Footage of a father’s confession to detectives that he covered up for his wife after she killed their five-year-old daughter has been released, a year after the child was beaten to death.
Liang Zhao, 35, was filmed telling officers how his wife Ming Ming Chen beat their five-year-old daughter Ashley to death at their home in North Canton, Ohio, last year.
After killing her, Ming Ming and her husband took the girl to their Chinese restaurant, where they wanted her six-year-old sister to see her and think she was asleep.
Their plan was to later call police, claim that Ashley was missing and that she had vanished from the restaurant.
A day after they reported her missing, police found Ashley’s remains in a container in the freezer at the restaurant and her parents were arrested.
Ming Ming Chen (left), 30, beat the couple’s five-year-old daughter Ashley (right) to death in the kitchen of their apartment on January 9, 2017
Her father’s interview with police was filmed that day. Video of the interview was published by Crime Watch Daily on Wednesday.
It begins with Zhao describing how his daughter was murdered.
Later in the footage, he tells of how they planned to dispose of their child’s body, saying they would ‘burn it, bury it or throw it in the ocean.’
‘My wife got angry and hit her head on the carpet two times.
‘Initially she was breathing. Her heart had stopped beating so I started panicking and I tried to do CPR on her and that’s when I realized, she’s gone,’ he said.
‘After a while we decided we should bring to the restaurant so that JoJo can see her so that when you guys ask her… she can say “She was here and she left out the backdoor of the restaurant” and not at the house.
Zhao then put his daughter’s lifeless body in a car seat and drove her to their restaurant Ang’s Asian Cuisine (above) in North Canton, Ohio. They kept her in a bed in a room where she sometimes slept, pretending to her older sister that she was asleep as they served customers, and then put the child’s body in the freezer and called 911, claiming she had disappeared
‘JoJo would see that she’s sleeping there and can verify it,’ he said, explaining his plan.
‘She’s six. She can’t tell the difference between someone that’s no longer breathing and someone that’s sleeping,’ he said.
Detectives asked him how he then got the child from their apartment to Ang’s Asian Cuisine, their restaurant, and he confessed: ‘[We] put her in the car seat.’
He then said he moved her from the room where she sometimes slept while they worked into the ‘walk in’, an industrial freezer at the restaurant ‘so she wouldn’t stink.’
Zhao then described to police in his interview how he put his daughter’s body in a plastic busing container, the type used to collect dirty dishes, and put it in the freezer
The 35-year-old father said he and his wife did not think through their plan and never expected to be questioned over their daughter’s disappearance
Zhao then admitted that he and his wife cooked and served customers inside the restaurant while their daughter’s corpse was in a bed in a room upstairs.
He then moved her to the freezer in a bussing container, the type used to collect dirty dishes, and called 911.
In his interview, Zhou said he and his wife planned to dispose of Ashley’s body after the search for her had stopped but that they were shocked when they were called in for questioning right away.
Liang Zhao is serving a 12-year prison sentence for covering up the killing and lying to police
‘That’s when we were going to call the police and we were hoping that the police would come here. We didn’t expect this.
‘I didn’t know the procedure. I didn’t know I would be called here and asked to take a polygraph test.
‘I didn’t know I was going to be asked so many questions or that there was going to be so many people involved.
‘If we knew there was going to be 100 people searching for her, maybe more, I don’t know. I am so sorry.’
Chen seemed similarly shocked by how swift and serious the police response was. She at first claimed that she did not know how Ashley died but later in the interview coldly admitted: ‘I just killed her and the she died.’
Chen is a Chinese national. She was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and endangering a child.
Once her sentence is complete, she will be sent back to China.
Zhou is serving a 12-year sentence for obstructing justice, gross abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence and two counts of endangering children. Both parents accepted plea deals.