Hanoi woman beats 6-year-old son to death

Nguyen Thi Thanh Thi, 37, a native of Thai Nguyen Province, which borders Hanoi, is under investigation for murder, police said Saturday.

According to the police, Thi married a local man named Manh in Thai Nguyen in 2011 and the two had two children, now aged 10 and six.

They divorced eight years later and the court ruled that the mother was allowed to take care of the youngest child.

However, Manh and his family refused to let her take custody of the boy.

In 2020, Thi married a man in Hanoi and already had another child. She is now seven months pregnant with her second child with the second husband.

But Thi continued to argue with the authorities for the custody of her son with her first husband. She was eventually granted the right to take custody of the boy.

In August this year, the boy came to live with his mother and his new family in Hanoi’s Quoc Oai District.

The mother told the police that in mid-September, she beat the boy with a 1.4 long bamboo stick, cloth hangers, plastic tubes and plastic chairs several times as he "refused to obey and did not study hard."

Early this month, she used a short metal ladle to hit the boy on the top of his head.

Around 6 p.m. on December 9, Thi discovered that her son’s whole body had turned purple so she rushed him to a local hospital for emergency aid. However, doctors determined that the boy had suffered a cardiac arrest, circulatory arrest, and several other injuries, resulting in his death before arriving at the hospital.