ST. PAUL
On a piece of paper, the child drew the weapon that tore her ear.
The outline of a wrench that the 7-year-old said her mother used to attack her led investigators to charge Mai Neng Xiong with malicious punishment of a child.
Xiong, 39, of St. Paul allegedly was angered that her daughter ate some fruit she had just bought.
The incident occurred this way, according to a criminal complaint that charged Xiong with the crime Monday:
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About 3:15 p.m. Nov. 11, a school nurse at Farnsworth Aerospace school in St. Paul called police to report a girl with visible injuries on her arm and her left ear.
"(The girl) drew a picture of the object that her mother used to cause the injuries," the complaint said. "The item looked like a pipe wrench. (Police) looked at the injuries and concluded that (the child) required immediate emergency medical attention and transported her to Children's Hospital" in St. Paul.
The girl was treated and placed in emergency foster care.
Dr. Mark Hudson, of the Midwest Children's Resource Center at Children's Hospital, examined the victim. He said she suffered "a severe denuded laceration of her left ear, which would require plastic surgery to repair, and that there were obvious pattern injuries on (her) left arm, which appeared to be from pinching from a wrench or some similar tool."
In an affidavit for a search warrant that police used to retrieve the wrench, the girl's ear was described as having exposed cartilage.
Xiong,
who does not speak English, enlisted the help of her 13-year-old daughter to report to police about 6:45 p.m. that day that the younger girl had not come home from school.
While police were talking to the sister, she reported that the mother was abusive to the girls.
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The following day, investigators presented a search warrant for the family's home in the 600 block of Sherburne Avenue. They found a "channel lock wrench" in a kitchen drawer that "looks very similar to a drawing of the
wrench provided by (the victim)."
Xiong initially denied that she had anything to do with injuries to her daughter. But eventually, she admitted that she got angry and pinched the girl's ear with the wrench, the complaint said. She said her daughter's arm got hurt while she was trying to defend herself from being pinched on the ear.
The older girl told police that Xiong had gone grocery shopping about 5 p.m. Nov. 9. She heard Xiong yelling at her sister about eating the fruit. She was taking a shower but could hear her sister screaming, the complaint said. When she got out of the shower, she saw her sister's ear covered with toilet paper and saw the injuries to her arm, she told police.
A phone number for Xiong could not be located.
Xiong was convicted of malicious punishment on two other occasions in Ramsey County, in incidents from 1999, and of child endangerment in Hennepin County in 1994.
In one of the Ramsey County cases, Xiong became angry with her three sons, ages 4, 6 and 8, and hit them with a metal stick after they knocked over a TV. One of them bled from the head. In the other Ramsey County case, Xiong was convicted of hitting an 8-year-old son with a stick for taking $400 from her and giving it away to his friends.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
