said that Chen admitted he came upon the young girl, who was wrapped in a towel, in the corridor.
"Fearing that she was going to scream, he attacked her, wrapped the towel around her head, put his arm around her neck, choked her and dragged her outside to his trunk and put her in," he said.
By the time he got her into the trunk of his car, her body was limp.
Chen drove a short distance away, and when he went to check in on the schoolgirl, she wasn't breathing.
"So this was a botched kidnapping attempt, a very incompetent one as well because he didn't have any plans to take her anywhere. He was hoping that he could just leave her in the trunk, phone the family, get the money, and then let her go," Murphy said.
The brazen early-morning abduction prompted a door-to-door search in the area surrounding the family home in northeast Toronto and extended to an international probe where local investigators were collaborating with police in Asia.
But the search ended in tragedy when her skeletal remains were found five months later in a wooden ravine in Mississauga, west of Toronto.
Chen was arrested and charged on July 21, 2004. At the time of his arrest, police said he knew a woman who had lived at the Zhang home between September 2002 and March 2003.
The Shanghai-born man entered Canada on a student visa on New Year's Day 2001, a month before his 18th birthday.
Chen is being defended by well-known criminal lawyer John Rosen, who represented killer and serial rapist Paul Bernardo.
Neither Cecilia's parents nor Chen's were in the courtroom to hear the guilty plea.
However, Sgt. Todd Moore of Peel region police read a statement on behalf of Cecilia's parents.
"We have experienced a sense of loss that cannot be explained ... each day has been extremely difficult," said the statement from Raymond Zhang and Sherry Xu.
"The fact that there is now a guilty plea by the person accused in this case brings some sense of closure to us, but no act will ever bring our dear Cecilia back to us."
Her parents thanked police officers, friends, Cecilia's school and lawyers for their support, which "constantly inspired us to go on." |
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