In the summer of 2022, a devastating chain of events began to unfold in Maplewood, a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota, starting with the death of 27-year-old Yee Lee. On the morning of Friday, July 1st, police were called to a residence on the 1300 block of Pearson Drive. There, they found that Yee Lee, an Asian male, had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His wife, Molly Cheng, was the one who reported the incident to the authorities.
In the immediate aftermath, social workers were brought in to assist Cheng and her young children as they faced this sudden and tragic loss.
The grief and trauma of Yee Lee’s suicide, however, spiraled into a much larger tragedy. The following day, concerned relatives contacted law enforcement, expressing fears that Molly Cheng was intending to harm herself and her three children. This report triggered a statewide alert as authorities scrambled to locate them.
Police were able to track Cheng's cellphone to Vadnais-Sucker Lake Regional Park. At the park, they discovered her abandoned vehicle. A grim discovery followed on the shore of Vadnais Lake: several pairs of children's shoes and the keys to the car. A search of the lake was initiated, and over the course of the weekend, the bodies of Molly Cheng and her three children, 5-year-old Phoenix Lee, 4-year-old Quadrillion Lee, and 3-year-old Estella Zoo Siab Lee, were recovered from the water. The Ramsey County Sheriff's Office later confirmed that the deaths of the children were the result of drowning and smothering, and that Molly Cheng had died by drowning. The authorities have not identified any other suspects and have characterized the entire event as a murder-suicide precipitated by the initial death of Yee Lee.
