Nine-year-old Cecilia Zhang is shown in this Sept.26, 2003 police handout photo. (Canadian Press)
Toronto — After spending more than five months in the public spotlight assuring people that their missing nine-year-old daughter was still alive, Cecilia Zhang's parents stayed locked up at home Sunday, coming to terms with the fact that she is dead after all.
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The only clue to the extent of their suffering came from police.
Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino arrived at the house last night to offer his condolences to the sequestered couple and say police will stop at nothing to find her killer.
"They're very distraught," he told reporters afterward.
"It's been a long, long, very traumatic period of time for them."
Police and the family had always held out hope that Cecilia would come back, Chief Fantino said.
"They always maintained the hope, as we did, that one day we would get a break and we would return Cecilia safe and sound. Tragically, that's not possible."
Raymond Zhang and Sherry Xu made a statement Sunday night through their lawyer.
"We hope she did not suffer and hope she knows how much of a treasure she was to us in her all-too-short life," Jeffry House said outside the family home. "We are devastated and in anguish to know that our angel daughter Cecilia has departed this life. We commend her soul to God in heaven where we know she now resides."
By 4:30 Sunday afternoon, hopes that their daughter would be found alive had vanished.
Detective Sergeant Gerry Cashman, the chief homicide investigator in the case, and two of his colleagues arrived to give them formal notice that a skeleton found in Mississauga on Saturday was that of their daughter.
Neighbours on the tidy North York street with the big houses had been on tenterhooks all day, glued to radio and television, waiting for news. Police cars began arriving early in the morning, and so did dozens of members of the media.
By 5 p.m., it was all over. Neighbours heard through news reports that it really was Cecilia's body. Jack Jia, who lives across the street from the Zhangs and who is a close friend of the family and often acted as their spokesman, emerged from his sprawling home minutes later. He stood stock still for a moment, then sobbed: "Shit," and began to cry.
He said he would spend the rest of his life trying to find out who had killed Cecilia. "We really cannot figure out why anyone would hurt Cecilia and for what," Mr. Jia said. "There is no reason."
Yu Wang and his wife Julia Jia, friends who live several blocks away, were also drawn to Cecilia's house Sunday afternoon after they heard the news. Mr. Wang said he still could not accept that Cecilia would not come back home.
It's the same home on Whitehorn Crescent where Mr. Zhang and Ms. Xu awoke on Oct. 20, 2003, to find Cecilia unaccountably gone from her bed. Ashen-faced, Ms. Xu ran to the nearby school where Cecilia was in a Grade 4 class for gifted students, to see whether her daughter had gone to class early.
The child was nowhere to be found. The police investigation that followed suggested that someone had broken into her bedroom through a window in the night and left through an open door. At the time, eight grownups, including Cecilia's grandmother and five tenants, lived in the house.What followed was an international search for the girl that included investigations in mainland China, where the Zhangs had lived before they immigrated to Canada when Cecilia was a toddler, prominent poster campaigns in the Toronto area beseeching Cecilia's abductor to set her free, a spot on the television show America's Most Wanted and a series of rich rewards for information that could lead police to the missing child.
Cecilia was a gifted pianist who was already working at a Grade 5 level at the Royal Conservatory of Music and took lessons each Monday at 5 p.m. Neighbours said that she was a devoted student of music and practised constantly.
Her Chinese name was Dong-Yue, which means eastern mountain. She was placed in the gifted program at Seneca Hill Drive Public School when she began Grade 4 in September.
Mr. Zhang and Ms. Xu have university degrees from Jiangsu province in China, a prosperous coastal area near Shanghai. Mr. Zhang worked as a computer programmer for Sun Life in Toronto. Ms. Xu, who taught school in China, ran a tutoring agency. They took in tenants from nearby Seneca College to help pay the mortgage on their home.Toronto Mayor David Miller expressed his sympathy to Cecilia's parents yesterday.
In a statement, he said: "There are simply no words that can convey how deeply sorry I am for the loss of Cecilia. I feel the pain of this tragedy both as a parent and as a resident of Toronto. The hearts of everyone in this city are with Cecilia's family tonight."
With a report from Canadian Press
