There are only a few ways of getting out of it alive. The one rule - no matter how good it feels - DO NOT let sleep whisk you away.The only options are as follows:1. Cover yourself completely in plastic and only stick your head out to breathe when necessarily.2. Crawl into a cardboard box and try your best to stay awake.3. Take the frozen goods and stick them into your clothing. That is how you stay alive if you are trapped inside of a commercial walk in freezer. Or at least that’s what they say but the odds of survival do not look good. The police are concerned that, that is where 5 year old, Ashley, is going to be. Maybe she accidentally locked herself in the freezer with no way out? The officers look through the freezer bins, cardboard boxes filled with packaged meats, and grocery bags… She’s is not there.But that’s the thing about humans - we all have a blind spot.They looked left, right, under the tables of the restaurant… but have they looked up? Full show notes at rottenmangopodcast.com
Chapter 1: What happened to Ashley at the restaurant?
There are only so many places you can hide inside of a restaurant. But the problem is almost every single spot is relatively easy to search. The bathroom requires someone sticking their head under the stall. You're going to be caught. They're going to appear. They're going to make sure nobody is hiding and they're going to see you. The stock rooms, the kitchen, same thing.
You get one person poking around, hide and seek is over. There's not that many hiding spots. which leaves just that one door, the steel door. It's like the size of a small closet. Sometimes the room is, it's like a small room.
And if you step inside and you close that door behind you, you might as well have taken a portal to a different world because once that door clicks shut, the gasping, the shivering, the numbness, you can't feel your ears. You can't feel your fingers. You're trying to bang on the door to be let out, but you're more clumsy.
It's normal because this is exactly what happens when you are trapped inside of a giant freezer. The idea of working with a freezer big enough for you to walk into and then being trapped inside of one has seemingly become one of the top 15 slightly irrational fears of the everyday person.
I have yet to step foot inside of a commercial walk-in freezer, but I do have random, perhaps intrusive thoughts about being trapped in one. So much so that there are Ask Reddit threads asking people, in the hypothetical world, if you were to be trapped inside of a commercial walk-in freezer for the night, let's say at a restaurant, what do you do to survive? Nobody's coming until the morning.
The answers really don't do anything to make you less paranoid. I would take the cold boxes of food and create an ice shelter type of structure. So you want to prevent the blowing air from cooling you down to the point of hypothermia. That's how you're going to circulate your inner warmth.
Another professional Reddit survivalist writes, many restaurants have large plastic bags in or on those wire racks. If that's the case, take two bags, wrap yourselves in them, utilize your body temperature by breathing inside the bag, but not enough to suffocate yourself. Come out for air every now and then. You'll last eight hours. One person comments, I worked at a fish and chip shop once.
Got loads of pies and food and, you know, stuff back there. I would just stuff them into my clothes. I would put them in my pants. I'd put them in my shirt. Yeah, they're frozen pies. It's going to feel freezing for the first 10, 20 minutes. And then after that, it'll actually somewhat insulate you. That's how it works.
That is crazy how creative people are.
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Chapter 2: How do police search for missing children?
Chapter 3: What survival tips are shared for being trapped in a freezer?
The answers really don't do anything to make you less paranoid. I would take the cold boxes of food and create an ice shelter type of structure. So you want to prevent the blowing air from cooling you down to the point of hypothermia. That's how you're going to circulate your inner warmth.
Another professional Reddit survivalist writes, many restaurants have large plastic bags in or on those wire racks. If that's the case, take two bags, wrap yourselves in them, utilize your body temperature by breathing inside the bag, but not enough to suffocate yourself. Come out for air every now and then. You'll last eight hours. One person comments, I worked at a fish and chip shop once.
Got loads of pies and food and, you know, stuff back there. I would just stuff them into my clothes. I would put them in my pants. I'd put them in my shirt. Yeah, they're frozen pies. It's going to feel freezing for the first 10, 20 minutes. And then after that, it'll actually somewhat insulate you. That's how it works.
That is crazy how creative people are.
I mean, probably the best advice, the most simple advice comes from one professional that works with industrial freezers. He says, best thing to do if you're trapped, find something to stick into the fan blade so they stop turning. It's gonna overheat the compressor outside, the cooler's gonna stop cooling, the temperature alarm's gonna sound, and then you'll get out.
Obviously, this is after you check to see if the emergency exit method is not already working, which surprisingly a lot of people report in the restaurants that they work at, it never functions well. Naturally, it is one of the very first places the police officers check for the little missing girl. What if she accidentally walked into the freezer and somehow got locked inside?
They start going through the bins, the grocery bags filled with raw meat inside of the freezer. She is not here. They check and they double check. And when they're done, they walk out of that commercial freezer. It's clear she's not in the freezer. But that is the thing. Even police have their blind spots. When looking for five-year-old Ashley, they look everywhere. They look on the shelves.
They look under the chair. They look in the bags. They look inside that commercial walk-in freezer. But while they're in the freezer, did they ever think to... Look up. This is the case of Ashley Zhao, the five-year-old girl that was found in the walls of a Chinese restaurant. We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten Mango to support Baby to Baby.
They are a nonprofit that provides essential items to more than 1 million children across the country. This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten Mango's growing team. And we'd also like to thank you guys for your continued support. As always, full show notes are available at rottenmangopodcast.com. Now, first, a disclaimer for today's case.
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Chapter 4: What were the parents' actions after Ashley went missing?
When we came back, it was just myself and my daughter, not my wife. My wife was here the whole time we came back. Okay, so your wife hasn't seen your littlest daughter since around four or five o'clock either. He explains they saw her around four or five, everyone. The six-year-old saw her, the wife saw her, the husband saw her, everybody saw her sleeping. And then the dinner rush came.
They were fixing up the dinner rush afterwards. They went to check on her and she's gone. And it's been five hours. Maybe she managed to walk out the back door. And if that's the case, she maybe has a few more hours left. Because if she's been out there for at least a few hours and it's six degrees outside, she doesn't have a lot of time.
Six degrees Fahrenheit?
What?
If the walk-in freezer is the worst case scenario, at least on first glance, this is the second worst case scenario. Ashley, five-year-old Ashley being lost outside in the cold. A lot of health inspectors do not like to eat out at restaurants. It's just not a fun time for them. you wanna eat dinner with a health inspector, you're probably gonna go to their house. It's understandable.
Maybe it's safer to cook at home when a ton of restaurants they're inspecting are clearly doing what they call fire drills. You think the health inspector doesn't know what's going on? They know. Manager, owner, eyes get huge. They start ordering employees to do all sorts of tasks. You over there, you over there.
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Chapter 5: What did the 911 call reveal about the parents' behavior?
They're like managing a drill to cover up all sorts of potential violations, which usually results in creating more violations on the spot. or some of them try the distraction method, divide and conquer. They send people to bombard the inspector to get all their attention so they can't actually focus on the restaurant and the inspector is thinking, that's not working.
Sometimes I heard they will form a clique with all the restaurants nearby. Yes. So usually when it comes to one of them, they will alarm the other.
Yes. There are so many ways around it. I think the health inspectors are the citizens' number one friend and the restaurant's number one enemy sometimes. And one of them just goes by this rule. One health inspector. He said, go to the bathroom. Before you order, go to the bathroom. Usually in most restaurants, the bathroom and the kitchen are in very similar conditions.
One health inspector writes online, at one busy restaurant, there was a bucket under the prep bench. And I thought, what's that bucket? I walked up to it. The chefs were peeing inside the bucket instead of going to the bathroom. Another says, I do remember a steak being returned once. Flipped it over. There was a crispy fried cockroach cooked into one side of it.
One netizen writes online, my mom was inspecting a donut shop in California and saw someone changing a diaper on the dough prep table. Their excuse was, what? We're not open yet. People say, I've seen soup being prepared in five gallon Home Depot buckets on the floor. I've seen soup being prepared without utensils, just using a bare arm to stir the soup.
Someone said, I discovered as a health inspector, one of the local restaurants had been washing dishes in the lake behind the restaurant. Another said, I'm not a health inspector, but I worked at a major fast food chain. I had a coworker that would lick her index finger every time she peeled a slice of cheese from the stack of cheese to make cheeseburgers.
It was as if she was trying to separate a sheet of paper from a stack of papers. I would watch her do this all day long. I never said anything to the health department, but I sure as hell never ate the cheeseburgers. Another person writes, I worked at another major national food chain, fast food chain.
When the health inspector came, the cooks took all the expired food out of the fridge, stored it in their cars by the dumpster until after the health inspector left, and then we put it all back. One health inspector said, we kept getting reports of a vanilla ice cream machine with black specks in it, worried it would be grinding metal, like a little lock metal that could be a health hazard.
The barrel for the ice cream machine was infested with cockroaches, just being ground up and expelled as additional protein. One person writes, you think that's bad? I saw a floor painted with non-slip paint, and they literally painted over a dead rat and sealed it there. Considering how bad health inspections can go, Ong's Chinese cuisine in Ohio is actually not that bad.
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Chapter 6: What clues did police find during the investigation?
You don't have to explain to me, but at least let us go get her. That's all we want to do so that we can send everyone home so they can at least spend their evening with their loved ones. I know, I know, I understand, okay? I really do, but you know, it's not just my wife, it's my whole family that's gonna, can I just leave? Can I just leave for a little while?
Just let me go back home to my wife and see my kid. I just wanna see my kid. You're not gonna tell us, are you? I just wanna see my kid and my wife. I wanna help, but I can't help if you don't help me. I'm going to reach my arm out to you. I'm going to reach my hand out to you. And I take my hand. I'm here to help you. Look at my hand. It's shaking. It shakes when I'm nervous.
But I'm putting my hand out to you. Please. I don't. It was an accident. We didn't mean for this to happen. What happened? Did she fall? No. Something get spilled on her? No. Somebody fall on her? No. Was she playing and she got hurt? No. Just tell us so we can at least go get her. I mean, I'm still gonna go to jail. But what did you do wrong? Why would you go to jail? Because I hid a dead body.
The police are searching for Ashley in the woods and near the restaurant. They unlock the front door to Eng's Cuisine. This is not their first search of this entire restaurant, but now they know for sure that they're looking in the right direction. They start going through, combing through the entire place again, but this time with a lot more patience.
They go through the kitchen, the walk-in freezer, the messy storage room, the tiny closet with the mattress in there. And why is there a ladder propped up against the wall? leaned above where the walk-in freezer is. So on top of the giant commercial walk-in freezer, there's a crawl space. And they shine the light. Look, the tiles are not even even. Get the ladder. We've got to go up there.
So the light detector test was when was that taken? The next day?
The next day. So they've been searching. They call that 9 p.m. They've been searching all night into the day. And the lie detector test is taken.
And then after that, this is when the police is going back to the restaurant.
I mean, I do think that the police were suspicious of the couple from the get-go. But they're honing in now. They're no longer focusing on the woods. They're inside the restaurant. The first officer calmly pulls down the first tile, places it on the ground. He shines his light into this tiny little crawlspace. And it is storage. There's photo albums, wedding photos of Ming Ming and Liang.
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Chapter 7: How do interrogations reveal the truth?
You're going to put me away because even knowing what my wife did, those things, I didn't do anything about it. I just... Ashley has a lot of... Well, what would Ashley do? What would Mingming do to Ashley? Would Mingming twist her arm, kick her? Would she hit her? What happened? Pretty much all of it.
He explains that Ashley was raised by his parents for the first four years of their lives, her life. And since Ashley got back, maybe not even a year ago, They just, it's been rough. He says that his parents call nonstop. They send relatives over to tell Ming Ming that she's a horrible mother. He says, my mom started telling my wife that she's doing it wrong, that she's raising Ashley wrong.
That kind of got to my wife because it's, you know, your own daughter. And then your mother-in-law's telling you that you're not doing it right. You're not supposed to be doing what you're supposed to be doing. That's one thing. And then you got to look after your own daughter. She's four. She's not potty trained. She doesn't know her last name. She doesn't know if she's a boy or a girl.
And the list goes on and on with all these things. And she finally knows that she's a girl because we taught her that and we taught her her last name. But initially, when we got her back from my parents, she didn't know.
And combined with the fact that my mom kept telling my wife that she's doing it wrong and seeing how Ashley was actually raised, the combination of the two just made my wife really angry. And the more my wife saw Ashley being that way, not being able to be potty trained and just getting angry. It's always when Ashley does something that Ming Ming gets triggered by. What? Yeah.
As for what happened yesterday, Liang tells the full picture, whereas Mingming doesn't. Liang says that he went to go drop off Jojo from school. He comes home and he recognizes that Ashley had defecated in her diaper. So she pooped in her diaper because she's not potty trained. And which, by the way, I've got a very firm stance.
If your child is not potty trained, that's on the responsibility of the parent. It's not the child. The child does not potty train themselves. She pooped in her diaper. And then I think she was so uncomfortable with the poop in her diaper because obviously it's very not a great sensation. She took off her diaper, which led to some of the poop falling onto the floor. Liang walks in.
Mingming is smashing Ashley's head into the carpet.
In the restaurant or at home?
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