Daughter Dies Three Days After Admission to Prison; Authorities Block Independent Autopsy

Ms. Chen Yan, a 45-year-old Falun Gong practitioner from Benxi City, Liaoning Province, died on November 8, 2025—just three days after being admitted to Liaoning Province Women’s Prison to serve a five-year sentence for her faith. The Falun Dafa Information Center reported her death on December 2, 2025, describing how she was transferred to the prison unable to walk after 16 months of abuse in detention, and died within days. This report follows up with new details that have since emerged about the authorities’ handling of her death and their obstruction of an independent autopsy.

In the seven months since Ms. Chen died, her family has been unable to obtain an independent autopsy, her body remains at a funeral home, and no official cause-of-death documentation has been released to them.

Blocked autopsy and shifting accounts

Ms. Chen’s hospital emergency record, dated the morning of November 8, 2025, reportedly listed no detectable pulse, unmeasurable blood pressure, no spontaneous breathing, and fixed, dilated pupils on arrival—the clinical signs of a patient already dead—contradicting the guards’ account that she had been taken to the hospital for treatment. The same record listed a prison guard, rather than a family member, in the field for the patient’s relationship or guardian.

The guard who called the family gave shifting explanations—first saying Ms. Chen was found dead in the morning when she failed to get up, then that she died after getting up and dressing. Guards attributed her death to heart failure and pressed her parents to send an “appreciation flag” thanking the prison for taking her for “treatment.”

During an external examination of the body the following day, Ms. Chen’s parents reportedly observed several abnormalities inconsistent with a natural death: her right upper arm was swollen and thicker than the left; her right leg showed an abnormal inward curvature suggesting a fracture; two areas of skin necrosis, each the size of a bowl, were present on the same leg; and black fluid oozed from her mouth and nose when the body was turned. Having weighed about 132 pounds before her arrest, she had reportedly lost more than half her body weight by the time she died.

The prison has since obstructed every attempt to establish an independent cause of death. Officials showed Ms. Chen’s father only the folded conclusion lines of two internal documents—an external examination report stating “no obvious fatal external injuries” and a death investigation report stating “death by natural causes”—while refusing to provide copies.

Chinese regulations permit families to commission an independent autopsy, but the prison rejected the Beijing-based agency the family chose, and the local agencies, lawyers, and additional experts they subsequently engaged all reportedly withdrew after being pressured or threatened. When the family petitioned procuratorates at the district, city, and provincial levels in March 2026, a prosecutor responded only orally that the death was natural and declined to intervene.

To date, the family says they have received no prison admission notice, death notice, or examination report, and the autopsy that regulations require within 24 hours of death has still not been performed.

Deadly custody in China

Ms. Chen was arrested on July 14, 2024, tried in a hearing reportedly held inside her detention cell, and sentenced to five years with a 5,000-yuan fine; the Benxi City Intermediate Court denied her appeal on September 19, 2025.

Throughout her detention she was reportedly beaten by inmates and denied adequate medical care, and by her final family visits she was wheelchair-bound, unable to care for herself, and doubted she would survive the transfer to prison. She had already served a three-year term in the same prison from 2015 to 2018, during which she was reportedly given unknown drugs that damaged her central nervous system.

Ms. Chen’s family continues to seek an independent autopsy and accountability for her death, so far without response. Her body has now lain in a funeral home for more than seven months.

For Ms. Chen’s elderly parents, that pattern has meant not only the loss of their daughter but the denial of any means to learn how, or why, she died.