After Their Toddler Fell From an 18th-Floor Window, a Chongqing Mother Filed a Criminal Complaint Against Her Husband

On September 13, in Chongqing, a boy of two years and two months fell from his family's 18th-floor apartment and died. His mother was out on an errand. His father, surnamed Cui, had left the child alone to walk the dog — about twelve minutes, she says, a gap she had asked him not to create. The window was open; the balcony's only protection was a simple safety lock, and it was not engaged; the child had never tried to climb before (Sina Hot Topics' interview).

Since then, the family's grief has become a legal file. On October 16, the mother, surnamed Liu, submitted a criminal complaint at her district police station accusing her husband of negligent homicide (过失致人死亡), and the police issued a receipt showing the case has been formally accepted (Haibo News reported from the cemetery where she wept). She says her husband has never apologized — his first answer was "I don't know," then "go ask the police." His proposal, she said, was to keep the marriage: his parents would pay 6,000 yuan a month and he would add 4,000, and life would carry on as before. Her answer: "Our child did not die of illness. This was the tragedy of his gross failure of supervision. I cannot pretend it never happened."

The newest turn — the one that put the story back at the top of the trending list — is over the child's belongings. Liu keeps everything of her son's; she discovered that her husband had thrown part of it away. Asked why, he said: "It hurt to look at these things, so I threw them out." Her reply has been quoted across Weibo: if seeing things keeps the person close, shouldn't you keep them all the more? She has lost 11 jin — about five and a half kilograms — in a month, and says she barely sleeps or eats (the full exchange).

The comments section has turned the case into an argument about the law's reach. Many point to precedents in which parents were convicted of negligent homicide after children died in unattended "accidents," and ask why the father can be giving interviews while the mother waits on a case number (one post liked nearly 3,000 times). Others push back against turning grief into a template — a father who cannot bear to look at the toys may be coping in his own damaged way (one such argument).

What Liu says she wants is not money, or even necessarily the marriage's end, but accountability: "In every family, a father must take responsibility for his child — see the mother's labor, give the child love. He is the child's father, but his dereliction caused this. The responsibility must be pursued to the end." Whether a twelve-minute lapse becomes a criminal case is now the question the police receipt has set in motion.