Murder on Market St.: Masked Bandits Shoot Chinese Mom Dead While Trying to Rob Husband

Two “sheisty masked” bandits shot and killed a 57-year-old Chinese woman Ying Zhu Liu inside the 8th floor hallway of her family’s Chinatown apartment during what appears to be a robbery gone viciously wrong on the night of Sept. 9.

Tragically, Liu, a home health aide, was not herself the criminals’ original target. Rather, it was her 61-year-old husband who, shortly after 11 p.m., Liu’s returned to their condominium building at 44 Market St., just south of the Manhattan Bridge between Madison and Monroe Streets.

For reasons that are presently unclear, the husband needed to be buzzed up by couple’s son 32-year-old Lin Rong Yan. He wasn’t alone, however.

According to police sources, the husband (Yan’s father) had been followed into the building and onto the elevator by the two bandits who, after getting off the 8th floor, where Yan was waiting, attempted to rob him. When the son tried to thwart the robbery, he was pistol whipped. When Yan’s mother, hearing the ruckus, came out of the apartment with what’s been described as a stick, one of the bandits shot her in face. The wound was fatal.

At press time, both suspects, having alighted with the husband’s cell phone, remain on the loose and no photos of the perpetrators have yet been released. Likewise, it appears that the husband’s name is being withheld at present. On the twelve-story building’s buzzer directory, apartment 8A is occupied by Lin / Ni.

According to the Daily News, the father is a retired restaurant worker, and the family came from Fuzhou, China around a decade ago.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” the son told a News reporter he and his dad were released from the hospital Tuesday afternoon. “It’s difficult. My mom was a good woman.”

Until the slayers of Ying Zhu Liu are apprehended—and afterwards as well—New Yorkers should beware any and all persons wearing black ski masks, aka “sheisty masks,” the only purpose of which in warm weather is seen as increasingly to hide one’s identity for the purpose of intimidation or crime.

The official police description of the suspects is as follows: the gunman wore black ski (“sheisty”) mask; a half-black, half-red hooded jacket; black pants with a white stripe down the leg, and white sneakers. His accomplice wore a similar sheisty mask; a black hooded coat; blank pants; and black and white sneakers.

While the available details raise many questions—particularly the likelihood that the husband was not a “random” crime victim but rather targeted for some reason—the fact that he and his murdered wife were both Asian can’t be overlooked.

Indeed, 44 Market Street is literally around the corner from 37 Monroe Street where on June 26, two sheisty-masked savages attacked 58-year-old Chinese woman, Shi Yahan, in broad daylight. Punches, kicks and a baseball bat were used in the assault, which ended without a robbery being completed when a pedestrian approached. Although much of Monroe Street is covered in crime-encouraging scaffolding, surveillance photos of the two thugs, was soon released, revealing that that beneath the masks—the attackers were two young Asian men.

How young? Weeks later, when one of the suspects was caught, he was 14-years-old and because he’s a juvenile, his name hasn’t been released. Equally shockingly, it is believed that the youth’s partner in crime remains on the lam.

Later, on August 2 a shocking Chinese mahjong parlor on Canal Street was held up by a 22-year-old Black man, alleged gang member and repeat offender Joshua Dorsett. Wearing a blue COVID-era mask for nominal disguise, Dorsett used a .45 Taurus semi-automatic pistol to threaten the Chinese mahjong patrons and after taking what purses he could, he fled up Eldridge Street.

While inter-ethnic hold-ups historically are not unknown, they are rare—a perpetrator is not just robbing individuals, they are violating an entire culture and social structure; see the acclaimed crime novels of Chinatown native Henry Chang for much further detail.

When two alert cops near Delancey Street tried to stop Dorsett, he fired at them, with one bullet striking Sgt. Carl Johnson, of the 5th Precinct, in the groin and grazing Sgt. Christopher Leap of the 7th Precinct in the leg. Thankfully, both wounds were minor and the officers were only briefly hospitalized.

Dorsett, charged with 1st degree attempted murder, is being held without bail at the George R. Vierno Center in East Elmhurst, Queens.

More recently, 32-year-old Chinatown landlord Brian Chin is facing felony assault charges for allegedly beating a vagrant at Grand and Chrystie Streets, just steps from Chin’s building at 111 Chyrstie Street.

If that address sounds familiar, it should: it was the home—and Chin the landlord of—Christina Yun Lee, the Korean-American woman horrifically stabbed to death by a deranged intruder who followed her into the building on February 13, 2022. Shortly after Lee’s murder a “Stop Asian Hate” protest rally and memorial to Lee was held outside her building. Days later, the physical memorial to Lee, assembled around a sidewalk tree, had been vandalized.

Speaking to the New York Post, Chin said “I had to clean up all the shattered glass. I try to put the sign back together as best as I can ... They try to desecrate her as much as they could and we as a community are beyond fed up, we are beyond angry and we are tired of being attacked,” he added. “We are tired of seeing this hatred and we are not going to stand for it anymore.”