In early January, when 12-year-old Wei Xuanlong finished his last test of
In early January, when 12-year-old Wei Xuanlong finished his last test of the semester, he didn’t go home. Instead, according to the Guangzhou Daily, he went straight to the local internet cafe to play games. What happened to him after then isn’t entirely clear. A classmate says that he saw Wei outside the school gate the next day asking a sixth-grader for money to buy some food. Two days after that, the proprietor of a local internet cafe says he was still in there playing games. But that was the last time anyone saw Wei. As of early February, the boy was still missing, and his parents had been searching for him for nearly a month with no luck whatsoever.
No one knows what happened to Wei, but kidnappers and predators looking for children his age have often found internet cafes to be the perfect stalking ground. It makes a lot of sense; kids in net cafes are unsupervised and often they also want money for food or games, which can make them easy to lure away in the hopes of making a quick buck or getting in a free meal with a “friendly” stranger.
What happens next can be horrific.