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Vadnais Lake murder suicide: MN mom kills 3 kids, self after dad’s suicide

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Molly Cheng Mapplewood MN mom kills self 3 kids Vadnais Lake
Molly Cheng Mapplewood MN mom kills self & 3 kids at Vadnais Lake. Pictured the mother and her 3 children. Images via Pa Lee Facebook.
Molly Cheng Mapplewood MN mom kills self 3 kids Vadnais Lake
Molly Cheng Mapplewood MN mom kills self & 3 kids at Vadnais Lake. Pictured woman’s husband and father of the couple’s 3 children, Kos Lee according to man’s sister, Pa Lee.

Molly Cheng Mapplewood area Minnesota mother kills self and 3 kids at Vadnais Lake after husband and father of children’s suicide. Man’s sister, Pa Lee id suicidal man as Kos Lee. Wife’s sister in law may have shamed her in Facebook Live. 

The bodies of a Vadnais Heights, Minnesota woman and her three young children were recovered at a Maplewood area lake hours after the woman’s husband and the father of the 3 siblings committed suicide. 

Identified as the mother was Molly Cheng, 23, a tattoo and beauty artist hailing from Vadnais Lake’s Hmong community.

Ramsay County Undersheriff Mike Martin said one of the children’s bodies were found on Friday evening, with the bodies of the other two and the mom recovered by Saturday morning along Lake Vadnais. Police said all the kids, two boys and one girl, were all younger than five years old. 

The husband was identified only as Kos by the man’s sister, Pa Lee, who shared news of her brother’s suicide death on Facebook according to the dailymail.

Ramsay County Sheriff Bob Fletcher said police are ‘treating this is a potential triple-homicide here at Lake Vadnais.’

Molly Cheng Mapplewood MN mom kills self 3 kids Vadnais Lake
Molly Cheng Mapplewood MN mom kills self & 3 kids at Vadnais Lake. Pictured the mother and her 3 children. Images via Pa Lee Facebook.

Suicidal mom responds to suicide death of her husband & father of 3 kids

Matters came to the fore after the Maplewood Police Department recovered the body of a man on July 1, 10.30 am who had committed suicide at a Maplewood residence, followed by a call circa 4pm, later that day about a possibly suicidal mother who was on her way to Lake Vadnais with her three children.

Fletcher said that investigators determined that the children went into the water with their mother in an apparent murder-suicide as the children’s shoes and mother’s car was found close to the water. Police were able to track her cellphone to the location.  

Martin said the first child’s body was recovered at around 7:30p.m., with a team of more than 20 law enforcement agents working through the night to uncover the body of the second child. 

By 10:40 a.m. on Saturday, police were able to recover the mother’s body, and by 11 a.m. they found the third child. 

‘Our goal was to find the children and the mother, and return them to their families,’ Martin said. ‘Our hearts go out to the family and their friends.’ 

‘I’ve been in this 32 years and this is one of the most difficult [cases],’ commander Eric Brandt added about leading the search.  

Officials confirmed the mother and her three children’s deaths were connected to a suicide taking place at the Rolling Hills Estates Mobile Home Park earlier on Friday. 

‘Forever goodbye my nicest brother’ 

The man who committed suicide at the trailer park is the children’s father and husband to the woman. The above direct video offers live scanning of the crime scene and dialogue in Vietnamese seemingly explaining what happened, with possible criticism of Molly for the husband’s death. 

The sister of the children’s father wrote on Facebook on the morning of the suicide: ‘Forever goodbye my nicest brother. Why are you making me so mad and sad at the same moment. I’m so sorry that I’m 20 minutes late and cannot help you.’

She added: ‘I drive so fast to help you and to stop you but I still failed. I’m sorry that I fail you in this life and was late to help you. Only if I was faster then you will be alive.’ 

In a series of videos that were posted by family members, investigators reveal that the children’s father committed suicide in his bedroom while wearing pajamas.

One of those videos shows the bedroom to be ransacked (see video directly below, with Molly dressed in black seen standing outside a bloody bedroom moments after her husband’s suicide). 

A family member suggests that the father owned more than one gun and that he used the ‘bigger one’ to take his own life.

Molly Cheng Mapplewood MN mom kills self 3 kids Vadnais Lake
Molly Cheng Mapplewood MN mom kills self 3 kids Vadnais Lake. Pictured the family, including suicidal husband, Kos. Image via social media.

Victim of cyber-bulling? 

Of increasing disconcert are claims by social media users that the husband’s sister, Pa Lee, moments after the suicide death of her brother proceeded to publicly shame her sister in law on Facebook Live (the author has yet to see this video for himself with Pa Lee’s FB account since scrubbed of such alleged videos) and possibly forcing the unsettled wife to the brink.

Posted one commentator: ‘Can you also state the fact that the sister in law went Facebook live and bashed this woman’s life, calling her names, bad mouthing her that led to the community shaming her. You can hear her bad mouthing this woman in all her live videos. This woman might have done what she did due to what the sister in law had done on Facebook live. The sister in law had something to do with it.’ 

According to those familiar with Molly and Kos within the local Hmong community, the couple had a fractured relationship. Molly had been adopted and originally hailed from Bangkok, Thailand outside the Hmong community. 

As per a post that appeared on medium on July 3: ‘When she married Kos Lee, the family didn’t approve of her. There were accusations of cheating from the family early on, and friends say the family wasn’t afraid to be vocal about it. Whether the accusations were true or not, we’ll never know, but Molly felt everything she did was met with disapproval. She’d left her husband and returned multiple times. She felt as though both her father and her husband’s family didn’t love her children because of who she was — an outsider. Hmong by culture, but not by birth.’ 

The Twin Cities area is home to the largest concentration of Hmong people in the United States with more than 66,000 calling the area home. 

Not immediately clear is what led to the father taking his own life, whether the man’s wife and the couple’s three children lived at the trailer home and what ultimately led to the mother taking her own life along with those of her children.

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