A Hong Kong man is accused of murdering his wife and daughter with carbon monoxide as they drove their Mini Cooper, reports The New York Times.
The circumstances of the alleged murder are about as clear as mud. What is known is that in 2015 a passing jogger noticed the wife, Wong Siew-fing, and daughter, Lily Li-ling Khaw, asleep inside of a yellow Mini Cooper as she ran by. Later, that same jogger passed the car again and noticed that the car’s windshield wipers were on even though it wasn’t raining. This seemed suspicious, so the jogger called police. The two were taken to the Prince of Wales hospital and were pronounced dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The husband, Dr. Khaw Kim-sun, worked at this same hospital as an anesthesiologist, as well as being an associate professor in the department of anesthesia and intensive care at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Co-workers at the university reported seeing him filling yoga balls with carbon monoxide the day before his wife’s and daughter’s deaths. One of these yoga balls was found in the car. Another was found under his desk.
Carbon monoxide is a deadly gas not used for anesthesia, but allegedly Dr. Khaw had ordered some for an experiment involving rabbits. Dr. Khaw had reportedly brought two of these carbon monoxide filled yoga balls home the previous night, along with a carbon monoxide detector to warn him if gas levels got too high in his Toyota. How one ball got from the Toyota into the Mini and the other under his desk is unknown.
The plot thickens with the addition of Dr. Khaw’s affair with, Shara Lee, a student of his who had previously tutored the couple’s children in the family home. Lee was also assisting Dr. Khaw with the rabbit experiment. It seems that the wife had known of the affair for five years, and that the marriage was a rocky one, with the couple sleeping in different rooms.
Dr. Khaw pushed his children to excel in everything, despite diagnoses of attention deficit disorder, depression, anxiety, and even dyslexia. He claimed that perhaps his daughter had placed the deadly yoga ball in the car in order to commit suicide, a defense that the prosecution shot down as being untrue.
Still, Dr. Khaw has expressed extreme remorse about the death of his wife and daughter. Whether he is actually responsible for this or not will be up to the courts to decide.