Five Charged With Murder After a Drunk Driver Dragged a Shaanxi Teacher 5.9 Kilometers to Her Death

The second car arrived eight seconds after the first. On the evening of April 29, 2024, Xue Murong, a 50-year-old primary-school teacher in Baihe County, Shaanxi, was walking home when a car knocked her down on a dark stretch of road. Its driver stopped, got out, saw nothing, and called the police. While he stood waiting, a second car — driven drunk and over the speed limit, prosecutors now say — ploughed into the same spot, ran over Xue and pulled her beneath the chassis. She was dragged 5.9 kilometers down the highway and died at the gate of a primary school.

The driver of the second car, identified in court documents and news reports only as Xiao, was a safety supervisor at a state-owned road-maintenance company, and he was not alone: four colleagues were in the car with him. At a speed bump the vehicle jammed, and several people got out and looked underneath. What they saw made them drive on. In the days that followed, the car's dashcam footage was destroyed and a colleague was arranged to take the blame — a practice known in China as "topping the bag" (顶包).

For more than two years the case moved as a traffic matter. Two of the five men involved were charged with traffic offences, one with covering up for the others, and two faced no charges at all. That changed on September 28, when relatives of the victim told the news outlet Xin Huanghe that prosecutors had elevated the case to a higher-level court and re-charged all five defendants with intentional homicide (故意杀人). The about-face is now among the most-followed questions on Zhihu, China's Quora-like question-and-answer platform.

The upgrade turns on a distinction Chinese criminal law draws sharply. Causing a death while drunk driving is ordinarily punished as a traffic offence carrying a few years at most, and in fatal hit-and-runs it is the escape hatch many defendants aim for. But a driver who continues for nearly six kilometers with a human being under his car has, in legal terms, accepted the possibility of killing her — indirect intent, in the language of the statute. "Several people got out, saw someone under the car, and still drove off," one widely shared Weibo post said, calling the case "not a traffic accident but a group's utter indifference to a life" (一群人对生命的极端冷漠). Another asked the question the public debate has settled on: "Where is the bottom line of humanity?" (人性底线何在？)

The case has also landed on a sore spot about who the law protects. That the drunk driver was a safety supervisor — a man whose job was preventing exactly this — that he had four colleagues in the car, and that an institutional cover-up followed, has made the trial a national referendum on privilege and accountability. Intentional homicide carries sentences of ten years to death under Chinese law; whatever the court decides, the charges themselves mark a rare prosecutorial answer to public outrage over a "traffic accident" that never was one.