(Minghui.org) After his wife divorced him and his father passed away, Mr. Guo Hao’s mother also died in the fall of 2020, when Mr. Guo was still serving time for his faith in Falun Gong.
Mr. Guo, a former emergency room doctor in Jianping County, Liaoning Province, is serving an unknown term of a prison sentence for his faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual and meditation discipline.
He began practicing Falun Gong in 1996. He had a happy family, only to see it falling apart after the Chinese communist regime ordered the persecution of Falun Gong in July 1999.
Mr. Guo, 55, lost his job for upholding his faith at the onset of the persecution. He was arrested on December 5, 2002, and sentenced to three years in June 2003. During the time, his wife divorced him and left with their son.
Dealt a blow by Mr. Guo’s imprisonment and divorce, his father, Mr. Guo Yuanzhong, suffered from complications of strokes. He became unable to take care of himself and died three years and four months later.
After Mr. Guo was released, he relied on his mother's pension to get by. Living under stress, he developed high blood pressure, diabetes, and depression.
As the police constantly came to harass him, he was forced to live away from home three times and wandered about.
Mr. Guo was arrested again while visiting another practitioner Mr. Sha Jintang on November 9, 2015. Although Mr. Guo was released due to high blood pressure on the same day, Mr. Sha was later sentenced to three years with five years probation.
The police didn’t stop persecuting Mr. Guo and still submitted his case to the procuratorate. On October 13, 2016, the police brought Mr. Guo to the procuratorate. After he refused to sign the indictment notice, the police asked for his guarantor’s phone number and released him.
Seven months later, on May 16, 2017, Mr. Guo was made to appear in court. The judge didn’t announce the verdict right then and let him go home afterward.
At around 8 a.m. on August 23, 2018, Mr. Guo was about to have breakfast when someone knocked on the door. His mother, Ms. Zhang Li, opened the door slightly and saw three young men standing outside. One of them grabbed the doorknob and the three of them all barged in.
As Mr. Guo came over, the three people identified themselves as officers from Chengxi Police Station. They asked to take Mr. Guo to the police station to verify some information and promised to send him back home as soon as they finished asking the questions.
Ms. Zhang waited anxiously at home. As Mr. Guo still hadn’t come back a few hours later, she took a taxi and went to the police station to look for him. The officers there denied that they had information about Mr. Guo.
Disappointed, Ms. Zhang returned home. At 11 p.m., another four young men knocked on the door. They told her that Mr. Guo has been taken to the local detention center and they came to get some clothes for him. They also asked her to sign Mr. Guo’s arrest warrant, but she refused.
Despite Ms. Zhang’s leg problems that made it difficult for her to walk up and downstairs, she delivered 18 letters to the county court, procuratorate, police department, county government, and county congress to appeal for her son's release, but to no avail.
She managed to hire a lawyer to represent Mr. Guo, and the lawyer visited Mr. Guo at the detention center. Not long afterward, Ms. Zhang lost track of her son's detention location after he was transferred away. When she went to the police station to ask about his whereabouts, the police chief pretended he wasn’t the one in charge. When she went to the court, the receptionist directed her to the police station. Not until Mr. Guo called her three months later did she find out that he has been taken to the Kangjiashan Prison.
In deep distress and struggling to live on her own, Ms. Zhang passed away in the fall of 2020. Mr. Guo still doesn’t know about his mother’s death at the time of writing. It’s also not clear how long he was sentenced.
Only Son’s Arrest Another Blow to Mother of Family Broken by the Persecution of Falun Gong