Li Tao was in middle school when he first got into web games. His parents, poor Henan farmers, worried that he wasn’t spending enough time on his schoolwork, especially when he started staying out late at night at net cafes playing. His mother, especially, grew more and more restrictive, and although he was never abused, Li was annoyed that he wasn’t allowed to play games whenever he wanted.
In 2008, Li noticed a bottle of fast-acting poison in the family’s home. It was pesticide, of course, but Li reasoned that it was likely to make his parents sick enough to go to the hospital, and if his parents were in the hospital, he could play games for as long as he wanted without anyone to stop him. So he slipped the poison into their food one day and then slipped out to play games. By the time he returned home, he had gotten his wish: his parents were in the hospital. But unfortunately for Li, the poison was quite strong, and both his father and mother died.
Li was ultimately caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 15 years in prison, and although his crime was originally committed almost five years ago, his story made the rounds yesterday in the Chinese media and was even printed in the official People’s Daily. The tone of the story, which was originally published in Henan Fazhi Bao, makes it clear that this is meant to be a cautionary tale. The final line reads: “What awaits Li Tao is not just his legal punishment, but a lifetime of suffering with guilt and pain.”
And while it might seem like a fluke, frequent readers of this site will know better. So far this year we have already seen another Chinese teen who tried to poison his family over not getting enough internet time (he was luckier than Li Tao; none of them died) and a gamer who murdered two people and burned an internet cafe to the ground when the internet cut out during his favorite web game.
So the moral of the story, we guess, is stay the hell away from addicted Chinese gamers, because they will literally kill you.
(Henan Fazhi Bao via QQ Games)
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