Brother gets life in prison for role in trio's fatal torture of starved 19-year-old sister

A man who physically abused and starved his younger sister until her death in 2021 was sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday (Nov 5) for murder.

According to court documents seen by AsiaOne, Huang Bocan, 34, was part of a trio that meted out punishments to 19-year-old Huang Baoying over her performance in selling Herbalife products.

The teen died on May 5, 2021, after one such punishment where she was beaten, tied up, had salt poured on a wound and drenched with water from a toilet tap.

She weighed just 27.6kg then, with the cause of death reportedly being severe malnutrition and extensive blunt force trauma.

Huang is the second person in the trio to be sentenced.

The first perpetrator, the siblings' landlord, Lim Peng Tiong, was jailed for 14 years and 11 months in May for a reduced charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

The case of Huang's girlfriend, Chee Mei Wan, who ran the company selling Herbalife products and acted as a "coach", is still pending.

The abuse

Chee and the Huang siblings began living in the same Clementi flat owned by Lim in the second half of 2020.

In October that year, Chee created a financial punishment system to correct bad habits, which Lim and the siblings were subject to.

This soon turned into physical punishment in the form of hand raises and squats, with Baoying reportedly punished most for her "mistakes".

From January 2021, Bocan began giving his sister a weekly sum of only $20 to $30 for one meal each day.

Baoying was also disallowed to leave home on multiple occasions, with Bocan once cutting her long hair before forcing her out.

In February, he and Chee began confining her in the toilet for long period.

Around the same time, the trio started hitting her with a wooden stick.

For almost the whole of March, the teen was confined to the toilet. She was later chained up to stop her from leaving to look for food.

In April to May, she was deprived of food for days and only allowed to drink water.

Baoying's death

On the night of May 4, 2021, a weakened Baoying could not perform squats, and she was beaten again for lying about it, and Bocan and Chee interpreted her silence as defiance.

The trio then reportedly subjected her to the water torture and sprinkled salt on a wound.

Baoying was found unresponsive after midnight on May 5, 2021.

Bocan called 995 later in the morning.

He had also deleted photographs and videos of his sister's injuries from his phone, as well as audio recordings of the victim being scolded.

A psychiatrist assesed that Bocan did not have mental illness and was not of unsound mind.

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