Hong Kong socialite Abby Choi’s ex-husband and in-laws on trial

The details out of Hong Kong read like something from a crime novel, except they're grimly real. A young mother, an heiress, dismembered in a house that should have been a family home. Her ex-husband, his brother, and their parents are now on trial, and the city is still trying to process the savagery of it all. This isn't a political story in the typical sense, but it is a story about what happens when the basic bonds of family and decency are obliterated by greed and resentment.

This trial is a test of the rule of law, and so far, the system is doing exactly what it should. The accused are being held to account, and the cameras are capturing every moment of it. But the coverage also forces a hard question: how does a civilized city produce this kind of monster? Hong Kong is a place where violent crime is rare, a point of pride for the city. That rarity might also be its blind spot. It's a reminder that evil doesn't check itself at the border or require a passport; it can sit right at the family dinner table.

We in the West tend to look at our own headlines—the daily unfolding of gang violence and open-air drug markets in our cities—and we wonder how it got so bad. This story out of Hong Kong is a stark reminder that crime isn't just about social programs or community outreach. It's about individual wickedness and the consequences of broken homes. The left likes to blame the system for everything, but the system didn't dismember anyone here. A family did. Until we admit that the decay starts in the heart and not just in the zoning laws, we're only treating the symptoms. A society that flinches from that truth is just waiting for its own version of this horror story to hit closer to home, and it won't be a shock when it does.