Hong Li Yang said she closes her eyes and is pulled back into the moment when her husband’s body collapsed to the ground in a pool of blood.
On Feb. 9, 2020, she was coming back from dinner when a gunman shot and killed her husband, Weizhong Xiong, 38, and their friend Huayi Bian, 37, in Chinatown as she took cover underneath the vehicle.
“Every night, I wake from nightmares gasping for air, my heart pounding as if I were still there, because I am,” she said in court Wednesday, through an interpreter. “Like him, I cannot walk away from this.”
Cook County Judge Neera Walsh ordered a sentence of natural life in prison for the man convicted in the killings, Alvin Thomas, 26, following a sentencing hearing at the Leighton Criminal Court Building. She found that, though Thomas was young at the time of the shooting, he exhibited “escalating criminal behavior” leading up to the attack.
“He … destroyed part of the family that the surviving witness was able to build at that time,” Walsh said.
The sentencing hearing unfolded almost exactly six years after the slaying that rattled the tight-knit Chinatown community just a month before much of the world shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Supporters of the victims attended the hearing, as well as family members for Thomas, who audibly cried when Walsh ordered the punishment.
After the proceedings, Yang said the life sentence offered her a measure of closure.
“Finally, I can tell my late husband somewhere up there that we did it,” she said.
A jury in November convicted Thomas of first-degree murder in the killings, despite the man’s arguments that the shootings were in self-defense.
In a short statement to the court, Thomas said: “I do believe that I honestly am innocent.”
A relative of Thomas’ told the Tribune after the hearing that Thomas was intoxicated and approached the victims for help, not meaning any harm.
The two friends and Xiong’s wife were returning from dinner and shortly after 2 a.m. were in a parking lot outside Bian’s apartment in the 2000 block of South Wells Street.
Xiong and Bian were outside of a car, guiding Xiong’s wife into a parking space, when Thomas approached and shot Xiong repeatedly in the face and head, according to prosecutors.
Xiong’s wife ducked underneath the car and saw her husband collapse on the pavement.
Thomas ran off, leaving a trail of bloody footprints that led police straight to him at the nearby Chinatown Square outdoor mall, prosecutors said.
When police arrested him, according to prosecutors, he was wearing bloody shoes and a gun was sticking out of his right pants pocket.
“All of this was ripped away from us by a gunshot, leaving behind a shattered heart, a black hole where the sun used to be, an empty future,” Yang said.
She called on people to truly understand the toll gun violence takes from loved ones. She said she avoids crowds and is triggered by noises on the street and slamming car doors.
Her son lost his father, the person who would have “stood proudly at his graduation and cried at his wedding,” she said.
“A shooting does not end when the gunfire stops. It continues, in the nightmares of the survivors, in the empty seat at the dinner table, in the echo of his presence in every moment of the future,” she said. “We don’t need to heal and we don’t need to forget. What we need is understanding, support and the courage to make sure tragedies like this never happen again.”
