Real Story Project | The Murderer Was a Classmate

The murder of high school students has shocked society.

On July 6, 2025, a 14-year-old male student in Qujing, Yunnan, attempted to sexually assault a 15-year-old female classmate on the way home from school, and killed her after the attempt failed. Just over two months earlier in Shenzhen, 14-year-old Pan Mouyou, a junior high school student, was stabbed 26 times by her classmate Zhong Mouchuan at the entrance of her apartment building and unfortunately died.

After the incident, Zhong Mouchuan admitted that he killed Pan Mouyou out of jealousy of her excellent grades.

Murdered

On the night of April 8, 2025, when 14-year-old girl Pan Mouyou was killed in her community, the first story residents heard was told by the murderer.

At 7:25 p.m., a mother asked in the community owners’ group: “How is the child my son saved? His hand tendons were cut, and the person ran away.” After being questioned, she told the story her son had told: someone was stabbing people with a knife in the community. The boy heard “help”, went forward to save the person, and was injured as a result. The murderer was wearing black clothes and left after the crime.

“What a heroic young man, good people are rewarded.” Messages of shock and praise popped up in the group chat. Residents questioned the security guards, surveillance cameras, and the broken walls, praising the boy as a “little hero”.

Half an hour before the news exploded in the group chat, Zeng Hua (pseudonym), Pan Mouyou’s mother, heard someone shouting downstairs from her fourth-floor home. “Someone fainted!” The voice came from a neighbor on the first floor. She felt a pang in her heart: “Could it be Youyou?”

Zeng Hua immediately told her husband to go downstairs, and she hurried to find chocolate. She knew that her daughter Pan Mouyou had low blood sugar and was worried that the child had fainted downstairs because she was hungry.

When the couple arrived at the scene together, what met their eyes was a pool of blood.

With the help of a neighbor’s cell phone flashlight, Zeng Hua saw her daughter, who was wearing a school uniform, lying on the slope of the driveway outside the building, less than 5 meters from the building, head down, blood flowing from the top of her head, covering her body, her eyes rolled back, and her pupils dilated.

The pool of blood covered the white turning arrow on the asphalt road. When trying to stop the bleeding for her daughter with a towel given by a neighbor, Zeng Hua found that her daughter’s blood had already dried up.

The next afternoon, Zeng Hua learned from the relevant authorities that the murderer was the boy who was called the “little hero” that night.

The boy’s name was Zhong Mouchuan, 15 years old, and he lived in the same community. He was a classmate of her daughter at the same middle school in the area. Her daughter was stabbed to death by Zhong Mouchuan with 26 knives. One of the knives pierced the artery in her neck, causing massive blood loss.

Picture | The road Pan Mouyou took home

At the first moment after the crime, the 15-year-old boy, with blood on his hands, returned home. Afterwards, people heard the story of the rescue. The story was quickly exposed by the investigation. Zhong Mouchuan was arrested that night.

Zeng Hua also learned that the boy stated his motive for the murder after being arrested: he was jealous of Pan Mouyou’s good grades.

Zeng Hua could not accept this answer.

Her daughter Pan Mouyou was indeed excellent. In 2010, Zeng Hua and her husband, who were middle-aged, had gone through all kinds of exhausting examinations and treatments before they were able to have a daughter. They regarded their daughter as a gift from heaven.

After her daughter was born, this feeling of gratitude grew day by day. In the mother’s eyes, Pan Mouyou “never needed to worry about anything” since she was a child, she was simple, well-behaved, and pretty. When she was a child, Pan Mouyou took six extracurricular classes every month, played the piano, and spent a total of more than 10,000 yuan, which was all of Wang Huimin’s salary.

At the age of 14, Pan Mouyou had already grown to 1.65 meters tall, was thin, weighed only 76 pounds, but had generous features, bright eyes, and a long neck. Her mother often filmed videos recording her daughter’s daily life. In the videos, Pan Mouyou was acting coquettishly with her father’s hand, lively and cute.

At school, the junior high school teachers had the same impression of Pan Mouyou as her mother, “quiet and well-behaved, studying hard, and a good student with a desire to improve.” Zeng Hua also knew that she got along well with her classmates and liked to call her friends “brothers” during her spare time, which was both playful and intimate.

Zeng Hua understood the complexity of the world. She had anticipated that Pan Mouyou would be liked by boys at school, so she deliberately did not teach her daughter to dress up, not wanting her daughter to be too outstanding.

Picture | Pan Mouyou in school uniform, from the WeChat video account “Pan Youyou’s mother”

“She never complained.” Zeng Hua repeatedly said. Whether it was dressing up, tutoring classes, or extra study tasks arranged by her parents, her daughter accepted them all. Her understanding made Zeng Hua both heartbroken and even more eager to give her the best.

For such a daughter, Zeng Hua could not imagine what could have caused her to suffer such great malice.

She repeatedly thought about the two words in the boy’s statement of motive. Would jealousy lead to murder? Could jealousy make a minor boy stab his classmate 26 times?

Murderer

On the night of the incident, the community property staff found that Zhong Mouchuan’s family had moved away overnight and disappeared.

Zeng Hua remembered that she first met Zhong Mouchuan three years ago, when junior high school started. The boy was more than 1.7 meters tall, tall and thin, and looked introverted. People who had contact with Zhong Mouchuan had similar impressions to his mother: he seemed silent and taciturn in the crowd, and a bit unremarkable, “ordinary people would not pay special attention to him.”

In the class group photo, Zhong Mouchuan sat alone on the far left of the class, with a clear boundary from the classmates next to him. When everyone’s bodies and faces were facing one side, he faced the other side. His eyes were squinting, and his eyes were a bit slanted.

According to the community property, Zhong Mouchuan’s family moved into this community in 2019 and purchased two houses here. In Zeng Hua’s memory, Zhong Mouchuan’s family’s financial situation was not bad either. The boy’s father worked in IT-related work in Shanghai, and his mother worked in finance in Shenzhen, and they were busy all year round.

In the impression of the school teachers, Zhong Mouchuan rarely interacted with those around him. The boy’s grades at school were average. Out of more than nine hundred students in the whole grade, he often ranked outside the seven hundredth place, and it was difficult for him to enter high school. Teachers often tutored him individually. During the tutoring, his reaction seemed a bit dull. Besides saying “thank you” in a low voice, he just nodded.

A teacher had read Zhong Mouchuan’s Chinese composition, “dry and lacking emotion, understandable.” With a full score of 120 points, his score usually stayed around 80 points, which was a B grade in school.

In contrast, Pan Mouyou, who was in the same class, often scored above 90 points, which was an A grade.

The teachers rarely saw the two of them communicate. Zhong Mouchuan was tall and always sat in the back row; Pan Mouyou was in the front row. In Zeng Hua’s impression, her daughter never mentioned Zhong Mouchuan after she went home.

But a teacher had heard a different Zhong Mouchuan from the mouths of the students. This usually quiet and withdrawn male student seemed to have undergone a change in his personality after entering the second year of junior high school, and began to show malice more and more frequently.

Malice was revealed from the details of the interaction. One time during recess, classmate A accidentally spilled water on Zhong Mouchuan’s desk. A saw his face immediately turn gloomy. Immediately, Zhong Mouchuan threw A’s schoolbag on the ground and stomped on it.

Classmate A reported to the teacher. After Zhong Mouchuan found out, he found A again during recess. He firmly pinched A’s neck. The classmates in the class saw this and went forward to stop him. It was not until several classmates pulled him away that Zhong Mouchuan stopped. Classmate A, who was frightened, did not dare to eat for the whole day afterwards. The classmates mentioned their fear of Zhong Mouchuan’s behavior when they recounted it, “A few more minutes, that classmate might have suffocated.”

Zhong Mouchuan, who entered the second year of junior high school, became cold and hostile in the eyes of his classmates. When looking at each other, some people could often catch his vicious eyes. Once, a classmate just smiled at him unintentionally, and he threatened, “When we graduate, I will definitely kill you.”

The school had organized a psychological survey, but no obvious problems were found with Zhong Mouchuan. In the teachers’ memories, Zhong Mouchuan’s parents also rarely attended parent-teacher meetings.

Later, Zeng Hua learned from the father of another female classmate B about the details of Zhong Mouchuan’s last interaction with her daughter before the crime.

On the evening of Tuesday, April 8, after school, Pan Mouyou and Zhong Mouchuan, as well as girl B, got into this father’s car together.

Since the first year of junior high school, due to their similar addresses, Pan Mouyou, Zhong Mouchuan, Zhong Mouchuan’s sister, and girl B, the four children, were picked up and dropped off by Pan Mouyou’s father and classmate B’s father in turn.

It was a four-seater SUV. Usually, Zhong Mouchuan sat in the front passenger seat, and the three girls squeezed in the back. In the second year of junior high school, Zhong Mouchuan’s sister entered a key high school in the city, and there were only three children left in the car.

On the night of the incident, before Zhong Mouchuan got into the car, he shouted “Uncle” to girl B’s father, and then sat in the front passenger seat without saying anything. The drive from school to the community was 12 minutes.

During this time, in the back row, Pan Mouyou whispered to girl B: “I didn’t do well in physics, I’m afraid I’ll be told off by my parents when I go back.” Girl B comforted her a few words. The boy sat in the front passenger seat and was silent throughout the whole process.

A few minutes later, the car turned right from the main road uphill, entered the community, turned left after entering, and stopped at the first fork in the uphill road, where the girl’s father dropped off the three children.

Girl B’s home was just before the fork; Pan Mouyou and Zhong Mouchuan needed to walk a few more meters to separate at the second fork.

At the end of the uphill road, Pan Mouyou went around to the front of the building from the left.

The short, narrow road was hidden and unmanned, with the windows of the first-floor residents on one side and the flowering shrubs and the outer wall of the community on the other.

On the road, a male resident on the second floor entered the building a few steps ahead of Pan Mouyou. At this time, Zhong Mouchuan, who should have gone home, suddenly appeared from the other side, catching up with Pan Mouyou, who was about to arrive home.

Around 7 p.m. on the evening of April 8, Wang Xiaojuan (pseudonym), a resident on the 1st floor of the community, was standing in the kitchen when she suddenly heard a few muffled sounds from outside the window, like a ball falling.

Wang Xiaojuan’s window faced Pan Mouyou’s building. She looked out the window, and in the dark night, it seemed like a boy was “patting” the girl with his hand. Then, she heard the girl shout: “Help! Help!”

She immediately shouted out the window: “Why are you hitting someone? You are not allowed to hit someone!” The sound stunned the boy. He hit her hard again and turned and ran away. Later, Wang Xiaojuan realized that it was dark and she didn’t see the knife in the boy’s hand.

Wang Xiaojuan hurried out of the house to chase after him, went around the small road in front of the building, and saw him running away along the downhill road, and his figure soon disappeared. Wang Xiaojuan couldn’t catch up and called the police. She ran back downstairs and saw the girl in the pool of blood – it was her neighbor Zeng Hua’s daughter.

She looked up and shouted to the upstairs: “Come down from the 4th floor, your daughter was beaten!”

Malice

After her daughter’s death, Zeng Hua thought about many “ifs”.

On the day Pan Mouyou was killed, Zeng Hua went home ten minutes earlier than usual. The day before, she bought an air fryer online. That night, when she came home from work, she unpacked the express delivery and was full of anticipation, planning to make fried ribs for her daughter in the evening. She misheard the neighbor’s shout as “Someone fainted”.

“If I had gone home ten minutes later that day. If I had been watching you come home on the balcony. If I had been downstairs.” Zeng Hua imagined how she could have avoided her daughter’s fate now. These “ifs” traced back to three years ago, the day she first met Zhong Mouchuan’s family.

When her daughter first entered junior high school, the school collected the students’ home addresses in the parents’ group. Zeng Hua found that a boy lived in the same community as her.

Zeng Hua took the initiative to contact the other party, and in the conversation, she learned that Zhong Mouchuan and Pan Mouyou had been classmates for three years in elementary school. But she had never heard her daughter mention him before.

Before the official start of school, Zhong Mouchuan’s mother proposed that the two families lived close to each other, and she had a driver’s license, but she didn’t dare to drive, and wanted to ask Pan Mouyou’s father to pick up and drop off the children along the way.

Zeng Hua agreed. She thought, it’s just one more seat, no big deal. Later, to express her gratitude, Zhong Mouchuan’s parents occasionally sent fruits and sausages, usually just putting the things at the door and ringing the doorbell before leaving.

For three years, Zhong Mouchuan had been taking the same car as Pan Mouyou to and from school. On the day she learned the identity of the murderer, Zeng Hua’s first reaction was self-blame. If she hadn’t chatted with the boy’s mother three years ago, if she hadn’t agreed to pick up and drop off the boy, wouldn’t her daughter be like this now?

The good cause of convenience to others led to the greatest evil result. Zeng Hua has always been puzzled: she kindly helped to pick up and drop off Zhong Mouchuan, why did he have to attack her daughter?

For Zeng Hua, the hard-won Pan Mouyou was once the center of the family’s life. After her daughter was born, her entire life revolved around her daughter. Her husband gave up working and opened a small mold factory. Although the income was not much, the time was more free, and she could pick up and drop off her daughter and accompany her at any time.

When she learned that the boy in the same community was in the same class as her daughter, Zeng Hua, as a mother full of love, released goodwill to her daughter’s classmates. Perhaps, she also hoped to become a role model for her daughter and do good deeds.

Zeng Hua could not get out of the grief. Her daughter seemed to still be in her life, and she would not let go. There are still many ways to contact her daughter for her to use, such as dreaming, burning paper, relics, and her old cell phone, WeChat, yearbook, and Douyin likes.

Logging into her daughter’s WeChat, Zeng Hua saw the messages from her classmates, from the disbelief of a day or two after the incident to the subsequent remembrance. A classmate played a game in Moments and got an impression evaluation from the initiator after liking it. Zeng Hua couldn’t help but like it with her daughter’s WeChat.

The classmate replied to her, “A very, very good girl.”

In the third month after her daughter’s death, Zeng Hua didn’t even dare to smile. Forgetting the sadness was like a betrayal to her. Recently, she smiled for the first time, looking at the young female lawyer in front of her, lost in fantasy: Youyou would also be so beautiful when she grew up, and she would be outstanding in her work.

During the break in the face-to-face chat, Zeng Hua suddenly said, “My daughter’s hands are the same as yours, they are also thin and long.” She took out a photo of her daughter, “Look, right? Thin and long, she really knows how to grow.”

She sleeps in her daughter’s room every day, gets into her mosquito net, and hugs her quilt. That thin quilt was covered by her daughter when she was in kindergarten, and in junior high school, it became an emotional sustenance that she hugged every night to sleep. Wang Huimin remembers that one day her daughter boasted to her, “I have a little quilt, Mom, you don’t have one.” Now, it belongs to Mom.

Picture | Pan Mouyou and her mother’s funny photos

Since April, Zeng Hua has been paying attention to the cases of injury in society. The latest news made her particularly sad: On July 6, in Qujing, Yunnan, a 15-year-old girl was killed by a 14-year-old male classmate from the same village on the way home from school. She thought that in the 1980s, when she grew up, the children were very simple. Are today’s minors more mature in their minds because they take in more information?

After the incident, Zeng Hua never saw Zhong Mouchuan’s family again. Some people spread that Pan Mouyou was killed because she had a relationship with Zhong Mouchuan. Wang Huimin firmly denied this possibility. At home, she felt that her daughter would tell her parents about anything. Even though they had been picking up and dropping off for three years, they had never heard her daughter mention Zhong Mouchuan. She believed that her daughter Youyou and Zhong Mouchuan were two different people. At school, they sat far apart, and there would be no interaction.

Zeng Hua always has a measure of good and evil in her heart: the girls and boys in the third year of junior high school, the good and bad grades, the early death and the long life… Although she only uses “devil” and “devil’s family” to refer to the murderer, Zeng Hua does not want to say bad things about the boy, only saying, “In my heart, I really can’t imagine where my daughter is not good.”

Zeng Hua chose to deal with Youyou’s afterlife in the traditional way, performing the Flame Mouth and the super-degree.

The super-degree is to eliminate the suffering karma. Zeng Hua hopes that her daughter will go to another world and no longer feel pain. After 26 knives, her daughter’s face was disfigured, and her eyes were always open. The pain her daughter suffered was something Zeng Hua could not forget. Zeng Hua and her husband never dared to tell her 93-year-old grandfather about her daughter’s recent situation.

After her daughter left, Zeng Hua no longer eats meat. When she was a child, the family in the countryside killed chickens, and her parents told her to hold the legs and then pull out the feathers on the chicken’s neck, and then cut the neck to bleed. Of the 26 knives on her daughter’s body, one also deeply pierced the artery in her neck, causing massive blood loss. From then on, every piece of meat that was killed seemed to be her own daughter’s meat.

Zeng Hua and her husband go home every day and pass the place where their daughter was killed. On an evening in August, Zeng Hua went out and passed the scene of the death, and remembered that in April, in the spring, there were small flowers blooming in the grass by the road.

At this time, the grass and the driveway were clean. After Zhong Mouchuan killed someone, his family moved away from the community. Zeng Hua doesn’t want to move. She said that although Youyou passed away here, her memories are also here.

One night, Zeng Hua dreamed of Youyou again. Her daughter said, “Mom, you lied to me.” She valued her daughter’s dream very much. Her daughter said she was cold, so she bought new clothes and burned them. Her daughter said she was deceived, what was she deceived about?

Zeng Hua remembered that she had said to her daughter, “Study hard, it will be hard for more than ten years now, and you will have fifty or sixty years of life to enjoy in the future.” Life is not a simple matter of giving and receiving. Sometimes good is rewarded with evil, and she and her daughter were both deceived.