Kids don’t feel safe after failed kidnapping plot

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This article was published 04/11/2023 (798 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG — Three children targeted for abduction by two of their parents’ former employees told a court they no longer feel safe in public and fear they may be snatched off the street one day.

“Sometimes when I am in public… I feel they are somewhere near me, I fear they could come out of nowhere,” a now 15-year-old boy wrote in a victim impact statement read out in court Thursday.

“I am scared this will happen again,” wrote the boy’s younger sister, who was just nine years old at the time of the May 2021 incident. “I worry that they will take me away from my family. I worry that they will find my new school.”

Xiaohui Ji, 33, and Guofeng Zhang, 34, were convicted after trial of attempted child abduction, extortion and criminal harassment in a case that revolved around the men’s attempts to force the children’s parents to repay 270,000 Chinese yuan (approximately C$50,000) they alleged had been taken from them in an immigration scam.

“The impact on the victims in this case cannot be overstated,” Crown attorney Mike Himmelman told provincial court Judge Cindy Sholdice, recommending each man be sentenced to five years in prison. “The Crown considers it highly aggravating that the two co-accused made a deliberate choice to use their former employer’s children for the purpose of financial gain.”

Ji and Zhang immigrated to Canada in 2017 and will face likely deportation upon completion of their sentences.

Defence lawyers Omri Plotnik, representing Ji, and Greg Sacks, representing Zhang, urged Sholdice to consider sentences that included periods of house arrest and no more than six months in jail, leaving them eligible to appeal a deportation order.

Court heard evidence at trial Ji and Zhang, who already knew each other and were friends, began working at a restaurant owned by the children’s parents in early 2018. The Free Press is not naming the restaurant or the parents, as it would identify the child victims, whose names cannot be disclosed under terms of a publication ban.

“At the beginning of their employment, things were good,” Sholdice said at a hearing delivering her verdict last June. The children’s mother testified she considered the two men part of the family and they would often eat dinner together at the restaurant.

But the men soon began to feel their employers were taking advantage of them, having them drop off and pick up their children from school and music lessons, and other “unrelated errands.”

“Both believed they weren’t being paid for the hours they worked and said they had difficulty keeping up with the expenditures placed on them,” Sholdice said.

Both men hoped to secure permanent residency status, which required they work for the same employer for at least six months. Ji, testifying through an interpreter, said his English was too poor to find another job, while Zhang said he didn’t want to start the permanent residency process over again.

Court heard Ji transferred 120,000 yuan into the the mother’s bank account in the fall of 2018 and Zhang deposited another 150,000 yuan (half of it borrowed from Ji) a couple of months later. The men testified the money was part of an “immigration scam” to keep their employment long enough to secure permanent residency status and to assist the mother with some “financial problems.”

The mother denied taking the money as part of a scam, testifying the men “willingly” provided the money as an investment in a new grocery business. As the business had not done well, there was no return on the investment to give the men, the mother testified.

Ji quit the restaurant in July 2019, and Zhang left the following November. In April 2021 the men hatched a “multi-step plan” to get their money back, Sholdice said.

Court heard the city was still under pandemic lockdown April 15 when Ji visited the restaurant shortly before midnight, entering through a back door reserved for employees, and confronted the mother in the kitchen.

“The evidence is clear Mr. Ji told (her) that it was time to pay the money back and that he wanted it paid (in three days) and that if it wasn’t he would take further action,” Sholdice said. The woman and her husband gave Ji no indication they would pay him and told him to leave.

The following month, Ji and Zhang visited a friend of the woman, another restaurant owner, and appealed to her to intervene, threatening to expose their former employer on the internet or at the children’s school. Again they were rebuffed.

On May 11, one day before schools were set to close for online classes, Ji and Zhang staked out the children’s schools — Ji at the school of the two young daughters, and Zhang at their older brother’s school — waiting for them to leave for the day.

The girls both testified Ji told them their mother had sent him to pick them up and that Ji pulled on the older girl’s arm, saying, “Let’s go.”

The girls’ father arrived in his car and honked his horn, at which point Ji walked away.

Around the same time, Zhang approached the boy at a different school, telling him the same story. The boy, suspicious, made up a story about having a music lesson and walked away and called his mother, who told him to take a picture of the man, which he did.

The boy “was very scared and did not feel comfortable taking photos as he did not know what Mr. Zhang was capable of doing to him, but he took the photo anyway without Zhang knowing,” Sholdice said.

Both Ji and Zhang denied telling the children they were there to pick them up, claiming they only wanted the names of their teachers, who, in their culture, were people with authority to intervene in cases of conflict.

Sholdice called the men’s claim “far-fetched and unbelievable.”

“While it may be possible that in China people seek the assistance of people in authority to help resolve an issue… I cannot accept that months and months later it would be an acceptable cultural practice to go to their previous employer’s young children, to approach them by surprise, without their parent’s approval,” she said.

“I am of the view their intent was to convince the children to come with them, depriving the parents of their children, causing fear and panic in the hopes the parents would pay them the money.”

Ji and Zhang remain free on bail. They will be sentenced at a later date.

» Winnipeg Free Press