Cheng Chieh
Cheng Chieh (April 3, 1993 – May 10, 2016) or Zheng Jie, was a Taiwanese mass murderer. On May 21, 2014, he committed a mass stabbing on a Taipei MRT train, killing four people and injured 24 others. The Supreme Court of the Republic of China sentenced him to death. Cheng was executed at Taipei Prison on May 10, 2016.

Early life
Cheng studied at the Mandarin Experimental Primary School and Hongdao National Middle School in Taipei City. His family was financially well-off. Cheng's taekwondo coach, when interviewed, said that when he was young, he was thin and behaved like other children. His professor commented that Cheng had been an ordinary happy child.

From middle school to university, whenever his friends met with Cheng, he would talk to them about his murder plan and chat through games. Some also said that Cheng often mentioned that he wanted to go to the MRT to kill, but that they did not expect it to come true.

After that, Cheng was admitted to the New Taipei City Banqiao Senior High School, and in September 2008, when he was a freshman, he started a personal blog on the website "Anonymous Station". He only provided the password of the blog. He had a normal performance in school. Any record of punishment or counseling was rewarded for his conscientious cleaning and writing of weekly diaries. When Cheng's high school female tutor, surnamed Chen, received the news of his crimes, she expressed that she was surprised and saddened and could not believe that her student had become a murderer.

Cheng's high school classmates said that when Cheng was in high school, his grades were at the top of the class and that his classmates considered him to be funny and popular. More than a dozen articles are about hundreds of people being killed in confined spaces such as abandoned classrooms or stations. In addition, the media reported that Cheng wrote the message "I didn't set fire to my house" in the graduation album.

College life
After graduating from high school, Cheng enrolled in the Department of Power and Systems Engineering of the National Defense University Institute of Technology; until June 2013, in the second semester of his sophomore year, he was punished by the school for failing to obtain more than half of the credits in that semester. He dropped out, and in September of the same year, he entered the second year of the Department of Environmental Engineering at Tunghai University, Taichung, through the transfer exam. During the school's winter vacation in 2014, Cheng again applied for the transfer exam to another school. He aimed to transfer to the Chinese literature department, which he was more interested in but failed to pass the exam.

A colleague of Cheng's father said that his father studied engineering and worked in the family business of his relatives and that Cheng planned to study science and engineering as his eldest son. Cheng was admitted to the National Defense University. Later, he dropped out due to lack of interest. Cheng's parents told the police that he had a lively personality in high school, and his personality changed after he dropped out. The father's colleague also stated that he had also heard that Cheng planned to transfer to another school's Chinese department or foreign language department, but that his family opposed this plan. Because he was not interested in science and engineering and felt unhappy in the engineering department, he became addicted to the Internet or wrote fantasy novels, which became his way of gaining a sense of existence in real life.

When Cheng was studying at Tunghai University, he stayed at home and only rarely went out. Apart from attending school, he seldom communicated with friends and had no girlfriend. His monthly mobile phone calls were only about NT$300. His only hobby was playing video games. Cheng's parents told the media that he liked to play violent fighting games, and when he was interrogated by the police, Cheng said that the games he liked to play were League of Legends and Tower of Saviors, both of which are fighting type video games; the Taiwan agent of the game League of Legends issued a statement saying that its game had nothing to do with Cheng's motive for the murder, and the company of Tower of Saviors also stated that the product is a match-three game, which has nothing to do with the case committed by Cheng Chieh.

Crime
Tunghai University, where Cheng was a student, stated after the incident, expressing sorrow at his actions and stating that "No matter what, Cheng will always be our family" and urging students to show care for one another. They also stated they would bring in experts to investigate the campus environment.

Aftermath
The Taiwan New Taipei District Court sentenced him to death for four counts of murder. The court's first-instance verdict mentioned that Cheng once wrote the beginning and end of his oath to kill in an autobiography on the website "Anonymous Station". Cheng said in his blog "The Source" that he was "the big brother of the boys". He would beat the girls every day in middle school and be "very good", and there were two female classmates in the class that he could not provoke, so he swore that when he grew up, he would kill them; when he grew up, Cheng thought that he had made his childhood oath ("since he has made it, he must keep his word to himself"), and vowed that if he did not kill the two female classmates, he would encounter two consequences, one of which was "At the age of 43, he disappeared from the world", and the other in which he "carried out a massacre" to find the whereabouts of the two girls. After that, the content of Cheng's blog began to revolve around the murder plot he conceived: in his article "Taipei Night Kill," he described his fantasy murder scene, including "two feet kicked the platform and the MRT headshot the track into a pool of blood." In "Hate," he wrote "If I catch you, I will not be a human being, and I will give you strong acid and alkali every day." When Cheng dropped out of National Defense University and transferred to Tunghai University, his studies were unsatisfactory, and he was reported.

Before Cheng was sentenced to death, he expressed the hope that someone would bring cartoons to the Taipei Detention Center where he was detained to visit, and Cheng's parents would send him pocket money from time to time. They also asked relatives to help send salted crispy chicken, plantains, etc. (his favorite food) and the comic One Piece, and bought a handheld TV so that he could watch cartoons and news to pass the time; when Cheng said that "the water in jail is not good," his parents would also buy bottled water and send it to him. He tried his best to meet his needs. Other inmates and staff at the facility jokingly said that Cheng seemed to be in a summer camp.

Execution
On May 10, 2016, at 20:47, Cheng was executed by firing squad at the Taipei Execution Ground of Taipei Prison (located in the Tucheng Detention Center). Before the execution, he only asked to drink water, and his family did not come forward before the execution. The delegation stated that it did not notify the family members and appointed lawyers before the execution, nor did it apply for an extraordinary appeal and retrial, and confirmed his death at 21:11. After the execution, the family took the body away and was not sent to the Banqiao Funeral Home as is usual. Cheng's body was cremated at 15:00 on May 13, 2016, at the Yusheng Hall of the Funeral Service Center in Zhongli District, Taoyuan City.

References

1993 births
2016 deaths
Executed Taiwanese people
People executed by Taiwan by firearm
21st-century executions
Taiwanese people convicted of murder
People convicted of murder by Taiwan
People from New Taipei
Executed mass murderers