SHANGHAI — The teenager convicted of murdering Canadian model Diana O’Brien last summer was sentenced to death Friday, with a two-year reprieve.
In China, that usually means the sentence will be commuted to life in prison.
The written ruling, sent to his lawyer Zheng Qiu, is an unexpectedly “light” sentence for someone who kills a foreigner in China. They usually are executed.
Chen Jun, 18, said during his trial that he suffered remorse and anonymously called the police right after he stabbed O’Brien, hoping they would rescue her. That may have earned him leniency from the court.
During the trial, lawyer Zheng asked that Chen be given a psychological examination, but the request was denied.
Chen Jun was an out-of-work migrant worker from Anhui province looking for enough money to finance his trip home when O’Brien caught him in her apartment late in the evening of July 6. She may even have recognized him from the nearby teahouse where he worked for a few weeks.
She had visited it a few times and he said later that he recognized her, although no one has ever hinted he targeted the pretty brunette.
She tried to stop him from robbing the apartment and he stabbed her repeatedly and left her to die.
The death of the 22-year-old from Salt Spring Island, B.C., caused a sensation because so few foreigners in China are victims of violent crime and police appeared to work overtime to find her killer.
After he was in custody, the unemployed Chen was interviewed on a “real crime” show on Chinese state television and said he was trolling the apartment building where O’Brien lived, looking for money, when he found her door ajar. He saw a laptop computer and sneaked in.
O’Brien came home at that moment.
“She saw me taking the laptop and leaving, so she rushed at me and tried to take it back. While I was not noticing, she hit me and knocked me to the floor,” Chen said.
He pulled out a knife and stabbed her. She backed away and ran into the hall, but he followed and struck again.
Despite Chen’s alleged tip-off to the police, O’Brien died in the stairwell from multiple stab wounds to the heart and liver and her body wasn’t found until early the next morning by a cleaning woman who followed the trail of blood.
O’Brien had only been in Shanghai for two weeks when she was killed and she was already homesick and planning to cut short her modelling contract to return to Canada.
Police identified Chen using the closed-circuit cameras around O’Brien’s apartment building and they picked him up five days later, following a trail that led to his hometown, Xuancheng, in Anhui province.
When they nabbed Chen in a cheap hotel, police found O’Brien’s digital camera, two mobile phones, one necklace, three rings and $255 Cdn. Police said he already had sold O’Brien’s laptop for about $155, to pay for his ticket home.
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