Yesterday, a funeral was held for Yu Yao, a 23-year-old who immigrated to Queens from China just a few months ago in hopes of studying law. Yao died from her injuries after being brutally raped and beaten in an alley in Flushing last month. NY1 reports, "You didn't have to understand the mostly Mandarin ceremony to understand [Yao's mother] Guihua Yu's sorrow."
Yu arrived in the U.S. last week, thinking her daughter was in the hospital, but was told she had just died. At the hearing for the murder suspect, Carlos Salazar Cruz, the distraught mother shouted, "I want to kill that man! I want my daughter back!" in Mandarin. Court papers say that Cruz, who said he had been drinking for two days before the alleged attack, grabbed Yao off the street, struck her with a metal pipe, stripped her of her clothes below the waist, raped her with the pipe, and beat her to death. A witness called 911 and police were able to arrest Cruz, whose shirt was covered in blood, a few blocks from the scene.
Assemblyman Grace Meng told NY1, "[Yu] wouldn't let go of her daughter's hand" at the open casket funeral "and it almost doesn't matter what anyone's saying today. She keeps fixing her hair and making sure she looks good and that she's okay." Meng added, "Just by coming to America, her daughter did reach her American dream, and it's something she should be proud of... I just wish that the mom could have gone back to China knowing her daughter is okay, but instead now she has to bring her deceased daughter back to China."
