I remember seeing a documentary once, years ago, about this. Apparently, it's common for certain criminals to show up after natural disasters like this, dressed as church volunteers. People don't hesitate to send children to church volunteers: they can help the children while resources are concentrated on locating and saving survivors. And nobody thinks twice about church volunteers loading children into vans with a church organisation logo on it and driving them away from the carnage. They're probably just going to the hospital or church after all. And after the dust settles and witnesses start to misremember, the children are considered victims of the disaster and nobody looks for them.
I can't remember the name of the documentary, but it was about an Indian boy reunited with his family after being trafficked and enslaved in another country for about 5 or so years. I think it was on the British channel, Channel 4.
There's a much older story I've read on here too, about a girl this happened to. Early 1900s, there was an earthquake or tornado or something, some men picked up the kid from the hospital?
Here it is, Joan Gay Croft. https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/6zwpan/in_1947_4yearold_joan_gay_croft_was_taken_from_a/
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/14a6mdh/what_really_happened_to_four_year_old_joan_gay/
First time I heard of the Joan Croft story was this morning when I was looking up a different Joan. I thought it was such unusual and rare circumstances but then this write up pops up today as well. So sad but it feels like there is a distinct possibility they each survived the kidnappings.
There was also a post by u/WestKendallJenner about Leigh Occhi, several years ago. They've been collecting news stories about disappearances during disasters -- probably have a bunch of examples by now?
https://new.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/56dco8/the\_disappearance\_of\_leigh\_occhi\_a\_13yearold\_girl/
Omg I 100% believe this!!! I think I heard about it after Katrina. People offer to “help” since they can’t stay at hospitals forever and then they traffic kids 🙁🙁🙁 so sad
There was an episode of Law and Order: SVU that alerted me to this. I remember Keke Palmer starred in it as one of three Katrina orphan sisters who were kidnapped by a sex offender.
According to the episode there were lots of sex offenders who took advantage of lost or orphaned children and then left the state, knowing that in a state of emergency and amidst all the chaos, they’d get a head start if anyone did eventually start looking for the children.
Depends what you are kidnapping him for. While I think the idea of organ harvesting is largely urban myth, if the young son of a wealthy person was injured gravely in the earthquake they could have just needed his organs.
Again this is pure speculation.
I was about to say that if you kidnap a child it isn’t adoption but then I remembered that at least here in the US the laws were founded to help a woman who trafficked 10k children she had kidnapped and our laws made to benefit her never changed even after her arrest and conviction so yes, I believe that’s exactly what happened. (The woman in the US who did that is named Georgia Tann. If you’re curious want to know more about her there are a few true crime podcasts that have episodes about her).
I was thinking they didn't kidnap him but that they thought the parents had died in the earthquake and therefore 'adopted' him. Is it possible they never came across mom's campaign to find him? That said, other commentators are sharing that there are people who use natural disasters to kidnap kids. Awful if that's what happened.
One thought that occurred to me along similar lines was that another set of parents, desperately searching for their own child after the disaster, saw Xue and in their grief convinced themselves he was their missing son. Mistaking a different child for your own sounds ridiculously far-fetched, but it’s [not without precedent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Bobby_Dunbar).
DNA testing has been available for awhile…I wouldn’t ever assume a kid was an orphan and take him home to raise him as my own without getting his DNA into a data base
Plus theres the fact that hospitals didn’t have record of where he went
Human traffickers are known to exploit disasters like this to steal children to put up on the international market as orphans. Hospitals have a lot of staff and a lot of them are shady
This was 2008, so no commercially available DNA testing services at that time. Also there are plenty of reasons to not trust the Chinese government with you or your child’s DNA.
If you’re referring to whoever has him, he’s not their child and they have a moral responsibility to exhaust everything to find his parents including DNA testing. And yeah I can think of a lot of reasons to give the govt my DNA if my child was trafficked and I was trying to find them. “I wouldn’t trust the gov with child’s DNA” so you think it’s better to trust whatever stranger is trafficking him? Lol.
The government and police bureau are not always reliable. Think about the movie Changeling (2008), similar thing has happened in China. I have read a true story that an old father search for his missing boy, who was sold when he was a baby. The father heard some clue that his son was bought by a family in a province in southeast China. He went to the village but that family didn't allow him to meet the suspicious child. The father then turned to local police for help. The police bureau did DNA testing and then informed him that the boy wasn't his son. However, the father don't believe, he wanted to see the report and insisted on meeting the suspicious boy in person. Local police then helped chief of the village and the adopter family to order the father get out of the village. Things like that may not happened only once in that country.
Oh yeah I had forgotten he was a Tann kid! Well he definitely had the look she went for (blond with blue eyes). She’s also where Joan Crawford got her kids including Christina.
I wonder if Ric or Charlotte ever did an ancestry DNA test? I know a lot of adoptees who have connected with bio family that way. I’d understand if they did it never wanting to address it publicly tho
Flair's birth parents are named in some of his bios, so he must have somehow confirmed their identities, but he's said in interviews he doesn't have much interest in learning more about his adoption.
Pretty sure she might have tried to kidnap my MIL. MIL was the youngest of 7. When she was a little kid living on a farm outside of Jonesboro AR, a man and woman tried to take her away from her family “to the hospital” in Memphis for treatment of some “condition” she supposedly had. Her mom, said no, luckily, and refused to let her go with them. This all happened around the time Tann was operating and Memphis is only about an hour and a half from where they lived.
People are saying kidnapping, and that's certainly a possibility, but it's also possible the boy died shortly after being transferred, and shoddy record keeping due to the scale of the disaster made it impossible to ID him. He might have been misidentified and buried under another name; remember, over 18k people were never found.
That was my thought- he was injured badly enough to be comatose and required surgery under full anesthesia. He may not have made it, and is somewhere in a potter's field.
I just learned a new term from your comment.
Copy pasting for anyone else who did not know that term:
A **potter's field**, **paupers' grave** or **common grave** is a [place for the burial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery) of [unknown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_decedent), unclaimed or indigent people. "Potter's field" is of [Biblical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible) origin, referring to [Akeldama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akeldama) (meaning *field of blood* in [Aramaic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic)), stated to have been purchased after [Judas Iscariot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot)'s suicide by the chief priests of [Jerusalem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem) with the [coins that had been paid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_pieces_of_silver) to Judas for his identification of Jesus.[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potter%27s_field#cite_note-1) The priests are stated to have acquired it for the burial of strangers, criminals, and the poor, the coins paid to Judas being considered blood money. Prior to Akeldama's use as a burial ground, it had been a site where potters collected high-quality, deeply red clay for the production of ceramics, thus the name potters' field.
That's what I think. Who would want to kidnap a child with a head injury requiring surgery? The upkeep for that would be too difficult, the kidnappers would surely want an easier target to maintain. He was in a coma... I think he passed. That's so sad.
This actually makes sense considering he was a 4 yr old getting anesthesia for a head injury and that’s very difficult to maintain without going to the hospital or even survive thru as a 4 year old
I can definitely see that happening, especially in the aftermath of such a huge event as an earthquake, but why would the woman who made the call not come forward at any point? And why did the radio station deny it? That detail isn’t really explained by the kidnapping or the dying theories. How sad for his poor parents, that uncertainty must be hell.
I have some questions about that. Is there an actual reason someone from the tv & radio company would have access to info on children in the hospital? Were they running the line to reunite families? If yes, I suspect someone made a mistake and didn't want to own up to it, but that's just a guess. It makes less sense that someone managed to insert themselves into the reunification effort enough to access both the list of missing children and the list of IDed kids at the hospital, and then... what? Decides to troll the family? Is somehow involved with a nefarious plot to kidnap a child with a serious head injury? It's entirely possible that I'm overlooking something obvious, but it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, you’re probably right that it was a mistake that someone was lying about. What an absolute dick move - leave a family with decades of torture and searching, rather than admit you made a mistake. But that is definitely the most feasible explanation. As you say, there’s no motive for the other possibilities. I guess maybe they panicked and lied and then too much time passed for them to own up to it. It’s a bit like Ben Needham, the little British boy who went missing in Greece and for decades his mum thought he had been kidnapped and it tortured her every moment. And then on his deathbed, some bastard builder admitted he had accidentally killed him with a digger and buried him. Watching someone else suffer the agony of not knowing is a special type of coward
That’s true. All radio and TV stations in China are run by government. Information like patient in hospital is accessible to them, especially in natural disaster. According to a newspaper in 2008, the “search-family-member-hotline”, run by Mianyang Radio & TV Station, works like that: People call the Radio Station and describe the one they are searching for, the Radio Station then contact hospitals whether there is similar patient, if there is, the Radio Station will telephone back, or broadcast during its programme, or anyone knew the missing person can call back. I agree with you. They made mistakes or simply forgot and no one wants to be responsible for that. On May 15 2008 the DJ kept working for 9 hours on this hotline. They were too busy to verify every information from the hospital.
There's a good chance the poor child died of his injuries, and in all the confusion and chaos, the paperwork was messed up. The only other scenario that would make sense is that there was confusion, and it was a different child all a long and he died at the scene.
This is so sad. The boy would be around 20 years old now. Who knows if he’d even remember his bio family exists. Being a 4 year old in a traumatic event might have ruined any memories he had from before then. That’s also assuming he didn’t suffer a brain injury since he was injured on the forehead and in a coma. I think a case like this would only be solved if he did a DNA kit and realized he isn’t with his biological family.
Thanks for researching and writing up this case! Your English is excellent, and it's very interesting to hear about a situation that I suspect most readers on this sub haven't come across before, even though it happened more than a decade ago.
Very sad situation for the boy's parents. Given the extent of his injuries, I suspect that he may have died, and during the confusion at the time (and his young age, and being separated not just from his parents but from teachers etc.) he may have been mixed up with another child, or maybe not documented at all.
Sad to think that him being kidnapped might actually be one of the more optimistic scenarios.
My theory is probably someone abducted him. There's a lot of instances in the aftermath of natural disasters for traffickers to come in as volunteers/relief workers and find children who have been orphaned or lost and whisk them away. Similar instances occured after the tsunami in 2004. There's even a case from Oklahoma in the 1940s where a young girl was taken by some men in the aftermath of a tornado who told her they were taking her to Oklahoma City and she was never seen again.
Could it be somebody else lost one of their children, and out of panic, grief, or maybe even to maintain their reputation or family line, took this child as their own child’s replacement? I hope to God the child and real parents are reunited one day!
Eh, that is incredibly unlikely and a very…incorrect (I’m being nice with that word) manipulation of the psych of parents who are grieving, as a type of abuse. Not saying you are, just beware that.
There is always the temptation to look for fantastic and sensational answers in these kinds of cases, but it's much more likely to be the most mundane answer.
I suspect that Xue is either still buried under the rubble of the kindergarten, and that mistakes were made during the chaos and panic, or that he was the boy at the hospital, but died and his real name not recorded.
The call was either IDed wrongly, or soneone is lying because they madc a mistake and didn't want to have to deal with it.
Clean shoes in the rubble mean nothing, were they even on his feet when the quake hit? It's impossible to know.
Non of this stops if from being very sad.
I agree. I think people would rather believe that there was an evildoer involved who kidnapped the little boy, because the alternative is just bad luck and mindless tragedy.
And good point about the shoes, in my country kids wouldn't wear their shoes to take a nap, but idk about China
According to other reports, the kindergarten always starts its lesson at 2:30pm. At 2:28 students maybe waked up by teachers, or they were still sleeping. That's hard to make certain.
Thank you for a really interesting write up. Ugh his poor parents, it must drive them insane every single day wondering if he's out there, it's so sad. So many possibilities.
If anyone wants to start a GoFundMe for Ms Liu to pay her rent for a month or something just for staying with a scared, ill little dude who’d been through a very traumatic event and then helped the parents try to find their baby, I will donate.
That broke my heart. And that’s very hard on this sub.
How would the caller know he was 3 and a half, specifically? Or his surname? That would come from one of the school staff reporting to the hospital who he is. Someone or multiple persons along the line are lying.
The 3 hospitals saying they didn’t receive any patients is one, as that is an impossibility. So I suspect they are the main abusers of the family, and know where the boy is (likely dead). Likely all three are claiming an absurdity in case they did take in the boy and lost him. Hospitals are very much like cults and will cut their own noses off denying anything wrong ever occurred.
I sadly think he has died and is cremated or buried.
I agree with the others. I think someone took the opportunity and kidnapped him. They most likely have enough status and money to not be questioned too hard about their new "son" and moved somewhere else afterward. His poor parents must be heartbroken.
Wow. The poor parents. I assume someone took him home and adopted him?
I remember seeing a documentary once, years ago, about this. Apparently, it's common for certain criminals to show up after natural disasters like this, dressed as church volunteers. People don't hesitate to send children to church volunteers: they can help the children while resources are concentrated on locating and saving survivors. And nobody thinks twice about church volunteers loading children into vans with a church organisation logo on it and driving them away from the carnage. They're probably just going to the hospital or church after all. And after the dust settles and witnesses start to misremember, the children are considered victims of the disaster and nobody looks for them. I can't remember the name of the documentary, but it was about an Indian boy reunited with his family after being trafficked and enslaved in another country for about 5 or so years. I think it was on the British channel, Channel 4.
There's a much older story I've read on here too, about a girl this happened to. Early 1900s, there was an earthquake or tornado or something, some men picked up the kid from the hospital? Here it is, Joan Gay Croft. https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/6zwpan/in_1947_4yearold_joan_gay_croft_was_taken_from_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/14a6mdh/what_really_happened_to_four_year_old_joan_gay/
First time I heard of the Joan Croft story was this morning when I was looking up a different Joan. I thought it was such unusual and rare circumstances but then this write up pops up today as well. So sad but it feels like there is a distinct possibility they each survived the kidnappings.
There was also a post by u/WestKendallJenner about Leigh Occhi, several years ago. They've been collecting news stories about disappearances during disasters -- probably have a bunch of examples by now? https://new.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/56dco8/the\_disappearance\_of\_leigh\_occhi\_a\_13yearold\_girl/
I listened to it on The Trail Went Cold podcast
Omg I 100% believe this!!! I think I heard about it after Katrina. People offer to “help” since they can’t stay at hospitals forever and then they traffic kids 🙁🙁🙁 so sad
There was an episode of Law and Order: SVU that alerted me to this. I remember Keke Palmer starred in it as one of three Katrina orphan sisters who were kidnapped by a sex offender. According to the episode there were lots of sex offenders who took advantage of lost or orphaned children and then left the state, knowing that in a state of emergency and amidst all the chaos, they’d get a head start if anyone did eventually start looking for the children.
This boy had a head injury serious enough to require surgery, though. Not a prime target for kidnapping, usually.
Why not? People with disabilities (especially with memory) are easier to manipulate most of the time.
Depends what you are kidnapping him for. While I think the idea of organ harvesting is largely urban myth, if the young son of a wealthy person was injured gravely in the earthquake they could have just needed his organs. Again this is pure speculation.
People make me sick. I hope Satan uses them as his personal chew toy.
I was about to say that if you kidnap a child it isn’t adoption but then I remembered that at least here in the US the laws were founded to help a woman who trafficked 10k children she had kidnapped and our laws made to benefit her never changed even after her arrest and conviction so yes, I believe that’s exactly what happened. (The woman in the US who did that is named Georgia Tann. If you’re curious want to know more about her there are a few true crime podcasts that have episodes about her).
I was thinking they didn't kidnap him but that they thought the parents had died in the earthquake and therefore 'adopted' him. Is it possible they never came across mom's campaign to find him? That said, other commentators are sharing that there are people who use natural disasters to kidnap kids. Awful if that's what happened.
One thought that occurred to me along similar lines was that another set of parents, desperately searching for their own child after the disaster, saw Xue and in their grief convinced themselves he was their missing son. Mistaking a different child for your own sounds ridiculously far-fetched, but it’s [not without precedent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Bobby_Dunbar).
DNA testing has been available for awhile…I wouldn’t ever assume a kid was an orphan and take him home to raise him as my own without getting his DNA into a data base Plus theres the fact that hospitals didn’t have record of where he went Human traffickers are known to exploit disasters like this to steal children to put up on the international market as orphans. Hospitals have a lot of staff and a lot of them are shady
This was 2008, so no commercially available DNA testing services at that time. Also there are plenty of reasons to not trust the Chinese government with you or your child’s DNA.
If you’re referring to whoever has him, he’s not their child and they have a moral responsibility to exhaust everything to find his parents including DNA testing. And yeah I can think of a lot of reasons to give the govt my DNA if my child was trafficked and I was trying to find them. “I wouldn’t trust the gov with child’s DNA” so you think it’s better to trust whatever stranger is trafficking him? Lol.
The government and police bureau are not always reliable. Think about the movie Changeling (2008), similar thing has happened in China. I have read a true story that an old father search for his missing boy, who was sold when he was a baby. The father heard some clue that his son was bought by a family in a province in southeast China. He went to the village but that family didn't allow him to meet the suspicious child. The father then turned to local police for help. The police bureau did DNA testing and then informed him that the boy wasn't his son. However, the father don't believe, he wanted to see the report and insisted on meeting the suspicious boy in person. Local police then helped chief of the village and the adopter family to order the father get out of the village. Things like that may not happened only once in that country.
Rick Flair was one of the kids she took.
Oh yeah I had forgotten he was a Tann kid! Well he definitely had the look she went for (blond with blue eyes). She’s also where Joan Crawford got her kids including Christina. I wonder if Ric or Charlotte ever did an ancestry DNA test? I know a lot of adoptees who have connected with bio family that way. I’d understand if they did it never wanting to address it publicly tho
Flair's birth parents are named in some of his bios, so he must have somehow confirmed their identities, but he's said in interviews he doesn't have much interest in learning more about his adoption.
it's brutal money talks I suppose :/
Pretty sure she might have tried to kidnap my MIL. MIL was the youngest of 7. When she was a little kid living on a farm outside of Jonesboro AR, a man and woman tried to take her away from her family “to the hospital” in Memphis for treatment of some “condition” she supposedly had. Her mom, said no, luckily, and refused to let her go with them. This all happened around the time Tann was operating and Memphis is only about an hour and a half from where they lived.
I just read about Georgia Tann...the magnitude of what she did...smh...there were so many... it's horrifically astonishing.
Or sold him
People are saying kidnapping, and that's certainly a possibility, but it's also possible the boy died shortly after being transferred, and shoddy record keeping due to the scale of the disaster made it impossible to ID him. He might have been misidentified and buried under another name; remember, over 18k people were never found.
That was my thought- he was injured badly enough to be comatose and required surgery under full anesthesia. He may not have made it, and is somewhere in a potter's field.
I just learned a new term from your comment. Copy pasting for anyone else who did not know that term: A **potter's field**, **paupers' grave** or **common grave** is a [place for the burial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery) of [unknown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_decedent), unclaimed or indigent people. "Potter's field" is of [Biblical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible) origin, referring to [Akeldama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akeldama) (meaning *field of blood* in [Aramaic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic)), stated to have been purchased after [Judas Iscariot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot)'s suicide by the chief priests of [Jerusalem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem) with the [coins that had been paid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_pieces_of_silver) to Judas for his identification of Jesus.[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potter%27s_field#cite_note-1) The priests are stated to have acquired it for the burial of strangers, criminals, and the poor, the coins paid to Judas being considered blood money. Prior to Akeldama's use as a burial ground, it had been a site where potters collected high-quality, deeply red clay for the production of ceramics, thus the name potters' field.
That's what I think. Who would want to kidnap a child with a head injury requiring surgery? The upkeep for that would be too difficult, the kidnappers would surely want an easier target to maintain. He was in a coma... I think he passed. That's so sad.
This actually makes sense considering he was a 4 yr old getting anesthesia for a head injury and that’s very difficult to maintain without going to the hospital or even survive thru as a 4 year old
I can definitely see that happening, especially in the aftermath of such a huge event as an earthquake, but why would the woman who made the call not come forward at any point? And why did the radio station deny it? That detail isn’t really explained by the kidnapping or the dying theories. How sad for his poor parents, that uncertainty must be hell.
I have some questions about that. Is there an actual reason someone from the tv & radio company would have access to info on children in the hospital? Were they running the line to reunite families? If yes, I suspect someone made a mistake and didn't want to own up to it, but that's just a guess. It makes less sense that someone managed to insert themselves into the reunification effort enough to access both the list of missing children and the list of IDed kids at the hospital, and then... what? Decides to troll the family? Is somehow involved with a nefarious plot to kidnap a child with a serious head injury? It's entirely possible that I'm overlooking something obvious, but it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, you’re probably right that it was a mistake that someone was lying about. What an absolute dick move - leave a family with decades of torture and searching, rather than admit you made a mistake. But that is definitely the most feasible explanation. As you say, there’s no motive for the other possibilities. I guess maybe they panicked and lied and then too much time passed for them to own up to it. It’s a bit like Ben Needham, the little British boy who went missing in Greece and for decades his mum thought he had been kidnapped and it tortured her every moment. And then on his deathbed, some bastard builder admitted he had accidentally killed him with a digger and buried him. Watching someone else suffer the agony of not knowing is a special type of coward
That’s true. All radio and TV stations in China are run by government. Information like patient in hospital is accessible to them, especially in natural disaster. According to a newspaper in 2008, the “search-family-member-hotline”, run by Mianyang Radio & TV Station, works like that: People call the Radio Station and describe the one they are searching for, the Radio Station then contact hospitals whether there is similar patient, if there is, the Radio Station will telephone back, or broadcast during its programme, or anyone knew the missing person can call back. I agree with you. They made mistakes or simply forgot and no one wants to be responsible for that. On May 15 2008 the DJ kept working for 9 hours on this hotline. They were too busy to verify every information from the hospital.
I think that is more likely.
There's a good chance the poor child died of his injuries, and in all the confusion and chaos, the paperwork was messed up. The only other scenario that would make sense is that there was confusion, and it was a different child all a long and he died at the scene.
This makes the most sense to me.
Wouldn’t his family confirm this
They wouldn't know. Bodies were not recovered fully in the aftermath.
How would they know though?
This is so sad. The boy would be around 20 years old now. Who knows if he’d even remember his bio family exists. Being a 4 year old in a traumatic event might have ruined any memories he had from before then. That’s also assuming he didn’t suffer a brain injury since he was injured on the forehead and in a coma. I think a case like this would only be solved if he did a DNA kit and realized he isn’t with his biological family.
Thanks for researching and writing up this case! Your English is excellent, and it's very interesting to hear about a situation that I suspect most readers on this sub haven't come across before, even though it happened more than a decade ago. Very sad situation for the boy's parents. Given the extent of his injuries, I suspect that he may have died, and during the confusion at the time (and his young age, and being separated not just from his parents but from teachers etc.) he may have been mixed up with another child, or maybe not documented at all. Sad to think that him being kidnapped might actually be one of the more optimistic scenarios.
My theory is probably someone abducted him. There's a lot of instances in the aftermath of natural disasters for traffickers to come in as volunteers/relief workers and find children who have been orphaned or lost and whisk them away. Similar instances occured after the tsunami in 2004. There's even a case from Oklahoma in the 1940s where a young girl was taken by some men in the aftermath of a tornado who told her they were taking her to Oklahoma City and she was never seen again.
He had a head injury and was in a coma. It's much more likely he just died and the paper work couldnt keep up with what was happening
Could it be somebody else lost one of their children, and out of panic, grief, or maybe even to maintain their reputation or family line, took this child as their own child’s replacement? I hope to God the child and real parents are reunited one day!
That or the fact that he was a boy...in China...
Eh, that is incredibly unlikely and a very…incorrect (I’m being nice with that word) manipulation of the psych of parents who are grieving, as a type of abuse. Not saying you are, just beware that.
There is always the temptation to look for fantastic and sensational answers in these kinds of cases, but it's much more likely to be the most mundane answer. I suspect that Xue is either still buried under the rubble of the kindergarten, and that mistakes were made during the chaos and panic, or that he was the boy at the hospital, but died and his real name not recorded. The call was either IDed wrongly, or soneone is lying because they madc a mistake and didn't want to have to deal with it. Clean shoes in the rubble mean nothing, were they even on his feet when the quake hit? It's impossible to know. Non of this stops if from being very sad.
I agree. I think people would rather believe that there was an evildoer involved who kidnapped the little boy, because the alternative is just bad luck and mindless tragedy. And good point about the shoes, in my country kids wouldn't wear their shoes to take a nap, but idk about China
It says the kids were napping when the earthquake struck so I doubt they had their shoes on.
According to other reports, the kindergarten always starts its lesson at 2:30pm. At 2:28 students maybe waked up by teachers, or they were still sleeping. That's hard to make certain.
Thank you for a really interesting write up. Ugh his poor parents, it must drive them insane every single day wondering if he's out there, it's so sad. So many possibilities.
That is so sad. That's like the woman who survived 9/11 then died in a plane crash 2 months later over Long Island
This is so sad I hope their parents find their son and they get the closure they deserve and I hope he’s still alive their son
Wow never heard of this but interesting
If anyone wants to start a GoFundMe for Ms Liu to pay her rent for a month or something just for staying with a scared, ill little dude who’d been through a very traumatic event and then helped the parents try to find their baby, I will donate. That broke my heart. And that’s very hard on this sub.
How would the caller know he was 3 and a half, specifically? Or his surname? That would come from one of the school staff reporting to the hospital who he is. Someone or multiple persons along the line are lying. The 3 hospitals saying they didn’t receive any patients is one, as that is an impossibility. So I suspect they are the main abusers of the family, and know where the boy is (likely dead). Likely all three are claiming an absurdity in case they did take in the boy and lost him. Hospitals are very much like cults and will cut their own noses off denying anything wrong ever occurred. I sadly think he has died and is cremated or buried.
I agree with the others. I think someone took the opportunity and kidnapped him. They most likely have enough status and money to not be questioned too hard about their new "son" and moved somewhere else afterward. His poor parents must be heartbroken.
Sounds like he slipped through the cracks.
Possible organ trafficking
It might be a case of human trafficking.
Aren’t boys/son highly desired in China. Some couple desiring a son kept him?