Changchun Court Assigns 40% of Blame for Brick-Throwing Death to Wanda, Property Managers and Night Market
Three years after a 28-year-old lawyer was killed by a brick thrown from a Changchun high-rise — by a man who was executed in 2024 — a court has ruled that Wanda, the building's property managers and the night market's operator jointly bear 40 percent of the liability, a civil verdict with consequences for every Chinese business that operates beneath residential towers.
A court in Changchun has ordered the owner, manager and operator of the places where a 28-year-old lawyer was killed by a brick thrown from a high-rise apartment to share responsibility for her death — a civil verdict that closes one of China's most disturbing recent cases about the dangers of walking under residential towers.
The facts of the criminal case were settled long ago. In June 2023, a man named Zhou began dropping objects from the upper floors of an apartment building above a snack street by the Wanda Plaza in Changchun's Hongqi Street district — water buckets, unopened cola cans, bricks — and kept doing it for six days. Prosecutors said he told them he wanted to end his own life but could not bring himself to jump, and so hurled objects at the people below instead. Bricks struck three diners and a food vendor; one of them, a 28-year-old woman surnamed Lou who was visiting the night market, died of her injuries. Zhou was convicted of endangering public safety by other means, sentenced to death, and executed in October 2024 after review by the Supreme People's Court.
What has now been decided is who else must answer for it. Lou's family sued the plaza's owner, Dalian Wanda Group, its Changchun commercial-management arm, the building's property company and the night market's operator, arguing on a claim of more than 2 million yuan that all of them had a duty to keep the space below a tower safe — and that Zhou had been throwing things for six days before the brick that killed her fell, without anyone intervening. The court agreed in principle, ruling that the three operating parties bear 40 percent of the liability jointly, with a post reporting the verdict liked more than 7,000 times on Weibo.
That split is the part of the case with consequences beyond Changchun. Chinese courts made throwing objects from buildings a standalone crime in 2021, but criminal law punishes the thrower alone; the civil claim tested whether the businesses that profit from a public space are accountable for what falls into it. The verdict says they are — a signal to property managers and market operators across the country that "not our brick" is no defence. On Weibo, the question readers kept asking was the simpler one underneath: he threw things for six days — where were the people who were supposed to be watching?