#she's a lawyer! has short hair! stands up to the cops and advocates for her rights! socially she's super strong and independent!

[vulpinesaint]

i just think that their actual relationship where they care about each other and want each other to be safe and their conflict is based on the moral conflicts that arise from venom's definition of "justice" is so much more interesting than the "wow i hate my ex" relationship that some people seem to want them to have. people hate to see two people have an amicable divorce and still care about the person they used to be with. and still see the person they used to be with even beyond the way they've both changed. anyway

[booksummarieswithkatz]

Karma by R.J. Blain

Okay, terms to know can be found here.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

As with Pack Justice, I’m gonna do a bunch of spoilers by telling you the story in order of in-universe chronology instead of the books method of presenting it for the sake of suspense. Got it? Good.

So Karma Clarice Johnson isn’t nearly as human as we are led to believe at the beginning, you see – Karma was adopted after being dropped off in a forest with only a gold locket with her first name inscribed on it. She was taken in by her parents, whose names are so unimportant I’ll just call them Shitter Dad and Shitter Mom, as an adopted surrogate for their missing son as opposed to being one of the many fostered children the two have cared for over the years. Now, Shitter Mom and Shitter Dad are not what I would call good people, mostly because they (mostly Shitter Mom) beat the shit out of Karma when she was a small child. The Inquisition allowed them to adopt Karma because they had a great track record with taking care of children of supernaturals – they just never realized that they were so good because the children were too terrified to get into trouble.

Karma in particular was beaten regularly until she was five, because she is a… something? We never actually find out what she is, but she has aspects of both shifters and earth witches. Karma has two modes: normal person mode (a result of her abuse) and vixen mode, which means that she doesn’t think like a person, she thinks like an actual fox – biting, scratching, and making fox noises instead of talking. The process of breaking her lack of control and overpowering instincts have left her with several phobias, heights in particular. She also has an issue with water, like many powerful earth witches, she sinks like a stone; water loves her and doesn’t want to let her go – ever. But because character’s have to have sudden realizations of the supernatural, Karma’s early abuse has cause her to severely repress all memory of her fox powers, relegating them purely to dreams and a childhood fixation.

Remember how I said that the Shitter parents had a missing son? Yeah, so when Karma was six years old, the team of FBI agents assigned to the case by CARD (Child Abduction Rapid Deployment division) came to visit so say that they had found the boys body; it was the four grown men breaking down and crying over their failure to save an infant that stuck with her and gave her her life-long dream: to join CARD and save parents from that kind of heartache. So now, at the age of 29 (six years after entering FBI training), Karma has been accepted for a position at CARD in New York, and she is finishing the move out procedures after selling her house in Baltimore.

So it turns out that her house is being bought by some condescending dick-bags, who tell her that it’s not right for her parents to make a young girl like her do all this paperwork – oh yeah, did I mention that despite being 29 Karma looks like she’s 18 at most? Because she does and that’s important. Just to be sure we’re ready for the story begins let’s get her appearance out of the way, yeah? Karma is short, at around five-foot-one, she is also hot – and I mean hot. While her actual features are never mentioned, she has pale skin (in a pretty way? Idk) with eyes the color of amber (not brown, like vividly orange/amber). Her also needs to be regularly dyed to appear normal, because while her long locks are a deep black in color, the last few inches are a stark white, and when put in pony tail looks like a fox tail. Got all that? Because people are gonna say shit about it and it will be important (okay it’s mostly her eyes but whatever).

So Karma hands of the last of the house keys to the buyers, and tries not to use her 23 years of kickboxing experience to earn herself an assault charge, opting to go to a music festival downtown to cool off before competing in a womens kickboxing tournament later that evening. Tomorrow she drives up to New York City for her dream job. Things are looking really great for Karma. For about five fucking seconds.

At the festival Karma hops in line to satisfy her funnel cake addiction, and ends up behind a middle aged woman and her seven children. The oldest child, a girl named Chloe, sees the kickboxing patches that Karma had sewn on her purse and starts chatting her up about the sport. Karma goes on the whole “everybody loves a whooping” spiel and admirably advocates the sport (she’s a four-time champion btw). This continues until the other kids (ages 3-6) decide to start screaming and being little shits; Karma offers to hold the youngest child, an infant named Annabelle, while Chloe and her mother rein the rowdy kids in. While Karma is holding Annabelle, however, she feels something eerily similar to a gun barrel pressed up against her head. No… yeah that’s a gun barrel. Everyone starts screaming and backing away, while the man with the gun pulls a Karma and the baby into a black SUV, then goes screaming off down the street.

The kidnappers are smart; they use multiple identical SUVs to separate law enforcement and turn a chase into a mess of hide-and-go-fuck-yourself. They think that Karma is just some teenage girl, and force her to take care of Annabelle in exchange for not killer her. The soon cross into West Virginia, and time starts getting skewed as Karma rests and focuses on fooling the kidnappers and caring for the baby. Somewhere in Kentucky they make her drive for a spell, then they must have slipped her some sedatives somewhere along the line, because before she knows it, she’s in a lodge in the mountains somewhere in Colorado. The abductors remove all ways of telling the time other than the lengths of their shifts on watch. Days pass, and finally, a call comes in: in twenty-four hours, dump the baby and kill the girl.

The abductors don’t realize that Karma knows what’s going on, and one of them lets his guard down; she kicks him in the back of the skull, knocks him out, steals his gun, then uses his phone to call the cops before fleeing with Annabelle in a travel carrier. She treks through the woods for several days, before she realizes a wolf is stalking her. When she puts Annabelle down to give her a change, she turns around to find herself nose to nose with the beast. She screams and pistol whips it. It smiles at her. She pistol whips it again. It is a very friendly wolf, it’s also way bigger than a wolf has any right to be.

Realizing that the wolf probably won’t eat her, she sets off with the wolf in tow, and she finally finds a river so she can mix more formula for the baby (desperate times because river water might make you sick boys and girls). She tests the water on herself first, but when she turns around and sees someone is standing at the baby carrier, she panics and slips and falls in the water. Remember: Karma can’t fucking swim. So she starts doing a strip tease because trying to doggy paddle in heavy wet clothes doesn’t really work very well, but she’s yanked out of the water when she’s down to her panties by none other than her former partner, Jake.

A slight digression here for Jake, because he’s the love interest and it’s important. In the six years Karma has worked in the FBI, she has had not one, not two, not three, but NINE partners. The first one repeatedly allowed her to get shot because he was too busy trying to impress their supervisor, the next six just couldn’t handle how strict she was about the buddy system, the eighth one actually tried to murder her before disappearing into the void. But Jake, Jake was perfect; he always watched her back, always kept it professional. They worked together for four years, and other than him being there to razz her every once in a while, they got along really well. But they chose separate paths for their careers, she wanted to join CARD (Child Abduction Rapid Deployment), and he wanted to join HRT (Hardcore Rectal Training). They said goodbye as partners and friends a few days before she was abducted, but they called him on to the case when they finally realized an agent was involved.

So they bring Karma to the hospital (she was in shock and hypothermic at this point), and goose her up with some morphine (any other sedative turns her into a screaming homicidal maniac). When she’s recovered and lucid they begin her interview and debriefing, and this is where the sexism starts. The guy they sent from Washington immediately accuses her of being in on the abduction to boost her resume, and Karma responds by not talking other than to demand a lawyer. Eventually the director in charge of the FBI in Colorado comes in and kicks the asshole out, then they start actually debriefing her. They don’t learn anything new, and Jake takes Karma out for pizza in celebration of her safe return (pepperoni, light on the cheese).

They wake the pair up extra early, hand Karma a gun, and put them on the first plane they can find back to Baltimore. They then tell her that she will have to lie low and play Anchor (basically a coms-monitoring secretary) until the media sensation from the abduction blows over. So Karma moves into her new apartment in NYC, cuts and dyes her hair, quits kickboxing so she doesn’t need to go out in public, and buys color contacts; she’s finally starting her dream job.

Too bad her team is full of sexist old-school assholes who don’t respect her and let a kid die because they didn’t want to follow a lead she discovered. Nice! This goes on for two whole months, and Karma’s life enters a stress based death-spiral. Since moving to NYC, Karma has only eaten pizza (pepperoni, light on the cheese, just the way Jake liked it), and she’s getting out of shape from being unable to go to a gym and kickbox; her job is so arbitrary that she actually sits in a pool and doggy paddles around while listening to her supposed teammates chatter on the phone. Finally, the last straw is placed on the camel’s back, her supervisor looks at her and says: “You have brown eyes, not amber. Was putting the exotic color on your file just to boost your confidence?” She very slowly takes out each of the color contacts, and tells him to go fuck himself. She quits.

After a brief standoff where she tells her supervisor that he can have his stupid boys’ club and shove it up his ass, and walks out on the job she’s worked her entire life for. So Karma decides that she needs to take a walk and finally get around to exploring the city. She winds up in central park, and after  kicking stones into pond for a while, someone sits on the bench next to her. He says that her proposal of quiting has been rejected, effective immediately. Turns out that this guy (who looks maybe 30 if you’re generous) is actually her supervisor’s boss, Kelvin Daniels, and he takes Karma out for some Italian food (not pizza), and makes her and offer: sign a waiver (which basically says “don’t kill innocents” and let’s her break pretty much any other rules), go rogue, and take an unmarked car (a yellow Corvette convertible) out to due the case that her team already left for, on her own, and she has to do it without any FBI agents finding her first. If she wins, she gets put on a new team and she gets to keep the car; if she loses, she gets a new team and isn’t allowed to quit. Basically if she doesn’t agree to this game they will arrest her and keep her in custody until she agrees to take her job back. Cuz that’s not illegal at all.

She agrees, takes the Corvette, and puts on her disguise: booty shorts, a halter top with leather jacket to hid her gun, and foot-long hair extensions; she looks like a promiscuous highschooler. She heads off on her assignment.

Jacob Henry, ten year old son of an accountant that works for the government. He has been missing for a few days now, and may have run away to his relatives in a neighboring state. Karma starts by meeting with Jacob’s uncle in New York, Winston Henry, who likes to hang out at home in the buff. She learns that Jacob has a lot of issues: he hates being home-schooled (even though his parents claimed he was registered at the local school), and has few friends, and his parents don’t let him go outside, and life’s just not awesome for young Jacob. Also Jacob’s father doesn’t get along really well with the rest of the family. She also notices that someone has tampered with the phone chord in the drywall, possibly a wiretap. She then spoke with another uncle, Peter, who says a lot without giving any useful info other than a set of albums that supposedly have pictures of Jacob’s fathers friends, who drive around in nondescript black SUVs and aren’t terribly friendly.

So Karma gives Daniels a call and they manage to connect the Jacob’s case with the Gianni case (her and Annabelle’s kidnapping), and Daniels wants to take her off the case before she becomes a target, but Karma says she really will go rogue if he tries. So he says that if the agents he has pursuing her catch up then she needs to take a partner. She agrees (kind of) and looks through the album, finding a picture of one of the men who kidnapped her. She tells Daniels and heads off the next day to meet with the principal of the local elementary school to talk about any overlaps between home-schooled kids and those who have public education. Getting the names of two local hangouts, she catches sight of a nice car that’s following her. She lures the car to the more popular of the two hangouts, a gorge that cuts through the town. It turns out that the partner they sent her was actually Jake, and they roll out to their hotel room to have a chat about all the shit she’s gone through recently (they always take a double-bed room after an incident where a guy broke into Karma’s room when she was taking a shower and tried to kill her). They catch up, and then Jake gets really uncomfortable and insists that she change into normal clothes. The tiny booty shorts and halter top are a bit too stimulating for him, and asks if she’s wearing the outfit because she is switching careers to being a prostitute, because if so he has a lot of cash in his wallet and a set of handcuffs. After checking the waiver to see that it removes all rule about coworker fraternization, they whip out the handcuffs and have a whale of a time “roughing up the suspect.”

Karma is so impressed with his sexual prowess that she jokingly says “marry me.” Jake responds with a “yes! NO TAKEBACKSIES!” and they take a quick drive to Ohio and get married before anyone can talk them out of it. They head back and go to the second hangout in town: a big alcove under an overpass that is covered in detailed chalk drawings. Karma spots the signs of a a shooting here, two bullet hole and signs of removed bloodsplatter. They call Daniels to get a forensics team over and head back to the gorge to investigate if any bodies were dumped in it. After very carefully “negotiating” with Karma’s fear of heights, they look around the river running through. They don’t find anything, until Karma trips and falls right on top of a rotting corpse. They take off most of her clothes to wash of the pieces of the body stuck to her, and she trips on another corpse. She sees the third without falling on it. They call the forensic team and cops over, and then get a call that Jacob has turned up at his uncle Winston’s house, traumatized and covered in blood. They drive the Corvette at about 125 miles per hour to get there as soon as possible, before getting Jacob to agree to go to the hospital with them.

At the hospital we meet Jake’s father, who looks just like him plus a year or two. He tells them they have to go with him to D.C. and he takes Karma’s car keys without asking first. Now, Karma is not really in a good place right now, and she gets fed up with people not asking her to do something like they would a reasonable person and kicks the keys out of his hands (kickboxing ftw).

They confiscate her gun as they get on the plane (saying that they did not have her paperwork to bring it on the plane ready on such short notice), but then they tell her once they land that they won’t return her gun until she passes a psych evaluation. They thought she wouldn’t submit her weapon willingly, they didn’t trust her enough to be so reasonable, Jake didn’t trust her to be so reasonable. Agents can’t deploy without a weapon, she’ll be forced to Anchor for months before they get around to doing her eval and requalification with a  firearm. That fucking tears it. She has a nice dinner with Jake, his father, and his mother; she tells them that she will be sending in her resignation immediately.

The next morning she has a talk with Jake’s mother, borrows her car, and heads to the airport. She walks up to the ticket counter and buys the first airline ticket that catches her eye: first class to Morocco.

She explores the country for a week, buys new clothes, a bag, and a set of beads the same chocolate brown of Jake’s eyes (the traitorous bastard). After that she heads to Russia, sees that it sucks, and immediately hops on a plane to Germany. She grabs a really expensive rental car, and drives around the autobahn for two weeks straight, no phone, no credit cards, only cash and the road. Finally she decides to head to London, then she’ll go home to sort out what she’ll do with her life.

In London she gets stopped by a man with the FBI named Agent Miller, he insists on bringer her to the American Embassy, and by insists I mean that her resignation was rejected on the grounds that it was “done under duress” and that as an agent who did not respond to muster he has full legal right to arrest her as a “possible traitor” to the United States government. She agrees to go. On her arrival at the embassy, she is brought into a room and left sitting with a psychiatrist and psychologist names Dr. Sampson, who has been assigned to do her psych eval and then either give her treatment or return her to active duty. Karma tells her to fuck off. Dr. Sampson implies she’s a whore that willfully endangers others like a petulant child crying over a gun. Karma responds by calmly denying such allegations, punctuates her statement by slamming her hand on the table so hard that she fractures her fingers and dislocates her wrist.

They take a trip to the hospital and get her some really nice morphine (turns out the use of other anesthetics was expressly forbidden in her file, the entry is highlighted, underlined, and circled). They bring Karma, now a sobbing mess because drugs, and hand her off to Jake, who just about kills someone when she starts crying into his shirt. Jake brings her into their hotel (which is actually a five-star hotel converted from an old castle), and takes her to their room. They spend the evening… making up for lost time… and the next morning she answers a knock on the door to find… the Shitter parents. Shitter mom barges in spitting hellfire, but Karma manages to focus her parents’ wrath onto Jake, and hides under the bed while they’re distracted. Jake’s parents kick the door down in the middle of Shitter mom’s tongue-lashing, and start their own lecture on how it’s bad form to get married in Ohio at 8 a.m. without inviting your parents you little shit.

Eventually everyone realizes that Karma is nowhere to be found, and Shitter mom says that she’ll have climbed a tree or something and they all go off to find her. Jake pulls her out from under the bed and they sneak out to London to buy some new clothes (Jake had one suit and Karma had two outfits that hadn’t been washed in three weeks). As they walk, they hear screeching, and a bullet blasts through Karma’s shoulder, and three shots hit Jake’s chest. Karma starts going into shock as she’s pulled into a nondescript black SUV again.

She passes out as they drive her away, only to be slapped awake somewhere in the woods. Her kidnapper punches her in the shoulder and asks how she knew that Annabelle would be kidnapped at the festival. Karma goes quiet, she stares at them like they are already dead. What’s the point? She thinks, Jake is dead. But she’ll take his killers with her. She opens her mouth, and what comes out is a fox’s scream. She shifts and tears out the man’s throat, all human thoughts and memories a forgotten dream to her bestial instincts. The killing begins. More kidnappers come to check in with the one’s that grabbed her, she kills them all, and when they are all dead she tears the whole place apart.

Her business finished, she heads off into the forest. She slinks into the river, the water welcomes her, the earth hides her scent. Wolves are following her; she can smell them invading her new territory. The pack come to the river where she lurks, invisible in the water. A foolish wolf begins to drink from the waters, his lack of caution infuriates her, and she jumps out of the water and bites him right on the nose. The pack startles, but soon surrounds her, she keeps biting the wolf’s nose, until he shakes her off and she falls into the deeper waters. The water welcomes her and she passes out as she starts drowning.

She awakens with the wolves surrounding her, an injured male watches her anxiously. She’s terrified that they’ll eat her, and when the alpha female starts licking her it just gets worse. A woman picks her up. She brings her back to where Karma killed all of her attackers, and passes out.

She wakes up again in a bed, and Jake’s voice greets her. She demands that they’re dead, three shots to the chest is not survivable and she’s not buying what he’s selling. Finally he gets her to accept that they’re alive, but then she sees that his wounds are almost healed, it’s been four days. Bulletholes don’t heal that fast. But they did. Her shoulder is in a sling, and the x-rays show that the bone is perfectly healed, a year of healing finished in days. Impossible, she says, but the evidence is before her, and the only problem with her shoulder is that the tissue hasn’t healed over fully.

They tell her that her surgeon was Dr. Sampson’s father, Mr. Dr. Sampson, and he made the unfortunate choice of trying a bunch of different painkillers on her so she wouldn’t get addicted to morphine; she told her parents off on the phone and explained the entirety of her sex life with Jake in front of Jake and his parents and admitted that Shitter mom “beats the sin” out of kids in front of two members of CARD and an HR manager from the FBI. So guess who isn’t going to be allowed to foster kids, and disowns Karma?

So after being taken out to a firing range to give her mostly healed shoulder some exercise, Karma has a nice cry out in the woods about how her parents hate her now, and then one of the giant wolves comes out of the shadows. Karma screams like a fox and climbs a tree. Jake tries to convince her that she’s safe and Karma screams that she’ll miss him once the wolf eats him. Finally Jake reveals that the wolf is actually his mom, and then his dad shows up and busts as over how much of a fragile baby she is being despite the fact she can turn into a coyote-sized fox.

Eventually they get her to accept the crazy that is the situation, and then bustle her off back to America so they can begin hunting the remaining abductors, they have a license to kill and the Inquisition as told them that there are no rules as long as their foes are taken down quietly. The End.

[arplis]

Arplis - News: When Your Rape Doesnt Count

Something about the knock at the front door made Mary-Scott Hunter think a neighbor was in trouble. She had just arrived home from her job at a corporate training company, and she was mulling over an earlier fight with her girlfriend, but the sound jolted her out of it: five loud, fast raps. She could see two men looming through the window, dressed in oddly formal clothing. When she cracked the door, they identified themselves: a Minneapolis police officer and an FBI agent.

Oh shit, Hunter thought. What have I done wrong? She wasnt sure if she should open the door. She didnt trust cops all that much. She let them in but remained standing, uncertain, as they settled into her living room.

The men asked Hunter if she had been raped in 1987. Yes, she said.

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They told her they had identified the stranger whod broken into her house when she was 21 years old and attacked her in the hallway outside her bedroom. The suspects name was Darrell Rea. After 31 years, he was in custody.

First came the shock. Then reliefand, finally, happiness.

Seriously? she asked.

Sergeant Chris Karakostas, a homicide investigator at the Minneapolis Police Department, assured her it was true. He asked her if she wanted to sit down, so she did, and she listened.

From the perspective of police, Hunter had done everything right back in 1987. Shed immediately called the cops, allowed a nurse to collect a rape kit, and recounted the attack in painful detail during multiple police interviews. But the rape had taken place four years before the state forensics lab began testing DNA, and other leads went nowhere. For decades, Hunter lived with the uncertainty of whether her rapist was still out there.

Yet while Hunters case went dormant, Rea came under suspicion for a slew of other crimes. Police came to believe that the former apartment building caretaker could be linked to a number of sexual assault, physical assault, murder, and missing person cases, according to a criminal complaint. But he was never convicted of serious charges.

Theres a lot of women out there that really dont have some justice for what happened to them, says Sergeant Chris Karakostas.

Then, in 2013, the state crime lab matched DNA from Rea, by then in his late 50s, to the 1983 murder of a 17-year-old, Lorri Mesedahl, who appeared to have been raped before she was beaten to death near railroad tracks in north Minneapolis. But because the crime was so old, many witnesses were dead, and prosecutors wanted more than the DNA match from the victims body to charge Rea. So investigators ramped up their testing of the citys old rape kits. Thats when a hit came back for Hunters 1987 attack.

By the time the investigators told Hunter about Rea in March 2018, she had given up hope the case would ever be solved. I stopped fantasizing about this guy getting caught a long, long time ago, she tells me.

Today, Hunters experiencethe knock at the door, the detective bearing unexpected newsis becoming less of an extraordinary occurrence. After decades of shelving untested rape kits and otherwise mishandling many reports of sexual assault, police departments are now making progress on long-unsolved rape investigationsdue to unprecedented political will, new investigative techniques, and increased funding for DNA analysis.

In Michigan, for instance, an effort to test about 10,000 rape kits since 2009 led to the identification of at least 833 suspects who could be linked to multiple sex crimes. A state-funded effort to test old rape kits and hire new investigators and prosecutors in Cleveland has produced about 370 convictions since 2013. And a $38 million program created by the Manhattan district attorneys office paid for the testing of 55,000 rape kits across the country from 2015 to 2018nearly eliminating the pileup of untested kits in seven states. More than 20 states have recently passed laws requiring rape kit testing, audits of untested evidence, or systems for survivors to keep track of their kits, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation, an organization that advocates for sexual assault survivors. Meanwhile, police departments are rapidly adopting new approaches to solve sexual assaults, including genetic genealogya technique that identifies offenders by comparing crime scene DNA to consumer genetic profiles stored in public, online databases.

Even when these cold cases are solved, the legal system still prevents some survivors from getting justice. As Karakostas explained to Hunter as he sat on her couch, the window for prosecutors to press charges against Rea for her rape had long passed. At the time the attack occurred in 1987, Minnesotas statute of limitations for criminal sexual offenses involving adult victims was just three years.

Statutes of limitations are meant to protect defendants from false charges based on faded memory or degraded evidence. But they can also be a way for rapiststo remain free in a criminal justice system that convicts assailants of a felony in just 5 out of every 1,000 rapes, according to estimates from the antisexual violence organization RAINN. Over the past couple of decades, often following cultural upheavals like the Catholic child abuse scandal and the #MeToo movement, activists have fought to abolish or lengthen statutes of limitations, with mixed success.

Currently, at least seven states have no statute of limitations for any felony sexual offense. Dozens, including Minnesota, have lengthened the time given to prosecutors to bring charges, or added exemptions for cases with DNA evidence. Still, these reforms dont help survivors like Hunter, whose case expired before thenew lawstook effect.

The statute of limitations basically says, after X amount of years, the crime and its impact dont matter anymore.

But, as in most states, there is no statute of limitations for murder in Minnesota. So after Hennepin County prosecutors charged Rea with killing Lorri Mesedahl, they hoped Hunter would play a role in putting him away. Similarities between the attacks might bolster the prosecutors case. Before he left Hunters living room that evening in March, Karakostas asked if she would help.

Hunter instantly agreed. Taking part in the murder trial could be a way to recover some of the feeling of control wrested from her three decades prior. Shed never really forgiven herself for giving up that control, even though there was nothing to forgive; even though she knew, intellectually, that the rape was not her fault. The idea of being able to prosecuteor be involved in a prosecutionwas part of that want to be able to do something positive, to enact a result, Hunter, whos now 54, tellsme.

She pauses for a moment. Dude should pay, she adds.

The investigation that led officers to Hunters front door was long and circuitous. Minneapolis police had been looking into Darrell Rea for more than 40 years, slowly uncovering a series of women and girls they believe suffered at his hands: a terrified child, a troubled teenager, a marginalized sex worker. Each case proceeded in fits and starts, hindered by problems common to sexual violence investigationswitnesses dropping out, police bias against certain types of victims, and expiring statutes of limitations. (Through his lawyer, Rea broadly denied the criminal accusations against him and declined to answer specific questions or comment further on the allegations detailed in this article.)

In 1990, the Minneapolis Police Department got the call that would eventually prove crucial in bringing Rea to justice. Seventeen-year-old Victoria Owczynskyor Vicky O, as police investigators have long called herwas reported missing after disappearing on August 26, 1990. In a photograph circulated in a missing person bulletin, she smiles broadly, wearing a baggy sweatshirt and big earrings; permed, dark hair frames her face in a cloud.

According to retired Minneapolis Police Sergeant Tim Opdyke, who later picked up the investigation, the first sergeant assigned to Owczynskys case believed maybe she disappeared voluntarily on her own, he says. You know, 17 years old. She just ran away. But it was hard to square that with the fact that Owczynsky had left behind her money and cigarettesan unlikely choice for a teenager planning to skip town.

Naomie Rondo, 45, says her stepfather Darrell Rea abused her when she was a child.

At the time she disappeared, shed been staying with a friend, Naomie Rondo, in northeast Minneapolis. Rondo was one of Reas two stepdaughters. A neighbor told a police officer he had seen Owczynsky sitting in Reas pickup truck on the day she vanished.

By this point, Rea was not a stranger to police. In 1977, he had been accused of raping a woman after picking her up along Minneapolis Lake Street. Police found the woman covered in blood, crawling back toward the road; she later told them she had escaped by fighting off her attacker, who had a large knife, with a glass Coke bottle she found on the car floor. Rea was identified and tried for first-degree criminal sexual conduct and aggravated assault. But after he argued that the intercourse was consensual, a jury acquitted him of those charges and convicted him only for simple assault, landing him in jail for a short time.

About 11 years later, police got a report that Rea was abusing his stepdaughters. Rondo,now 45,says Rea would fondle her while washing her or tickling her, or put a hand down her pants while she was sleeping. At least once, he locked her out of the room and assaulted her older sister, Monique Stevens, while Rondo pounded on the door, crying. Stevens, now 48, has a vivid memory of looking at her second grade teacher and wondering if she should tell her how Rea pressed his body onto hers. I better not, she thought. She didnt tell anyone for years while Rea was entering her room at night, progressing from fondling her to raping her, punching, choking, and hitting her head against the bed frame. She would drink coffee at night to stay awake. Stevens says she believed that if she let the abuse happen, Rea wouldnt hurt her mother or siblings; that if she was quiet, her family could stay together. Only when Rondo reported the abuse to her school in the late 1980s did police get involved.

But after investigators questioned the girls, the family stopped cooperating with law enforcement, according to Karakostas. While prosecutors can press child sex abuse charges without the consent of a parent or guardian, they must believe they can meet the legal burden of proof to move forward. Once the family pulled out, neither of the two Hennepin County prosecutors who reviewed the case would bring charges.

Stevens says she used to babysit Owczynsky, who was a few years younger and often stayed at their house. She says Owczynsky was the only person who directly witnessed Rea raping her. Police working the Vicky O missing person case searched Reas home and car in 1990. When officers interviewed Rea, he denied that Owczynsky had gotten in the truck with him, Karakostas says. They never found enough evidence to arrest him for the girls disappearance.

But over the years, the Vicky O case would bring Rea under the police departments scrutiny time and time again. More than a year after her disappearance, Sergeant Opdyke and his partner, Sergeant Phil Hogquist, picked up the Owczynsky file from a box of unsolved cases. They, too, became fixated on Rea, who was by then in his late 30s, living and working as a caretaker in a shabby northeast Minneapolis apartment building. When they brought him in for questioning, Opdyke remembers thinking Rea was unnaturally calm under stress, and that he was using the interview to get information from the investigators. By the time the interview was over, I was flat-out accusing him of the murder of Vicky O, and he never reacted, Opdyke says. Never once got upset. He was there to find out what we knew.

Karakostas, a homicide investigator at the Minneapolis Police Department, spent years gathering evidence in Reas case.

While Opdyke was convinced that Rea was guilty, prosecutors werent. Opdyke says he was told that without a body, or more concrete evidence, they could not press charges.

But there was, possibly, another way to get to Rea. Given the 1977 assault case and the report regarding his stepdaughters, it seemed likely that they were dealing with a repeat offender. To that end, Opdyke and Hogquist learned from a fellow investigator of yet another caseRea might be involved in. In 1988, a 23-year-old homeless sex worker named Barbara, who asked that we use only her first name, had been attacked under circumstances similar to the details alleged in Reas 1977 trial, including the location. Barbaras case had gone cold, but it had one crucial difference from the other incidents: There was DNA evidence.

Barbara was walking to a White Castle near Lake Street one early morning in June 1988 when a man flashed money at her from a silver station wagon. They drove to a parking lot near some railroad tracks and had sex, and then, she tells me, he wouldnt stop. Barbara fought backscrapping and scrapping, just kicking and fighting and punching and kicking, she says. One of her hits must have drawn his blood; it dripped onto her shirt. Then the man jammed a tool resembling an ice pick into the hollow at the top of her neck.

The blow, somehow, didnt kill her. Barbara, her face pressed against the floor of the passenger seat, played dead as the man drove north into a quiet, leafy neighborhood. I just didnt know how bad I was feeling, but my mind was still working, she says. When she felt the car turn a corner, she leaped to open the door and rolled out of the station wagon. Struggling to grab her, the man crashed the car into a tree. He fled the scene as lights began turning on in the surrounding houses.

Karakostas reviews evidence in the Rea case.

Police later tested the bloodstain left on Barbaras shirt for protein and blood typeDNA testing was not yet availableand ruled out the first person they arrested for the attack, according to the Hennepin County Attorneys Office. Then they let the case fade away. It sat on somebodys desk, or got passed around, says Hogquist, who recalls feeling frustrated that there was a broad tendency to neglect sexual assault cases in the department. It was even worse for sex workers, anotherinvestigator tells me. Society was like that back then, says Barbara, who is now 54 and works as a nurse. She doesnt think attitudes have changed. Put yourself in harms way? Thats what you get.

But by 1993, five years after the attack on Barbara and three years after the disappearance of Owczynsky, the state crime lab had started testing DNA evidence. Working with Opdyke and Hogquist, the Minneapolis police lieutenant who had investigated Barbaras rape years earlier drafted a search warrant for Reas DNA. They obtained a sample and compared it to the bloodstain from Barbaras shirt. It matched.

Yet when the investigators brought the case to prosecutors, they were rebuffed: The three-year statute of limitations for both rape and attempted murder was already up. While a 1991 law extended the prosecution window to seven years for most criminal sexual offenses, it only applied to new cases, or cases in which the statute of limitations had not already run out. Barbaras case had expired less than seven weeks before that law was enacted.

Not until a couple of years ago did anyone tell Barbara about Rea. At first, she says, she was gladbut then I thought, There aint nothing I can do about it. Its just one more way in which she feels like the legal system failed her. As violent as a crime like that, they should never have a statute of limitations. Its ridiculous.

For Opdyke, Hogquist, and the other investigators, the dead end in Barbaras case deflated their hopes of catching Rea. Thats where all our investigation ended, says Hogquist. We got shot down. The Owczynsky investigation, too, went quiet.

When Opdyke retired in 2006, he made a copy of the Vicky O files to take with him to Florida. That was a case we carried with us when we left, he says. Thinking about Rea still gives him goosebumps.

It was like the one who got away. I always thought we had the right person, but wemeaning [Hogquist] and I, and the police department at the timewere never able to do anything about it.

Barbara Raped and stabbed in 1988 On escaping the station wagon where she was raped: The whole car just got fuming, sweaty, windows forming sweat and fog, and he wouldnt stop, and it was going on and on and onI was just hoping somebody would hear, somebody would see, and instead, I felt like I had to give upBut I felt a stab in my back and my neck. I found out later it was an ice pick. So I played dead. That was not easy to do. And I dont know if he saw somebody coming or whatIm just still trying to figure that out[but] he put a piece of carpet over me to hide meI felt the car start up, and he started moving. I just didnt know how bad I was feeling, but my mind was still working, and I could peek out through this hole of this carpet and see the lock and the door handleSure enough I felt the turn with the car. So thats when I did itjumped, got one hand on the lock, one hand on the handle and did them both at the same timeI got out, I just slid my body out and clumsily started running upThank God he did leave, because he wouldve got me again. Listen to Barbara tell her story: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Barbara.mp3

It would be almost 20 years before the Minneapolis Police Department would make significant progress in their investigations of Rea. Again itd be because of Victoria Owczynsky, the 17-year-old who had been friends with his younger stepdaughter.

Owczynsky, or her body, still had not been found, but in late 2007, Sergeant Gerry Wehr came across her missing person file. He was on light duty at the time, recovering from hip surgery, with an assignment to look for cold cases that showed promise. Wehr says he liked reading files from the crammed archives stashed in the clock tower of Minneapolis City Hall, retracing the steps of old investigations. Its dusty, dirty, its kind of dark, and there are just boxes everywhere, Wehr says. Of course, nothings in order.

His interest had been piqued after policegot a call that a relative of Owczynskys was using her information to get welfare benefits. So box by box up in the clock tower, Wehr continued working the case for years, learning about the teenagers disappearance, and about Rea, and, eventually, Barbara. With the help of the FBI, he started developing a criminal profile of Rea, uncovering several other attacks, mostly on sex workers, that seemed to fit his modus operandi. Over and over, those cases had been dropped, or not charged in time. Sometimes there was simply not enough evidence. But other times the reason was bad police work, Wehr admits; in particular, cases that involved victims who did sex work languished.

The haphazardly stored, jumbled archives made progress slow. It took nearly five years of investigating before Wehr pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of a box: the search warrant for Reas DNA from Barbaras case. Wehr had long been hoping for DNA evidence to help his search and he knew that Reas DNA sample, as well as the blood from Barbaras shirt, could still be in evidence. I just knew there would be something that would come up if we entered it in the system.

Both samples were still in storage. In 2013, the state crime lab reanalyzed the sample from Barbaras shirt and Reas DNA, confirming the match using more advanced testing. Then the lab uploaded its new DNA profile from the bloodstain into a database for crime scene evidence. Thats when the system returned another, unexpected hit: semen recovered from the autopsy of Lorri Mesedahl, the 17-year-oldkilled 30 years earlier. Wehr tells me he was surprised there was only one match for Rea in the database.

Mesedahls murder was not one of the cases Wehr had pegged to Rea. One Friday night in early spring 1983, after returning home from a party, Mesedahl had snuck out to go see her boyfriend. When she arrived at her boyfriends grandparents house close to 3 a.m., his grandmother refused to let her in. The next morning, Mesedahls body was found, facedown, surrounded by a pool of blood, next to railroad tracks. Semen was found in her vagina and rectum, as well as on the legs and seat of her pants. Not until 2008 would the samples be tested and uploaded to the system.

In 1983, Lorri Mesedahls body was found near these railroad tracks in north Minneapolis; the 17 year old appeared to have been raped and then beaten to death.

The Mesedahl hit blew the entire Rea investigation wide open: There was DNA and the statute of limitations on murder never expires. Finally, police had discovered evidence with a real chance of convincing prosecutors to bring charges.

Wehr was on the cusp of retirement. Before he left, he handed off the case to Karakostas, who once patrolled Lake Street as a young beat cop and had since become the departments cold-case homicide specialist. When you arrest [Rea], you got to make sure hes getting charged, Wehr remembers telling Karakostas. Because people have been doing this to him for 20 years. He gets called in on a rape, he gives them a story, and they threaten him and yell at him theyre going to charge him, hes going to prison. But nobody ever does. He walks away.

In part to see if they could bolster their case by finding more attacks linked to Rea, investigators ramped up their testing of old, neglected rape kits. In 2014, they found another victim: Mary-Scott Hunter, a young legal assistant who was raped in 1987.

By March 2015, Karakostas believed he finally had enough evidence and arrested Rea. But even then, it wasnt enough. Karakostas says prosecutors got cold feet and declined to charge him. Chuck Laszewski, the Hennepin County Attorneys Office spokesperson, says the county attorneys office felt it needed more evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rea had murdered Mesedahl. Key witnesses had died, including the medical examiner who inspected her body. As Wehr had predicted, Rea denied everything and was released.

It would take another two and a half years and follow-up testing on Mesedahls clothes before prosecutors decided they were confident enough to pursue the case, Karakostas says. In September 2017, Rea was taken into custody again, and charged with second-degree murder.

Monique Stevens Sexually abused starting in the late 1970s On growing up in Reas house: He would watch me take a shower. I didnt even want to take showers. I got teased at school because I smelled sometimes. I mean, we were poor, so I got teased for my clothes even though we had uniforms, cause I have holes in my shoes. So I was traumatized at school, too. I was ashamed of my body, of myself, who I was. I didnt want people to look at me. I just wanted to stay covered all the time. Listen to Monique describe growing up: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/stevens_growingup.mp3

On trying to defend herself against Rea: I slept with a knife under my pillow. He would run upstairs. I would jump up on my bed, and scream and scream and scream, and my mom would come up and get him out of the room. And then there were nights she wasnt there, so hed rape me. And when she was there, Id do the same thing all over again. Scream and scream and scream, and shed come running up there. I would not sleep. I would drink coffee sometimes, Naomie would too, so we could stay awake. Listen to Monique describe defending herself:

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/stevens_defend.mp3

Mary-Scott Hunter was always a light sleeper, even on the nights she had been drinking. In 1987, she was 21 years old, working at a law firm and sharing a split-level duplex with three friends from Carleton College. We were all incredibly close, says Nina Levine, who lived upstairs. They bonded over the Grateful Dead and played softball together. (Hunters story first came to our attention through Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, who became friends with Hunter in the years following the attack.)

Hunters housemates were somewhat worried about her; she was somewhat worried about herself. She had recently dropped out of school and was struggling. Maybe not eating enough, Hunter says. Drinking too much. She was trying to change those parts of her life. One Thursday night in March, she relapsed, going out to a bar, bingeing and purging, then falling asleep in her bedroom on the bottom floor of the duplex.

Around 4:30 in the morning, a noise woke her up. Then she heard it again, louder. She rolled out of bed and left her room to check on her friends. Thats when she saw theman at the top of the staircase. He wore a dark sweatshirt, the hood pulled tight around his face. In his right hand, he held a screwdriver.

Dont freak out, he said, according to her police report from that night. I just want to fuck you. If you freak out, Im going to stab you.

He forced her to the lower-level landing. Then he raped her for more than 30 minutes.

I was convinced, at one point, that somebody in the house would hear it, and the cops were going to come, Hunter says. But they didnt. As the man grew frustrated, she thought, Im going to die. She was stunned when he finished and left without killing her.

She immediately woke up Levine, who helped her call the police. When officers arrived, it just got surreal, Hunter tells me. It was a relief that they were there, but they were very nonchalant about the whole thing. Levine remembers watching an officer question Hunter and sensing he didnt believe her, as if she had invited the man to her house after going out drinking that night. She was shaking a lot, Levine remembers. She would start to talk, then get a little silent, then go back.

Mary-Scott Hunter (right) was living with Nina Levine in the mid-1980s when Rea broke into their home and raped Hunter.

Hunter recalls the lingering surprise that she hadnt been murdered. She remembers cracking jokes in the back of the police cruiser with Levine and another friend who accompanied her to the hospital. During her rape kit exam, a nurse wrote that Hunter was quiet, cooperative.

Only later, as she waited in the hospital lobby for a ride back to the house, did Hunter allow any darker emotions to hit her. She leaned forward in her chair and stared at the floor. I cant believe this happened, she recalls saying out loud. Levine put a hand on her back.

Im not typically somebody who kind of breaks down, so it wasnt that, Hunter recalls. I think it was the first time that I started to just be a little bit more in my body. And that was the startshe pauses, searchingof not wanting to be in my body.

A few days later, when Hunter sat down with a Minneapolis police sergeant for an interview, he asked her what she was wearing when she was raped, according to a transcript of their conversation. She answered his questions simply and completely. She wanted to help. When the sergeant identified a suspect and put together a lineup, she was frustrated with herself when she couldnt identify him. (Forensic testing eventually ruled that suspect out.) After the lineup, Hunter remembers, the investigation seemed to fizzle.

At the same time, she and her housemates were struggling to cope with what had happened. In the following weeks, Hunter slept on a mattress in their living room. She read and re-read feminist literature, and signed up for self-defense classes. The landlord fixed the window locks, installed an alarm system, and offered the housemates free therapy sessions with her husband, a psychologist.

As months passed, then years, Hunters struggles with mental health got worse, and, eventually, better. She got sober; she came out. I got to know myself, she says.

With time, she thought less and less about the attack and the still-open investigation. But she continued to question whether she had done enough to stop the rape. Those doubts still nag her: Why the hell didnt Ido more to fight? she asks. Is that some deficiency in me, that I clam up when Im in flight or fight? Why did I do the things I personally did? Did I not think I was worth fighting?

She knows its not her fault she was raped, knows its never any survivors fault. But knowing is a different thing than feeling it.

Only after Karakostas knocked on her door last year, after prosecutors finally decided to charge Rea, did Hunter come to a kind of peace with her doubts. Rea had killed before, she knows now. On the night hed attacked her, the same could have happened to her. Maybe I actually did have the right instincts, she says. If she had fought back, she might not have survived. Its let me off the hook a little.

Mary-Scott Hunter Raped in 1987 On night terrors in the years after her rape: Ill just get stuck in a loop of auditory hallucinations, of being sure that I hear somebody inside the house, and theyre coming up the stairsI had even tried tricks, like I would imagineI have cats, and I know that if theres any sound in the house, the cats just run away. So for a while I was like, look at the cats. If the cats are not running away, and you think you see the cats sleeping, its not happening. But then my brain would catch up to me and make the cats jumpOnce I finally would break the loop, and Id wake up, and now I was actually awake Id see the cats are sound asleep, or had just run off, because usually what breaks this cycle is, I wake myself up screaming. Listen to Mary-Scott tell her story: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/hunter.mp3

On a sunny morning in late June, Hunter pulled on a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words nasty woman and biked to the Hennepin County Government Center in the heart of downtown Minneapolis to see Rea receive his sentence for the murder of Lorri Mesedahl. By the time Hunter arrived at a meeting with a victim advocate on the 22nd floor, Barbara was already there, seated at a small round table.

It had been almost two months since the women had learned that Darrell Rea had been convicted of second-degree murder with intent, after waiving his right to a jury trial. Explaining her ruling, Hennepin County Judge Tamara Garcia wrote that the DNA evidence in this case is compelling and that a guilty verdict was the only possible conclusion. While Reas public defender had tried to propose other potential perpetrators, none of the alternate theories added up.

Garcia had considered evidence not just from the killing of Mesedahl, but also from the 1988 attack on Barbara, which the judge determined was similar enough to Mesedahls case that it could corroborate the facts of the murder. But Hunters rape, Garcia decided, couldnt factor in to her verdict. While some elements of Hunters case were similar to Mesedahlsboth were young women, attacked with a weapon just a few miles apartthe assault had taken place in her house, not Reas car, and did not leave her with serious visible injuries. The allegations of sexual abuse against Monique Stevens and Naomie Rondo also were not considered. None of those crimes, Garcia ruled, shared enough details in common with the murder to be included in her deliberation.

Hunter had been crushed by that decision. Shed been holding out hope that the trial would give her a chance to finally do something, to act after years of stasis. She says she wouldnt have been afraid to take the stand. I would love nothing more than to be able to stand in front of [him], she says, to be like, Yep. Guess what. Im here. Giving you a little bit of payback.

The closest she could get would be to see Rea sentenced to prison. She wanted to be there, to put a face to the figure who had persisted in her nightmares for 32 years, but whose features had grown fuzzy in her memory. And she was curious about the other survivors. But what do you say to a stranger brought into your life through trauma that is somehow both shared and separate? In the meeting room high above the city, Barbara and Hunter greeted each other politely. Then they fell into a nervous silence.

Barbaras mind was racing. That morning, shed woken up early to dress for court, taming her long, curly brown hair and applying makeup, which she did rarely. Then she smoked a cigarette beside a heart-shaped pond shed built herself in her backyard, her space for peace and reflection. She knew she would be disappointed by the sentencing, but she wanted to see the criminal proceedings through to the end.

I just hope this turns out okay, she told Hunter in her quiet rasp.

Yup, Hunter answered.

A cardigan-clad victim advocate arrived to prepare them for the hearing. Rea, the advocate said, would not be taking responsibility for his crimes. He would not show remorse. He had family members supporting him in the courtroom. And neither Hunter nor Barbara would be allowed to deliver a victim impact statement in person. They could only submit a written copy to the judge.

I was ready to just die, you know. I was letting go because I was exhausted. But I think the good Lord wanted me to survive. To press charges for Lorri Mesedahl, says Barbara.

Barbara could no longer keep from breaking down. She had spent hours practicing her statement in front of a mirror, imagining telling the judge how she was still scared, and angry that her case was never prosecuted: I have come to the conclusion I will never see justice. Welling up, she told the advocate about surviving other abuse and violence, before Rea, and how it had changed her, affecting all her relationships.

As Barbara spoke, Hunter sat very still except for her hands, which she was kneading. Suddenly she jerked in her seat. Goddamn these men, she said, turning toward the window.

Barbara caught her breath. Then, seeming to notice something, she turned to Hunter, whose short graying hair was tucked behind her ears. Were you brunette too?

Yeah, Hunter said.

A screwdriver?

Yeah.

Mine was a dull-ass ice pick. Barbara used a tissue to dab at the heavy mascara lining her eyelids. Do I got makeup all over my face?

You look great, Hunter said. Fierce. They rode the elevator down to the 13th-floor courtroom together.

Stevens and Rondo were there. Stevens, dressed in black, fought hard to stay composed; beside her, Rondos slight, tense frame betrayed her anger. They gripped each others hands as they waited first for the judge to appear, and then for their stepfather to be escorted to the defendants table. By the time Rea entered the roomnow 64, heavyset and pale, with a thick white goatee and mustachetears were streaming down Stevens cheeks. It wasnt that she was afraid of him; she had seen him once as an adult, at her grandmothers funeral a few years ago. Its that there were so many waysPTSD, struggles with intimacythat her childhood experiences still remain with her. I was held captive by him, and there was nothing I could do, she tells me. I would like to see him have to stay in there until he dies. Because Ive been in prison for almost my whole life.

The only statement permitted in the courtroom was from Lorri Mesedahls half brother. Darrell won the game, Del Young said, tearing up as he stood in front of the judge. To ever allow this man to walk these streets again puts the public at such an extreme danger.

A few minutes later, Garcia sentenced Rea to 10 years and one month in prison, the maximum permitted under Minnesotas sentencing guidelines at the time of the 1983 murder. With supervised release and the time he had already served while awaiting a verdict, Rea would likely get out in just under five years. If the statutes of limitations on Hunters and Barbaras rapes had not expired, and Rea was also found guilty for those crimes, his recommended sentence could have been more than 20 years, calculates Mike Brandt, a Minnesota criminal defense attorney who is not involved in the case.

Barbara admits it scares her that Rea will be out of prison so soon. But she also believes her role in convicting him is the reason why she survived his attack all those years ago; on the night he tried to kill her, she tells me, I was ready to just die, you know. I was letting go because I was exhausted. But I think the good Lord wanted me to survive. To press charges for Lorri Mesedahl. Mesedahl is buried a few blocks from Barbaras home. She visits the gravesite often.

The Rea case, says one veteran investigator, is a wake-up call to make a better system.

In the current system, the only person were protecting is Darrell Rea, Sergeant Chris Karakostas tells me. The way the case unfolded is the result of bad policy, bad police work, bad county attorneys, the failures of the system to take care of people like him, Sergeant Gerry Wehr says. Its a wake-up call to make a better system. There is some hope things will change, and that this generation of sexual violence survivors will be the last to face the obstacles presented by narrow statutes of limitations. Minnesota long ago eliminated the ticking clock for any sexual assault where there is DNA evidence, but its prosecution window for other sexual assaults of adults now expires after nine years. In the past two legislative sessions, state lawmakers have rejected proposals, including one from former state Rep. Ilhan Omar (now a member of Congress), to completely abolish the statute of limitations on all sexual assault cases.

Hunter is still living with that impact. Some nights, she hallucinates the sound of someone coming up the stairs in her house. The night terror loops until she wakes up screaming. Closure, she says, is kind of a tricky word. Part of her is glad that Rea refused to accept responsibility in court. If he had apologized, she says, theres a burden on me. To process forgiveness.Barbara, Hunter, and Stevens told me they wish the law treated rape the same as murder, leaving cases open for as long as it takes for police to solve the crime. Having statutes of limitations for these sexually violent crimes is belittling and demeaning, Nina Levine, Hunters friend and former housemate, wrote to me recently. The law basically says, after X amount of years, the crime and its impact dont matter anymore.

Karakostas still isnt done with the case. He believes Hunters rape indicates there could be more crimes to uncover. I think any investigator who worked, even touched, this case, or knows anything about it, would agree that the probability that there are other victims out there, either living or dead, is probably pretty good, he says. After Rea was convicted of murder, he was legally obligated to hand over a new DNA sample. And unlike the bloodstain from Barbaras shirt, this one has been uploaded to the FBIs national database. From now on, it will be automatically compared to unknown DNA from crime scenes across the country and to results from the roughly 1,700 rape kits that Minneapolis Police have neglected to test since the 1990s. One day, Karakostas speculates, there could be another prosecution. In that future case, a judge could rule that the experiences of Hunter and Stevens count as corroborating evidence. Maybe they could still get their day in court. Theres a lot of women out there that really dont have some justice for what happened to them, Karakostas says.

Theres also still the big unanswered question: What happened to Vicky O? Over the years, rumors of where she may be have circulated through the police department. According to multiple investigators, the apartment building where Rea lived when Owczynsky disappeared in 1990 had an underground level, and at least one witness told the cops that he used to spend time down there. Its become the stuff of legend among certain Minneapolis cops that Owczynskys body might be buried underneath the building. One problem: The city condemned the building and tore it down in 1992. In its place stands the headquarters of the Minneapolis Police Departments 2nd Precinct.

Its a chilling prospectthat the body theyve spent decades looking for could be literally underneath the polices feet. Theoretically, Karakostas muses, youd have to take [the building] down. That seems unlikely, but like the investigators before him, hes still driven by the search for Vicky O, and Rea is still his number-one suspect. No matter what it took, he says, nothing would please me more than to find Vicky.

Darrell Reas stepdaughters, Monique Stevens (left) and Naomi Rondo (center), with their friend Victoria Owczynsky, who disappeared in 1990.

A previous version of this story was published online in June. The story, included in the November/December 2018 print edition, has been updated to reflected the sentencing of Darrell Rea.

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/when-your-rape-doesnt-count

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Why strip searches don’t work

New Post has been published on http://doggietrainingclasses.com/why-strip-searches-dont-work/

Why strip searches don’t work

Sniffer dogs are as much part of Sydney life today as overpriced brunches and sudden public transport breakdowns.

We’re not just talking about the entrances to music festivals such as Defqon1 and Psyfari — the government has already pulled the plug on those events.

Take a wander through Sydney’s Central station during peak hour and you may well find yourself stopped by police, taken behind a semipublic barricade and stripsearched — even though, statistically, your pockets will probably yield nothing more illicit than a set of house keys.

In an especially baffling case last year, high school leavers had a dozen officers with sniffer dogs swoop in on their year 12 formal.

A report released last week found the number of strip-searches conducted in NSW has increased almost 20-fold in the past 12 years.

Research suggests the overwhelming majority of drug dog searches are fruitless; more often than not, no drugs are found, yet those stopped are still made to endure procedures such as strip searches and “squat and cough” tests many have described as “traumatic” and “dehumanising”.

Police and the NSW Government maintain, however, that searches are necessary to keep the community safe.

This week, news.com.au spoke to more than a dozen young people who had been stripsearched by police on suspicion of being in possession of illicit drugs.

Most requested anonymity, saying they feared reputational damage despite doing nothing wrong.

Here’s what they had to say.

‘THIS ABUSE OF POWER NEEDS TO STOP’

Lucy Moore knows from experience how traumatic strip-searches can be.

In March, the 19-year-old was stopped by a drug dog at Hidden Festival in Sydney. She said she had just one drink at her hotel before arriving, and had neither consumed nor carried any illegal drugs with her to the event.

A police officer told her she had been detected by a sniffer dog, and she was taken away to be stripsearched in a semi-private space.

“Not only did I see other people being searched, during my search the door was left half open and only blocked by the small female cop. I could easily see outside, which means that attendees and the male cops outside could have easily seen in as well,” Ms Moore said.

“Not only this, a girl in the cubicle next to me was also searched with her door still open with a couple cops entering and leaving at will.”

Ms Moore said she was made to “squat and cough” — a practice that entails bending over and coughing under the eye of officers to see if drugs are concealed in the rectal area.

Experts say the practice is legally questionable due to restrictions on anyone but a medical practitioner conducting a body cavity search.

At the end of her “humiliating and embarrassing” ordeal, Ms Moore said she was interrogated, held for over an hour and ultimately still kicked out of the festival — all despite no drugs being found on her.

Legal experts tell news.com.au there have been several cases in recent years of festival-goers being denied entry into events, even though they were not found to be carrying drugs and paid for valid tickets.

“It makes me feel disgusted, for police to constantly be breaching laws and taking advantage of young people who don’t know better. It’s terrifying,” Ms Moore told news.com.au.

A status she posted about the incident in March went viral, with more than 2000 shares and 12,000 reactions on Facebook.

“I think with the festival culture most teens are around these days, that strip-searches from police are something they deal with constantly, so it’s something that they can all relate with,” she said.

Ms Moore never received an apology from police and her ban from Sydney Olympic Park is still in place.

“I’m hoping we can get reform. Change is obviously needed to keep people’s privacy,” she said.

“Only 30 per cent of people will be charged and almost all of them being for very small amounts of drugs for personal use — leaving those 70 per cent with a humiliating and traumatic experience for absolutely no reason. It has to change.”

It’s not just festivals and dance parties where people are targeted. Police dogs are increasingly frequenting train stations, street corners, small pubs and restaurants.

One Sydneysider, who declined to be named, said he was stripsearched a few years ago at Marrickville Bowling Club, a lawn bowls centre in Sydney’s inner west.

“I was violently grabbed by the arms by the police and marched to the entrance of the club, where people were entering and leaving the party,” he told news.com.au.

“In full view of other patrons, they made me take off my shoes and socks, looked inside my underwear and checked all my pockets and wallet, becoming increasingly aggressive and frustrated as they found nothing.

“There was no apology at the end for the wrongful search; they just seemed to assume that I was guilty but they couldn’t find the evidence. I reported the search but nothing came of the report.

“This abuse of power needs to stop.”

Another Sydneysider, who requested only to be identified as Nate, said he was escorted out of a Sydney music festival by police after he was seen texting a friend.

“I was singled out as I was there by myself waiting for a mate who was coming from the other side of Sydney, so I was texting a lot and walking from stage to stage depending who was playing,” he told news.com.au.

Later, as they were dancing in the middle of the dancefloor, he said police tapped both of them on the shoulder and told them to follow them outside.

“We were both sober as a judge,” he said.

Nate described a setting in which a large group of police officers and security guards made him drop his pants and underwear, and pull up his shirt to be patted down.

“It made me feel very uncomfortable and like a criminal for doing absolutely zero wrong,” he said. “I asked the security why we were targeted. They said that they had seen me walking around texting constantly on my phone and then meeting my mate, they followed us in to where we were dancing.

“Getting pulled out in front of others we knew as well and explaining it to them after was a sh*t feeling.”

Do you think stripsearching is excessive? Comment below

Another young woman gave evidence in July at an inquest into six drug-related festival deaths over the summers of 2017 and 2018.

The woman, whose identity was suppressed, told the NSW Coroners Court heavy security at a music festival she attended made her feel “like a criminal” and that the officer in charge threatened to strip-search her “nice and slow”.

“Everyone was staring at me,” she said. “I have been stripsearched twice and they’ve never found anything on me.”

“She said, ‘If you don’t tell me where the drugs are I’m going to make this nice and slow,’” the woman said of the female police officer who conducted the test. “She made me take my shorts off and my underwear.

“Then she made me squat and cough … and then I had to turn around and squat and cough.”

ARE STRIP-SEARCHES LEGAL?

It is legal for police to request a drug search if they have reasonable suspicion to do so.

But aspects of this process — such as what constitutes “reasonable suspicion” and the validity of the “squat and cough” method — fall into a grey area.

Jahan Kalantar, a lawyer who represents young people convicted after drug dog searches, told news.com.au their experiences are often “traumatic” and “terrifying”.

He said police needed to establish grounds to justify a search.

Drug dogs are an important part of this, but because they’re notoriously unreliable, police use other undisclosed, vague information to select a person. Police might claim that you look nervous, or that your behaviour suggests you’ve taken illicit substances, but there is no official checklist.

The initial search involves removing your accessories and outer layers — backpacks, handbags, coats and hats. At this stage, police can turn out your pockets, pat you down, search your hair and instruct you to open your mouth.

NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge, who runs the anti-drug dog initiative Sniff Off, has long advocated against the practice.

“Often you’re surrounded by six or seven police officers with dogs nearby. It can be very intimidating,” Mr Shoebridge said.

“If nothing is found in that first search, what they should do is apologise and let people go on their way,” he said.

But statistics show this is not the case, with people increasingly being taken away for full strip-searches.

A strip-search, according to experts, involves the removal of clothing but should not extend to making the person expose their breasts or genital areas. They must also be conducted by a member of the same sex.

The “squat and cough” practice is arguably illegal, according to Mr Shoebridge, as it constitutes a “body cavity search” and thus requires a medical practitioner to be present.

Mr Shoebridge said it also breached “the overarching requirement to preserve privacy and dignity”.

“It’s far from uncommon. It’s a regular occurrence,” he added.

Mr Kalantar said the legality of “squat and cough” was murky.

“Police are not trained to the extent of, say, a clinical doctor,” he told news.com.au. “I think it’s certainly a dirty practice.

“I don’t understand how it’s a good usage of police resources.

“If you’re a father or a mother, do you really want police tapping on your children’s genitals? Do you really want a state that says it’s OK for this to occur? I have several clients who have been stripsearched — some of whom are child sex abuse survivors. It’s traumatic for them. It reawakens that torment. (Strip-searches) should only be used on very special occasions.”

WHAT DO POLICE AND THE GOVERNMENT SAY?

Police authorities stand by the prevalence of drug dogs and strip-searches, arguing it’s an effective way to ensure community safety.

News.com.au put a series of questions to NSW Police regarding the number of strip-search operations at Central station, the number of strip-searches conducted in NSW overall, and the cost of running operations involving drug dogs.

A spokesperson for NSW Police said the force detected illicit drugs on 1553 occasions during field strip-searches last year.

“Police officers do not enjoy carrying out strip-searches, but it is a power that has been entrusted to us and searches reveal drugs and weapons,” a spokesperson said.

“People who are trying to hide such items frequently secrete them in private places, and the only way to locate them is by a strip-search, which may involve asking the person to squat.

“Police are trained not to rely solely on a drug-detection dog indication when they exercise their search powers.”

Police said 82 per cent of strip-searches over the past five years resulted in either drugs being found on the person, or the person admitting to recent use or possession.

These statistics are incongruous with separate research conducted by the Redfern Legal Centre, Sniff Off and the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, which all argued the figure of “false positives” was far higher.

Samantha Lee, solicitor and head Redfern Legal Centre’s police accountability practice states:

“This figure is misleading, because admitting to recent use or possession of drugs is not an offence. To be charged with possession of a prohibited drug police must prove a person knowingly had possession of the drug at the time of their interaction with police. Also, the mere possession of a prohibited drug on its own would not meet the legal requirements of ‘serious’ and urgent’ to conduct a strip search.”

Police also said strip-searches were only carried out in a minority of cases, but did not comment on their increase over the past decade.

“Field strip-searches represent fewer than 1 per cent of the total number of all searches in NSW. Only about 20 per cent of strip-searches are initiated following a drug-detection dog indication. The majority of person searches carried out by police are not strip-searches.

“Training for police in how to undertake a person search occurs at the Police Academy and is reinforced in a number of forums throughout an officer’s career.”

The NSW government likewise takes an unapologetically hard-line approach to combating drug use.

Appearing on the ABC Q&A panel last week, Premier Gladys Berejiklian was asked about the rise in strip-searches.

She argued safety should ultimately take first priority, and the presence of police and drug dogs was the best way to ensure that safety.

“We want to make sure people are safe when they attend any event, music festival or otherwise, but also that they’re treated respectfully and appropriately,” the Premier said. “So, we’re always looking at ways in which we can improve the respect that young people feel they’re receiving. But also, the difficult thing that I have as Premier is keeping the community safe. It’s always difficult knowing where to draw the line on what community safety means.

“The bottom line is, and you could call me old-fashioned if you like, but illegal drugs are illegal for a reason.

“Please go and have fun and enjoy yourselves, but don’t risk not coming back to your family and friends, because there’s nothing worse than seeing a young person’s life lost.”

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO IF YOU’RE STOPPED?

Legal experts say you can’t refuse a search if it’s demanded, but it’s important to stress that you don’t consent to the search.

“The first thing you need to say is that you do not consent. Be polite, be affable, but say you do not consent,” Mr Kalantar said.

By making police note that you don’t consent to a search, the evidence may be put aside if the search is later found to be unlawful, he explained.

That said, you should always comply with police requests, as refusing to be stripsearched would likely land you in hot water.

Mr Kalantar also recommended you ask police if you are free to leave, and stressed that you had the right to request to speak to a lawyer.

He said there were some cases — such as being under 18 or of indigenous background — where you were afforded extra protections.

If a person is found to have drugs on them, the consequences range in severity depending on the quantity and police officer in question.

If the amount is small enough to warrant personal consumption — say, a single joint or a couple of pills — Mr Shoebridge says police can choose to issue a caution or an infringement notice, which doesn’t require court attendance.

But police can also choose to take it further. “Police can, purely at their own discretion, decide to formally charge you and make you go to court,” he said. “This can have devastating consequences.”

That said, even if police didn’t find drugs on you, they have the power to deny you entry into a festival — as was the case with Ms Moore.

“Getting your money back is only half the battle,” said Mr Kalantar, who confirmed several clients of his had had their tickets confiscated in these circumstances. “There’s all these extra costs — hotels, travelling interstate, petrol.

“It’s a ludicrous position that a young person attends a festival but just because an indication is made, they may lose the right to attend that festival.”

Ultimately, Mr Kalantar stressed it was important not to jump to conclusions if you’re issued with a court notice, or assume your life is over.

“I really want young people to understand it’s OK to make mistakes, and there are people who can help them and it’s OK,” he said. “Mistakes like this won’t ruin your life.”

@gavindfernando | gavin.fernando@news.com.au

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Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-case-of-jane-doe-ponytail/

Nature

A woman begins to fall. With her long dark hair in a ponytail and her black-and-red scarf loose around her neck, she is plummeting from a fourth-floor balcony, through the neon-charged November night.

Below awaits 40th Road, a gritty street of commerce in the Flushing section of Queens. Chinese restaurants and narrow storefronts, and dim stairwells leading to private transactions. Strivers and dawdlers and passers-by, all oblivious to what is transpiring above.

But before the pavement ends the woman’s descent, a few feet from a restaurant’s glittering Christmas tree, imagine her fall suddenly suspended — her body freeze-framed in midair. If only for a moment.

She toils in the netherworld of Flushing massage parlors, where she goes by the street name of SiSi. A youthful 38, she is in a platonic marriage to a man more than twice her age; harbors fading hopes of American citizenship; and is fond of Heineken, Red Bull and the rotisserie chicken at a Colombian place on Kissena Boulevard. Among her competitors, she is considered territorial and tireless.

It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and SiSi is in a shabby building’s top-floor apartment, for which she pays her “boss” a hefty fee. She has returned from a market with provisions. She has tried calling her younger brother in China, but he is asleep. She has been on the phone with friends and clients, unaware that she is in the sights of a 10-member police team working vice.

She heads downstairs to stand at her building’s entrance, a necessity of her job. Soon she is leading a man back upstairs — an officer working undercover — as her closely held cellphone casts a glow about her face. Their awkward conversation in her apartment convinces him that SiSi has broken the law, just as it convinces SiSi that he is a cop. She pushes him out and closes the door, though not to the inevitable. She knows from experience what comes next:

More police. Tromping through the dusky vestibule of her building, across the worn scarlet rug and up the 50 tiled steps. Past the Chinese sign that says if you’re looking for the driving school, you’re in the wrong place. Then right to her door.

The handcuffs. The hurried escort to a police vehicle. The humiliation. Again.

SiSi watches the officers ascend on the video monitor she keeps near the door. Under the fixed gaze of one of those lucky cat figurines perched on a table, its paw raised in a wish of good fortune, she begins to pace.

Now they are pounding on the door and shouting Police! Open up! SiSi rushes to the apartment’s north balcony, with its panoramic view of the street hustle below. Day and night, sun or sleet, this is where she and her sister competitors sing their plaintive song to passing men: Massage? Massage?

On the narrow balcony, barely two feet deep, she keeps a broom, a bucket and a small blue stool. Up she steps — and now she is falling, plunging toward the hard tenth of a New York mile that is 40th Road.

A tenth of a mile. Where Mandarin trumps English and a glance trumps the spoken word. Where sex is sold beside cloudy tanks of fish and crabs. Where seedy quarters controlled by local powers are rented to illicit massage operations, and the police make sporadic sweeps, and immigrant women are arrested again and again, and few in this city take notice.

Gravity prevails.

The undercover officer, his job done, exits the building and turns right — at the very moment that the woman who has just offered him intimacy for money hits the pavement at his feet. A woman known along 40th Road as SiSi, but whose given name was Song Yang.

In the Google Maps of the mind, pull back from this tiny street to take in the borough’s 178-square-mile sprawl: a pulsating hive of parkways and boulevards, apartment buildings and single-family homes, two airports, a major league ballpark, remnants of a world’s fair — all bracketed north and south by ocean, river and bay.

A striving borough of comity and contradiction, Queens is both the birthplace of the American president — elected in part on an anti-immigration platform — and home to 2.3 million people, nearly half of them foreign-born. With hundreds of languages spoken here, it may be the most linguistically diverse place on earth.

Every day, airplanes alight at Kennedy International Airport in southeast Queens, their passengers including many immigrants who join the borough’s anonymous, aspirational ranks. They chop the vegetables, wash the dishes, clean the toilets, mow the lawns, drive the hired cars.

And some wind up in the commercial sex trade. Making money for a pimp in an airport motel in South Jamaica. Waiting for the next client in a dingy building along Roosevelt Avenue in Corona. Or, like Song Yang, standing on a Flushing street on a cold November night, hiding behind her cute nickname, calling out to men. Playing her role in a shadow economy that benefited others through the exorbitant rent she paid.

“I hear she was No. 1: young, pretty, and her service was great,” said Michael Chu, a travel agent and community advocate who worked across the street from her on 40th Road. “People just lined up for her.”

For years now, Flushing has been an ever-replenishing repository of immigrants entangled in the underground sex economy. The commonplace raids of illicit massage operations across the country routinely lead to the arrests of women with Flushing addresses.

These parlors disappear and reappear with regularity, undermining the police crackdowns often prompted by neighborhood complaints. The industry’s opaqueness adds to the confusion. Some parlors have legitimate state licenses; some legitimate operations have masseuses making sex-for-money side deals; and some are illegally unlicensed, with no interest at all in addressing someone’s sore neck.

Emotionally manipulated by their bosses, ashamed of what they do, afraid to trust, the women rarely confide in the police or even their lawyers about their circumstances. They might be supporting a family in China, or paying back a smuggling debt, or choosing this more profitable endeavor over, say, restaurant work. No matter the backstory, the police say their collective silence further complicates law-enforcement efforts to build racketeering and trafficking cases against the operators.

But society has become increasingly aware of the complexities and inequities of the commercial sex economy, including a criminal justice system that has tended to target the exploited — often immigrant women and members of the transgender community — while rarely holding accountable their customers and traffickers.

In early 2017, New York’s police commissioner, James O’Neill, announced at a news conference that he would redirect his vice division to address prostitution and sex trafficking. This would include training intended to alter what he called the “law-enforcement mind-set.”

“We’ve already switched much of our emphasis away from prostitutes, and begun focusing much more on the pimps who sell them and the johns who pay for their services,” he said. “Like all crime, we can’t just arrest our way out of this problem.”

Since the establishment of this new “mind-set,” the police have continued to struggle at building criminal cases against the operators. But prostitution arrests in New York City have dropped more than 20 percent in the last year, while the arrests of customers have spiked.

Still, this change in attitude at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan had not necessarily crossed the East River to benefit an immigrant now lying on her side, unable to speak, gazing up at a plainclothes officer trying to calm her until an ambulance arrived. Beside a spent cigarette, her blood pooled on the pavement she had so often worked.

By morning, Song Yang would be dead, shattering a tight Chinese family that would never accept the police version of events. Her death would also come to reflect the seemingly intractable nature of policing the sex industry, and cast an unwelcome light on the furtive but ubiquitous business of illicit massage parlors.

In the epic of Queens, this stretch of 40th Road is little more than an asphalt hyphen. But along its short expanse exist worlds within worlds within worlds.

Baba, I want to go, I want to go.

I want to go to work, the little girl would say to her parents. I want to pick ginseng. She was a born worker, their Song Yang.

She and her younger brother lived with their parents in a remote village in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, where they grew crops on land allotted to them by their local village committee. Little Song Yang was especially efficient at harvesting the family’s ginseng crop, her mother, Shi Yumei, recalled. “The more her father praised her, the harder she worked.”

Her father, Song Xigui, eventually found moderate success selling construction-grade sand he bulldozed from a nearby river, and by the 1990s the family had replaced its thatched-roof home with a modern brick house that included two “kang” bed-stoves, heated slate platforms that provided warmth during the severe winters. Still, they continued to work the crops, with Song Yang often responsible for running home to light the stove, cut the vegetables and mind her brother.

As she grew older, she began to collect specimens of the enchanting butterflies zigzagging down by the river, and became meticulous in preserving their fragile iridescence. When friends came for boisterous sleepovers, they would marvel at her book of butterflies, and take turns asking to keep one.

Butterflies became Song Yang’s gift.

At 19, she moved 2,200 miles south to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth, where she became one of the thousands of young Chinese women who labored in sweatshops to produce apparel bearing the guilt-absolving label “Made in America.” Sharing a room with five other women in a dormitory, she covered her bottom-bunk bed with a silken cloth curtain, and adorned her small rectangle of privacy with family photographs.

Saipan’s garment industry was shrinking by the early 2000s, and Song Yang left to become a waitress on the island. She married a worldly divorced father named Chau Chuong, an American citizen who had worked for years in New York’s restaurant grind. He was so much older — 67 to her 27 — that her family was slow to accept him.

In 2006, the couple opened a small Vietnamese restaurant on Saipan that became so successful they opened a second place, with 150 tables. He worked the kitchen and she worked the front. “She attracted a lot of friendly customers,” her husband recalled.

Her brother, Song Hai, joined her after his high school graduation, eventually opening a henna tattoo parlor with a friend. When their mother came for a visit, she posed for photographs beside her daughter’s well-stocked restaurant bar, her smile radiating pride.

“We had a real sense of accomplishment,” Mr. Song said in Mandarin.

But a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, disrupting a main source of tourism to Saipan, as well as the fortunes of Song Yang and Song Hai. The restaurants were sold, the tattoo parlor shuttered.

Photographs from her brother’s wedding in March 2013 capture the last happy times that Song Yang spent with her family. Here she is back home, posing with the bride and groom. Here she is, sharing a restaurant meal with the growing family. Here she is.

A month later, Song Yang joined the hundreds who arrive daily at Kennedy Airport, direct from China. Straight to Flushing she went, like so many before, where she hoped that she and her husband would succeed again as restaurateurs.

But there is the dream of Flushing, and the reality.

With her husband now too old for kitchen work, Song Yang became their sole source of income. A waitressing job failed, as did a short-lived Chinese fast-food venture on Main Street. So she became a home health aide, and took a massage-therapy course in the hope of earning additional money. Then a friend told her of a more lucrative opportunity, to be found along 40th Road.

The understanding of her parents and brother was that Song Yang worked in reflexology. They knew that gifts arrived from New York. That she called regularly for video chats while sitting in a black office chair, sometimes eating a bowl of porridge. That when her nephew was born, she proudly announced on social media that she had become an aunt — a “gugu.”

That she seemed happy, mostly. But there was that time when she refused to video-chat for several days, after which she explained that a man had beaten her about the face. And that other time, when she revealed that a man — a law-enforcement officer, she said — had held a gun to her head while forcing her to perform oral sex. Family members reassured her: She had no choice.

Song Yang told her family last fall that she had booked a flight to China for December, and was looking forward to meeting her nephew for the first time. So far she had connected with him only online, through the popular WeChat app, where her avatar sometimes featured a butterfly.

What kind of present do you want Gugu to bring home? she would ask the child, her image beamed halfway around the world from some exotic place called Flushing.

The thoroughfare known as 40th Road was Grove Street, once.

In the 19th century it had a volunteer firehouse, a nursery and residents with Irish surnames. Just in living memory, there was Harry Barlow’s auto garage, the mimeograph services of Case the Printer, an appliance store proud of its color Zenith television sets and, of course, the Old Roma restaurant — famous for its veal cutlets on linguine, and that yellow sponge cake with pineapple filling.

It is all long gone, replaced by ginger duck rice casserole and a shaved ice treat called red bean baobing. The 40th Road of today is almost entirely Chinese, its restaurant signs often featuring no English at all — one more reminder that the only New York constant is change.

The street’s 20 buildings, including Song Yang’s, are mostly three- and four-story structures from the 1980s and ’90s that evoke a utilitarian, Soviet-bloc drabness. Narrow and claustrophobic, they loom like set pieces for a film noir.

The one-way street itself always feels like a wrong turn, an obstacle course of idling delivery trucks and construction equipment. One end elbows past a small playground; the other runs into the ever-clogged Main Street intersection, where plainclothes police officers can often be seen sitting in an unmarked vehicle in an attempt to deter quality-of-life crimes. Pickpocketing is so prevalent that a nearby grocery displays signs of a stick figure reaching into another stick figure’s handbag.

Above, looming airliners grumble as they approach LaGuardia Airport, across Flushing Bay. Just behind 40th Road, Long Island Rail Road trains grind and whine along the raised tracks. Up and down the block, the earthy aromas of produce stands and restaurant waste commingle with the classical Chinese instrumental music emanating from a soup-dumpling restaurant.

And here, beside the upturned fruit crates and the overloaded garbage bags, stand the women of the massage parlors. In their 40s and 50s, mostly, they check their cellphones, drag on untaxed Korean cigarettes bought in bulk, and chat, but with eyes scanning for unattached men lacking a law-enforcement vibe.

Massage?

The offer is understood, if not explicit. If the man consents, he is led up the stairs of one of the dull buildings, where massage operations are often crammed amid barbershops, driving schools and employment agencies.

Massage parlors offering sex are hardly a recent phenomenon, and business models vary. But the trade along 40th Road is especially audacious. The women stand on both sides of the street — five, 10, a dozen at a time — as ubiquitous as the delivery trucks. In the merciless heat and cold, they sweat and shiver on staked ground, prompting resentful neighborhood complaints about lost business and children exposed to the seamy daily spectacle.

A common arrangement on 40th Road is one in which a “boss” rents an apartment or office from one of the building’s tenants, then provides space to women for a $20 cut of whatever they charge each client. The general expectation is that each woman will generate at least $100 a day for the boss.

But the bosses provide no meaningful protection. The women are at the mercy of the street, where they have been robbed, beaten, raped, thrown down stairs. The surveillance cameras nearly always present are intended less for security, perhaps, than to provide the boss with a way to count the clients who walk through the door.

Over several months, the women along 40th Road shared in Mandarin the stories of how they came to be standing here, offering sex to strangers. They use names like masks. Some have chosen Americanized names — Jenny, for example — while others have been rechristened by bosses with nicknames that sound like Lala, or Kiki, or Yoyo.

They came from all over China, and from myriad backgrounds. One woman said she used to clean houses. Another said she was a former reporter who covered Chinese real estate. Several described the circumstances that left them in economic straits: a failed bus company, a bankrupt jade dealership, a gambling-addicted husband.

One woman often positions herself near a standpipe at the corner of Main Street, so as to be the first to approach any man venturing west. She is in her 60s, small-framed and usually dressed in layers, with long hair dyed black. She said in a raspy voice that she was from the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi, and that she was trying to pay off a debt incurred by her adult son in a business deal gone wrong.

She had visited two job agencies on 40th Road, looking for work as a nanny, but nothing panned out. And now she was here, on the corner, where her half-joking refrain — “I’m too old” — did not seem to deter clients.

Another woman, who gave her name as Xiao Li — or Little Li — said she was from the city of Dexing, in Jiangxi Province, home to a well-known copper mine, where she once was a welder. Thin and often wearing a simple black dress, she said she had briefly left the street to study legitimate massage — “So my heart could have a little bit of peace” — but had concluded that the classes were a waste of money. Back she came to 40th Road.

“My body can’t take it,” Ms. Li, 50, said. “My body can’t take so many men.”

Others were even more expansive, including a stocky, 40-ish woman with cropped black hair and a lazy eye who called herself Rachel. Eating a sweet baked potato at a dumpling stall on Main Street, she recalled that while working at a job she loathed — waitressing at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle — she began hunting through WeChat forums for leads on other work, and came across an offer that she recalled saying:

Massage Woman to Stand on Street. $20,000 a month. Flushing, N.Y.

Rachel called the number to ask what the job entailed. The boss replied: Everything.

After her first day, Rachel said, “I got home and took a shower, and cried.”

She paused at the memory, and added, “But then I just thought to myself, ‘I have to keep thinking positively.’”

Michael Chu, the longtime neighborhood advocate, has befriended some of the women who stand outside his building on 40th Road, and occasionally offers them assistance with police matters. His office, where an old dog named Scout is usually napping on some cardboard, is furnished with desks left behind by an accountant who moved rather than work beside a massage parlor.

A bespectacled man of 65, Mr. Chu has listened to the travails of these women, whom he calls “sisters.” The beatings, the robberies, the harassment from teenagers in the playground, the pressure to attract enough clients to cover their “rent” to the boss. The hopes they harbor for permanent residence, for having enough money, for finally not doing this.

“They also have an American dream,” Mr. Chu said. “The sisters have an American dream.”

The man spotted her on the street one night after stopping at a 40th Road restaurant known for its cheap and plentiful food. She was pretty, younger than the other women and conversant in English, so he paid for a session. She said her name was SiSi.

His was Paul Hayes. Single, in his early 40s and living in Queens, he carried himself with a seen-it-all air — but she beguiled him. They gradually became lovers, then good friends with vague plans to rekindle their romance someday. But she lived with her husband in an apartment a block away. It was complicated.

She had a good sense of humor, and often solicited his advice — although she ignored him when he recommended bolstering the building’s security system. She also confided about the dangers and vagaries of her work life.

“She really hated doing it,” Mr. Hayes said.

Even so, Song Yang established herself as a fierce competitor in the circumscribed world of 40th Road. Fueled by coffee and Red Bull, she toiled nearly nonstop, as if facing some self-imposed deadline. Word was that she was trying to save up to open her own Vietnamese restaurant, or to buy a house in New York for her aging parents, or to just move on.

Her sharp elbows and inexhaustible style irked some of the other women, leading to arguments, shoves and occasional hair pulling. One competitor recalled that if a man chose another masseuse, Song Yang would tease the client about preferring older women.

But another woman remembered a gentler, more generous Song Yang. She said that when she arrived at 40th Road, Song Yang insisted that she accept several pairs of pants to ward against winter.

Song Yang’s domain was a fourth-floor apartment at 135-32 40th Road, directly above another massage operation. The apartment door faced a boiler room and a makeshift gate that was intended to keep vagrants from sleeping on the roof, but also to protect the hot pepper plants nurtured there by the aged custodian.

As were most things on 40th Road, her rental arrangement was convoluted.

The building was constructed in 1992 by Jentai Tsai, 85, a prominent, even revered, banker in Flushing, and is owned by a real estate company overseen by his son, Eugene Morimoto Tsai. In a brief conversation last month, the younger Tsai, 42, said that he did not know that a woman had fallen from his building last year, or that his building had long been a hub of illicit massage activity.

They both said, and city records confirm, that the building’s managing agent — responsible for collecting rent — was another man of local distinction: Peter Tu, 62, the longtime director of the Flushing Chinese Business Association, a member of Community Board 7 and a district leader for the Democratic Party.

Outside his office around the corner, Mr. Tu at first denied that he was involved with the 40th Road building, but then said that he had merely tried to assist the Tsai family by collecting the $18,500 monthly rent from the main, first-floor tenant, the Shi Li Xiang seafood restaurant. He said he no longer served in this role, had never taken any payment “from the street,” and had no idea what arrangements the restaurant had with the tenants and subtenants upstairs.

“I’m always in the middle,” Mr. Tu said.

A man identifying himself as the boss of the first-floor restaurant began to shout when asked about the tenants upstairs. “How am I supposed to know the names of the people to whom I rent?” he asked in Mandarin. “You want me to go up and ask everyone who they are?”

Above the restaurant, in this building owned and managed by Flushing men of stature, Song Yang paid a flat fee for her apartment — as much as $400 a night, competitors say — to a square-headed, elusive “boss” who goes by Lao Li, or Old Li, a kind of avuncular nickname conveying familiarity with the women who work for him. But the particulars of his subleasing arrangements are as difficult to pin down as he is.

One spring midnight, Lao Li made a rare appearance on 40th Road to mediate a dispute over clients that had erupted among the women. When a reporter approached and called him by name, Lao Li looked up — and bolted. He dashed east down the center of 40th Road, dodging cars, before vanishing into the dark Flushing night.

Although Song Yang and other women often quarreled, they occasionally gathered with Lao Li at the restaurant downstairs, or at a nearby karaoke bar. They’d watch him blow out a candle on his birthday cake, or sing along to a song popular in his native northeast China. At the Chinese New Year, he would hand out red envelopes containing small cash gifts.

In cellphone videos and photographs of these get-togethers, the participants could easily be mistaken for co-workers at an accounting firm, making a night of it. They seemed untroubled by their profession’s many perils, including robbery, bodily harm — and, especially, arrest.

Arrest attracted unwelcome attention. It jeopardized applications for permanent residency. It magnified the humiliation. And it usually meant an appearance at the Human Trafficking Intervention Court, held on Fridays in the basement of the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens, where Mandarin sometimes seems as common as English.

Established nearly 15 years ago, the court set out to treat women in the commercial sex trade less as accused criminals than as victims of trafficking and exploitation. They are told that charges will be dismissed and records sealed if they complete several individualized counseling sessions — focused, say, on job training, or education — with Garden of Hope, Restore NYC, Womankind or another outreach organization. A group called Sanctuary for Families is also on hand to provide immigration services.

Song Yang went through this process more than once. In addition to expunging the arrests from her record, these court appearances provided pause, forcing her to confront the consequences of her work life.

In the summer of 2016, Song Yang began frequent WeChat dialogues with a Flushing lawyer, Chen Mingli, that at first focused on acquiring permanent residency — a process that he repeatedly told her could take months and months. Still, she fretted that her arrest history would thwart her application for a green card.

I am having a lot of anxiety, she wrote in Chinese.

Gradually, though, their conversations came to reflect the darker realities of her 40th Road realm, with sobbing emoticons peppering her messages.

Good morning, Lawyer Chen, she wrote in mid-October 2016. A police officer put a gun to my head today and forced me to perform oral sex.

At the insistence of a friend, she had filed a complaint with the 109th Precinct. Investigators spent the day in her “shop,” looking for evidence and checking the building’s surveillance video, which had captured a heavyset bald man in a suit ascending the stairs.

Mr. Chen assured her that the matter would not affect the status of her immigration case, and implored her to cooperate with the police. But her intense desire to avoid attention, coupled with fear of retaliation from her attacker, overshadowed everything.

The police said that this won’t affect me in any way, but I’m afraid that it will … Lawyer Chen, what am I going to do now? … (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

The police circulated a wanted poster based on a hazy photograph of the man lifted from the surveillance video. A retired United States Marshal, who surrendered after someone mentioned him as a possible suspect, participated in a lineup.

But Song Yang identified another man, wrongly, as her attacker. In addition, a DNA sample from the retired marshal did not match samples taken from Song Yang’s clothing. The case was eventually closed.

Several months later, in late September 2017, she was arrested a third time on a prostitution charge. Handcuffed, led away from 40th Road, held overnight.

A few days later, Mr. Chen asked, You’ve been arrested again?

Song Yang answered:

Yeah. (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

She explained that she had been forced to make hard decisions and that it had been difficult to suppress her feelings while married to a much older man who seemed increasingly removed from her day-to-day life. She felt “morally depraved,” and sometimes thought about giving it all up and going home — or worse.

I’ve been having thoughts of jumping from a building, but what should I do? she wrote early one morning.

Mr. Chen was never formally hired by Song Yang, but now his central role seemed to be to buoy her spirits.

Don’t be scared, he wrote hours later. Don’t think that way.

Song Yang only sank deeper.

I’ve fallen so low I can’t be saved.

She continued:

Without purpose, without direction, what meaning is there to keep on living?

I used to be a woman who was very strong in her life. I strove for perfection in everything I did. I never thought that my life would turn out this way. I’ve truly failed.

At the end of October, Song Yang made one last visit to Mr. Chen’s office. She confided that another client had badly beaten her a couple of weeks earlier — an assault she had not reported to the police — and showed him photographs of her bruised and swollen face.

“Why am I so unlucky?” he remembers her asking.

The case began with an anonymous complaint: Several women were said to be “selling intimacy” at the building at 135-32 40th Road.

The tip hardly came as a revelation, since shady activities at this address had generated scores of 911 calls over the years. To some, the building even had the aura of being cursed, following a horrific crime in 2010, in which a deranged stalker stabbed a woman in the second-floor hallway and removed her heart and lungs.

Forty-three arrests had taken place in the building over the last decade, more than a few sex-related, the most recent that of Song Yang. Ensnared in an undercover sting in late September, she had tried but failed to hide in the cramped boiler room across from her apartment, and was charged with offering sex for $70.

Her case, which had prompted those despairing messages to the lawyer Mr. Chen, was one of 91 massage-parlor-related arrests in the 109th Precinct in 2017, and one of six along 40th Road. According to court records, none of those arrests were for pimping, solicitation or operating an unlicensed massage parlor.

A few nights after the anonymous complaint, a sergeant and a detective ended a brief surveillance by venturing into the notorious building. The only thing they found suspicious was a handwritten sign in Chinese on the second floor, which they believed to say, in effect, There are no girls on this floor; please go to the third floor.

The police later determined that the sign actually said, “Attention, the driving school is on the third floor next door.”

An undercover officer then telephoned a woman associated with the building who was known as SiSi. They arranged an appointment for the next evening, Saturday, Nov. 25. Her price: $120.

On the appointed day, members of the Queens North Vice Enforcement Squad met at their base in College Point to discuss the seven locations they planned to hit that night. The closest target became the first: the bleak building at 135-32 40th Road.

The vice officers went over their safety plan. They chose their identifying color of the day. They agreed upon the mission’s assorted distress signals and code words, including what the primary undercover officer would say to indicate that sex had been offered for money. Now they were ready.

The 10-member team headed out into the evening, unseasonably mild for late November. They parked along Prince Street, across from the White Bear dumpling place and just short of where the one-way street bends east to become 40th Road. The team leader and two arresting officers sat in the first car, with two more arresting officers in the second car. The third vehicle was for prisoner transport.

The team tested its recording device, which used Bluetooth to transmit one-way audio. No problem. The green light was given: Go.

Minutes later, the undercover officer approached his target, Song Yang, just inside her building’s entrance. He wore an olive-green jacket, jeans and a cap. She wore a short winter coat, a red-and-black scarf, leggings and one of her signature headbands — with a small bow that resembled a butterfly.

The officer could not have known that this woman had just attempted a video chat with her younger brother, who was still asleep in China. That she had plans to fly home in December. That she had kept her court-mandated appointments with Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization that helps foreign-born victims of sex trafficking. That her fifth and last session with Restore was four days away.

About all he knew was her police nickname for the night: “JD Ponytail.”

Jane Doe Ponytail.

She led him up the worn stairs. She gave him a peck of a kiss in the hall, and opened her apartment door. Another woman, brand-new to Flushing and known as Momo, was already occupied with a man in the second bedroom.

Song Yang walked her client to her bedroom, where, according to the police, she offered sexual intercourse for the reduced price of $80. He consented to the arrangement and, heading to the bathroom, managed to utter the code word into his transmitter that a positive — that is, illegal — agreement had been reached. He also hoped to signal to colleagues that it was time to move in, but a wary Song Yang prevented him from having privacy, telling him to keep the bathroom door open.

“This is bad service,” the officer said.

Once in the bedroom, Song Yang became even more suspicious. Why aren’t you taking off your clothes? she asked. Are you a cop?

No, he answered. But he complained again about the service and grabbed his hat, prepared to leave. She pushed him out and closed the door.

Responding to the undercover officer’s signal, the three idling police vehicles turned onto 40th Road, smack into its everlasting gridlock. Four officers got out and hustled to the building. Climbing the dreary stairs, they passed their undercover colleague, who pointed to Song Yang’s door as he descended — and as she watched on the monitor in her apartment.

With the police demanding that she open the door, and preparing to break it down, a panicked Song Yang hurried to the apartment’s north balcony. The other woman, Momo, emerged naked from her bedroom to investigate the noise, but hustled back to hide when she realized it was the police.

The balcony was not equipped with surveillance cameras, leaving what happened next to the imagination. It is possible that Song Yang was hoping to escape, perhaps by reaching for a wire that ran vertically past her balcony. It is possible that she was trying to land on the protruding metal sign of the restaurant below. It is also possible that she intended to kill herself.

It is fact that she hit the pavement directly in front of the undercover officer she had pecked on the cheek just five minutes earlier. His supervisors say that the officer remains shaken to this day.

Later that night, while Song Yang was lying in a hospital bed with multiple fractures to her face, head and body, the police placed her under arrest. She died in the morning — and the arrest was, in the parlance of the police, “voided.”

In the dark of an early December morning, two weary travelers shuffled through the multicultural scrum of Kennedy Airport. One was a tall, reedy man named Song Hai; the other, a slight, older woman named Shi Yumei, whose protracted weeping on the long flight from Beijing had concerned an attendant.

Song Yang’s mother and brother had traveled 7,000 miles to better understand the how and the why of her death.

A telephone call from her husband several nights earlier had disrupted everything. Song Yang is dead, he had said. Police say she jumped from a building.

Her distraught parents had telephoned their other child, Song Hai, to deliver words so heavy that he dropped his smartphone, cracking its glass. Not accepting what he heard, he sent a WeChat message to his sister that depicted a pair of clinking coffee mugs, along with a gentle request to please call home.

The lack of an answer was the answer.

The mother and brother spent their first two weeks in Flushing tending to the affairs of death. Then, on a dismal day of late December rain, they made their way to the Chun Fook funeral home, a few blocks from 40th Road. Though some had recommended a modest ceremony, the family had insisted on a more elaborate service, in a spacious room with a chandelier.

The dark wood coffin sat at the front before rows of chairs that would remain empty. No women from 40th Road. No Lao Li. A pair of vertical scrolls with parallel aphorisms written in Chinese calligraphy — “Put Down Your Burdens and Return to the Lord” and “Take Up Tranquillity and Celebrate Everlasting Life” — hung on either side.

One minister delivered prayers in English, while another repeated those prayers in Mandarin. The few mourners included Song Yang’s close friend Paul Hayes; the community advocate Michael Chu; Chen Mingli, the lawyer who had tried to help her seek permanent residency; her husband, Chau Chuong, now 78, who had come from California, where he had been living for his health; and her mother and brother, their heads bowed and hands folded.

The ceremony ended with the reading from the Book of Common Prayer that we are all from dust, and to dust we shall return. Alleluia, the mourners mumbled. Alleluia.

Then it was a short drive along the Grand Central Parkway to the All Souls Chapel and Crematory at St. Michael’s Cemetery. This is where Song Yang’s battered body was returned to dust, and where, in his frustration and grief, her brother vowed justice and punched a wall.

The official explanation for his only sibling’s death made no sense to Mr. Song. After all, she had already paid for her flight home to celebrate their mother’s upcoming birthday and to meet, for the first time, his 5-year-old son. Suicide was not possible, he reasoned. Darker forces might be at play. He had already begun his own investigation.

One snowy night soon after arriving from China, Mr. Song appeared at his sister’s 40th Road building with Mr. Hayes. Their plan was to break into her apartment, collect her belongings — and, if possible, retrieve any surveillance video.

Mr. Song, a learning specialist by trade, and Mr. Hayes, a computer consultant, crept up the 50 tiled steps to the fourth-floor door, which was secured with a locked chain. Fearing the noise of the hammer and small acetylene torch they had planned to use, Mr. Hayes hustled to a Home Depot a mile away and returned with a hacksaw.

After a few minutes of sawing, the chain gave way, and the two men pushed open the dull-gray door to enter the setting of a life interrupted. The police had taken the surveillance equipment, but everything else made it seem as if Song Yang might return at any minute.

In the two bedrooms, rumpled sheets. In the kitchen, a Pepsi and a half-empty bottle of Bacardi, sliced carrots and apples, and the black chair that Mr. Song recognized as the one his sister sat in while video-chatting with her family. In the living room, a raised table with a red curtained skirt, on which sat a CD player, a pair of sunglasses and a lucky cat figurine. Placed neatly on the floor, a pair of pink shoes.

On the snow-dusted front balcony, a broom, an upside-down bucket, a stool, a few plastic bags containing fruit and eggs. And, just beyond, the beckoning lights and shadows of the street below.

Song Hai returned often to 40th Road, a spectral presence in his dark hooded coat and black cap, a cigarette cupped in his hand. He cajoled and confronted the sidewalk’s denizens, asking questions, taking photographs, recording conversations. He saw himself as a lone-wolf investigator, working to prove that corrupt officers of this strange city had thrown Song Yang over the railing.

His ever-evolving theory:

That his sister had been sexually assaulted by a police officer. That she had filed a complaint. That the subsequent police lineup was fixed to protect the assailant. Then it was payback, which explained why, of all the women along 40th Road, only Song Yang was arrested in September, and was about to be arrested again in late November.

As is standard when a death occurs during a police action, the Queens district attorney and the police department’s Force Investigation Division were investigating. But Mr. Song was already beginning to believe that nearly every corner of the American criminal justice system — from the police to the medical examiner — was colluding to hide the truth.

He patrolled downtown Flushing. He interrogated women and shopkeepers. He plastered the streets with leaflets featuring photographs of his sister and promising a “Big Reward!” The plea appeared in Chinese and in fractured English:

Hello! When you saw the photo, SiSi (Song Yang) was no longer alive. She fell from and died on 11/25/2017 at 135-32 4FL in Flushing. Families as well as the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau are eager to find out the truth of her death. If you have ANY CLUES, please contact me ASAP. Absolutely Confidential … (Her brother Song Hai)

The dozens of responses yielded little. One man called to say that Song Hai’s sister was a whore — a word he did not quite understand, and so he continued the conversation: Yes, yes. And do you have information?

His sleuthing occasionally paid off. One evening, amid the Main Street crush, Mr. Song spotted a man he recognized from his sister’s WeChat photographs: short, solidly built, and with a distinctive, block-shaped head.

Excited, Mr. Song crossed the street and, right at the Roosevelt Avenue intersection, near the subway entrance, grabbed the man by the arm. Mr. Song recalled what happened next:

Are you Li? he asked.

You’re mistaken, replied the startled Lao Li, the boss who controlled Song Yang’s apartment. My name is not Li.

Mr. Song waved down a passing police car, as a crowd gathered and the agitated man in his grip implored him not to involve the authorities. Let’s resolve this ourselves.

The two officers understood Mr. Song’s intentions, he later recalled, but they explained that this was America, not China, and that he was unlawfully detaining a man who wasn’t present when his sister’s fall took place. They separated the men, and Lao Li floated away in the rush-hour stream.

Later that evening, an angry Lao Li telephoned Mr. Song. In the conversation that Mr. Song duly recorded on his phone, Lao Li vented about the audacity of summoning the police — “If you don’t have evidence, how could you say I’m the boss?” — before giving his version of the realities on 40th Road.

He said that he rented the apartment to Song Yang for $3,100 a month — hardly the $12,000 that was rumored on the street. “She and I really didn’t have any employment relationship,” he said. “Just that at the start of the month, I would take the rent.”

Lao Li said she called him her “boss” so that others wouldn’t bully her, but he insisted that she was her own boss: prone to arrest, sure, but also smart, tenacious and tough.

Throughout the conversation, Lao Li characteristically remained at a distance — even when describing that fateful night. He rushed to 40th Road after receiving a call that “SiSi had jumped from the building,” he said, but by the time he got there, “your sister had already been taken away.”

As Mr. Song conducted his frustrating investigation, his mother spent her days in the numbing cocoon of grief. Once so proud of her entrepreneurial children, Shi Yumei was now a sorrowful woman in a foreign world, gingerly navigating a small cart down crowded Main Street, her pale gray knit cap pulled low, her mind occupied with worry. How, for example, would she and her son, here on temporary visas, survive on the little money they had brought with them?

An encounter with a bellowing street evangelist eventually led her to St. George’s, the old Episcopal church on Main Street whose steeple has long been a Flushing landmark. Its congregation embraced her, smothering her with food, clothing and compassion. Locking hands and forming a prayer circle one day, strangers asked God to grant peace to this new person among them, who felt so blessed that she began to volunteer at the church’s food pantry as a way of giving back.

One cool April morning, she donned an orange apron and joined 40 other volunteers, nearly all of them immigrants, as they prepared for the ritual that unfolds every Wednesday along the old church’s north side, opposite a Lucille Roberts fitness center. They unloaded the crates from trucks, bagged the fruit and vegetables, and established an assembly line of food down the sidewalk: turnips and fennel, lettuce and apples, onions and melons.

The decade-old operation had gradually adapted to the ways of Flushing, with organizers taking note of the tensions caused by different understandings of personal space among ethnic groups. The solution: two alternating lines — one that was entirely Asian, and the other a mix of black, white and Latino.

On this morning, the Asian line ran alongside the church’s cemetery wall, and the other line stretched down to a firehouse. But things moved apace, thanks in large part to the high-spirited efficiency of the volunteers — including Shi Yumei, who smiled at her sense of belonging as she proffered bags of onions.

Each evening, after long days of volunteering and investigating, mother and son returned to a worn apartment catering to transients, not far from 40th Road. Some lodgers paid $20 a night for a narrow bed in the living room. But with some financial help from the church and a few nonprofit organizations, Mr. Song and Ms. Shi managed to pay $1,000 a month for a cramped bedroom and first dibs on a shared kitchen.

They slept beside a closet packed with clothes and accessories that Song Yang left behind. Tears were shed over a single strand of black hair found on a coat. They lived in the presence of her absence.

To find sleep, the mother would hold a small audio device close to her ear and listen to lively recorded stories about historical Chinese triumphs, cuddled beside one of her daughter’s plush teddy bears. This way, Ms. Shi said in Mandarin, “I know my daughter is here with me.”

Two feet away, her son would lie in his twin bed near the window, cigarettes on the nightstand, spent beer cans under the bed, another Long Island Rail Road train clattering in the distance. Here he would try to piece together the stray bits of his investigation.

He had found a grainy photograph from his sister’s WeChat feed of the stocky, bald man who had supposedly sexually assaulted her, and convinced himself that a bald police detective, appearing in cellphone videos taken on the sidewalk after his sister’s fall, was the same man.

He had also obtained photographs and forensic notes from the autopsy. Poring over the graphic images, he decided that the discoloration around his sister’s face came from a beating, and that her broken fingernails suggested some kind of struggle — and, therefore, a cover-up.

This was America. Not China. Exactly.

On a sunny spring day, those invested in the proceedings of the human trafficking court filed into the basement courtroom in Kew Gardens. Among them were Song Hai, in a black blazer and brown work boots, and Shi Yumei, her blue-and-orange scarf recalling the colors seen on the Staten Island Ferry, on Knicks uniforms, on Mets baseball caps — the colors of New York.

They took their seats among the defendants, including a woman in glasses often seen calling out to men on 40th Road. Mr. Song sat with his hands clasped and back erect; his mother was bent forward, as if in prayer. They waited.

An air of empathy defines the court, which is intended to encourage women engaged in the commercial sex trade to avail themselves of counseling and other diversionary programs. On most Fridays, the judge, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are women, and the lanky head court officer is determined to make the defendants feel safe and respected. He does his best to dissuade any pimps or bosses from taking a seat.

Prominent in the dozen pews are Chinese women facing the usual massage-parlor-related charges of prostitution or unlicensed massage. Court-appointed lawyers from the Legal Aid Society or Queens Law Associates usually guide them through the process, along with a Mandarin-speaking interpreter and advocates from one of the nonprofit groups specializing in sex-trafficking outreach and immigration services.

Defenders of the program maintain that until a better approach is developed, arrests — followed by appearances in trafficking court — provide the best chance for intervention. Even if a woman returns to 40th Road, they say, she will at least have the names of people to contact if she needs help.

Others, though, counter that for many women caught in the commercial sex trade, an arrest only exacerbates their trauma. Besides, they say, one doesn’t need to be arrested in order to receive helpful contact information.

Judge Toko Serita, who has presided over the trafficking court for a decade, summons the defendants, one by one, to stand before her, as a court officer calls out, “Mandarin interpreter required, and present.” The judge has short black hair, glasses and a welcoming, even reassuring demeanor, whether it’s the defendant’s first appearance or her last.

How are you today? … Are you studying English? … This is a really good streak … I want to congratulate you for completing all your sessions with Garden of Hope … Stay out of trouble, lead a law-abiding life for the next six months, and the record will be expunged … Good luck to you.

On this morning, several cases were heard before a court officer finally called out: “03585 dash 17. Yang Song!”

Even though she was five months dead, Song Yang still had an open criminal case: the arrest on a prostitution charge two months before her fatal fall. The sprawling New York City judicial system may seem overwhelmed, even chaotic, but in the end its books must be balanced. This meant that a formality known as an “abatement by death” — a dismissal, in effect — was required to close the short chapter on Song Yang, or Yang Song, as the system sometimes rendered her name.

Judge Serita was informed that the deceased defendant’s mother and son were present and would like to thank the court. The request stilled the courtroom. The judge sighed in sympathy.

“Thank you,” she said. “Um. All right. This case is now going to be abated by death.”

She went on to tell Song Yang’s mother and brother that everyone involved in the trafficking court was deeply saddened by their loved one’s “tragic and untimely death.” She expressed hope that they “somehow find peace with these unfortunate circumstances.”

Mr. Song and Ms. Shi acknowledged her words with nods. They walked out of the courtroom, past an “Exit Only — No Re-Entry” sign, and into the late-morning brightness. He lit a cigarette. She adjusted her backpack. They continued on in silence.

Two weeks later, the mother and brother returned to Kew Gardens for a long-awaited meeting with investigators from the Homicide Investigations Bureau of the Queens district attorney’s office. With everyone seated around a dark-wood conference table in a windowless room, the investigators shared the results of their monthslong inquiry, including 22 minutes of video culled from cameras positioned both inside and outside the building at 135-32 40th Road.

In these images, their beloved daughter and sister appears in the fullness of life. Here is Song Yang, leading the undercover officer up the stairs. Here she is, kicking him out of the apartment, watching the officers ascend the stairs — rushing in alarm toward the balcony.

Here, from street level, something falling, and then a beloved daughter and sister, crumpled on the pavement. Watching the video again a few days later, Ms. Shi noticed the headband that flies off her daughter’s head.

“She especially loved butterflies,” the mother said.

The video over, the investigators laid out their sober findings: The police involved in a bust-and-buy sting on 40th Road the night of Nov. 25, 2017, did not cause the death of Song Yang. To begin with, no officer was even in the fourth-floor apartment when she jumped or fell.

Her brother scoffed at this conclusion. He said something rude in Mandarin. Meeting over.

Night comes to 40th Road.

The fruit and vegetable peddlers have boxed up and boarded up, and the last patrons of air-conditioned restaurants have stepped out to evaporate in the late June warmth. But the women are here, as always, calling out an invitation that sounds almost like a plea.

Massage?

They stand outside the same doorways, including the one for 135-32, where Song Yang once lingered. Very soon after she died, her fourth-floor apartment became the address for a new massage business. Its name: Heaven on Fourth.

A few steps away, at the entrance to another of the gloomy buildings owned and operated by prominent Flushing businessmen, a thin woman in a brown dress sits in a metal chair with a square of Styrofoam for padding, studying her cellphone through the smoke of her cigarette. Then she pulls out a bag of overripe cherries from the building’s broken mailbox and, between the repeated offerings of her services, spits out the pits and tosses them into the street, not far from a lamppost adorned with a poster bearing the face of Song Yang (“Big Reward!”).

To the woman’s right, roasted duck carcasses hang in the window of the Corner 28 restaurant, where a man is mop-swabbing the sticky floor. To her left, sorrowful creatures loll in a seafood restaurant’s murky tank. Above her head, scaffolding provides protection from the stucco that city officials say has been coming loose from the buildings. Rain begins to fall.

A nearby tanker truck groans as it sucks away a restaurant’s used cooking oil through a large hose that snakes across the sidewalk and into the bowels of a building. The women adapt: They step over the hose, ignore the smell, raise their voices.

One of the women leads a potential client to a building’s threshold, but he keeps walking; she mutters an epithet in Mandarin. Then a buzz-cut junkie, who just hours before was asleep on the pavement, begins to harass the women, disrupting their business by hovering, touching, dropping his sweatpants and simulating sex acts. He enters one of their buildings and urinates in the hall.

The rain hardens. The whoosh of a shuttered metal gate resounds. A kitchen worker emerges at the end of his shift and wishes the women a good night. They wish him the same.

It is all ephemeral, of course, a realization reinforced daily by the laborers trudging down this street to the subway, bone-weary from working another of the construction projects that are redefining Flushing. Few today remember the Old Roma restaurant that once thrived on 40th Road, just as few tomorrow will remember a Chinese immigrant who once died on 40th Road.

For now, at least, if you linger on the street, you will encounter those who remember her — including, occasionally, clients still looking for SiSi.

You might see Lala, and Kiki, and Yoyo, along with other women who competed with Song Yang. You might see her lanky brother, Song Hai, who still struggles to understand why no one will be brought to justice for all that his sister went through in her adopted country. His grief smolders, as does his distrust of America.

Lastly, you might see Song Yang’s mother, Shi Yumei.

One evening, Ms. Shi paused outside a building where some women were offering massages to passing men. Raising the drooping bags held in her hands, she explained that she had just left the food pantry at the Episcopal church on Main Street, where she had recently been baptized. She said the pastor had emphasized the importance of sharing what you have.

The mother placed a bag of sweet potatoes in the doorway that had once been Song Yang’s domain. It was an offering of sorts, a gift to women like her daughter. Then she was gone, assumed into the Flushing blur.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/11/nyregion/sex-workers-massage-parlor.html |

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail, in 2018-10-12 12:47:26

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Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-case-of-jane-doe-ponytail/

Nature

A woman begins to fall. With her long dark hair in a ponytail and her black-and-red scarf loose around her neck, she is plummeting from a fourth-floor balcony, through the neon-charged November night.

Below awaits 40th Road, a gritty street of commerce in the Flushing section of Queens. Chinese restaurants and narrow storefronts, and dim stairwells leading to private transactions. Strivers and dawdlers and passers-by, all oblivious to what is transpiring above.

But before the pavement ends the woman’s descent, a few feet from a restaurant’s glittering Christmas tree, imagine her fall suddenly suspended — her body freeze-framed in midair. If only for a moment.

She toils in the netherworld of Flushing massage parlors, where she goes by the street name of SiSi. A youthful 38, she is in a platonic marriage to a man more than twice her age; harbors fading hopes of American citizenship; and is fond of Heineken, Red Bull and the rotisserie chicken at a Colombian place on Kissena Boulevard. Among her competitors, she is considered territorial and tireless.

It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and SiSi is in a shabby building’s top-floor apartment, for which she pays her “boss” a hefty fee. She has returned from a market with provisions. She has tried calling her younger brother in China, but he is asleep. She has been on the phone with friends and clients, unaware that she is in the sights of a 10-member police team working vice.

She heads downstairs to stand at her building’s entrance, a necessity of her job. Soon she is leading a man back upstairs — an officer working undercover — as her closely held cellphone casts a glow about her face. Their awkward conversation in her apartment convinces him that SiSi has broken the law, just as it convinces SiSi that he is a cop. She pushes him out and closes the door, though not to the inevitable. She knows from experience what comes next:

More police. Tromping through the dusky vestibule of her building, across the worn scarlet rug and up the 50 tiled steps. Past the Chinese sign that says if you’re looking for the driving school, you’re in the wrong place. Then right to her door.

The handcuffs. The hurried escort to a police vehicle. The humiliation. Again.

SiSi watches the officers ascend on the video monitor she keeps near the door. Under the fixed gaze of one of those lucky cat figurines perched on a table, its paw raised in a wish of good fortune, she begins to pace.

Now they are pounding on the door and shouting Police! Open up! SiSi rushes to the apartment’s north balcony, with its panoramic view of the street hustle below. Day and night, sun or sleet, this is where she and her sister competitors sing their plaintive song to passing men: Massage? Massage?

On the narrow balcony, barely two feet deep, she keeps a broom, a bucket and a small blue stool. Up she steps — and now she is falling, plunging toward the hard tenth of a New York mile that is 40th Road.

A tenth of a mile. Where Mandarin trumps English and a glance trumps the spoken word. Where sex is sold beside cloudy tanks of fish and crabs. Where seedy quarters controlled by local powers are rented to illicit massage operations, and the police make sporadic sweeps, and immigrant women are arrested again and again, and few in this city take notice.

Gravity prevails.

The undercover officer, his job done, exits the building and turns right — at the very moment that the woman who has just offered him intimacy for money hits the pavement at his feet. A woman known along 40th Road as SiSi, but whose given name was Song Yang.

In the Google Maps of the mind, pull back from this tiny street to take in the borough’s 178-square-mile sprawl: a pulsating hive of parkways and boulevards, apartment buildings and single-family homes, two airports, a major league ballpark, remnants of a world’s fair — all bracketed north and south by ocean, river and bay.

A striving borough of comity and contradiction, Queens is both the birthplace of the American president — elected in part on an anti-immigration platform — and home to 2.3 million people, nearly half of them foreign-born. With hundreds of languages spoken here, it may be the most linguistically diverse place on earth.

Every day, airplanes alight at Kennedy International Airport in southeast Queens, their passengers including many immigrants who join the borough’s anonymous, aspirational ranks. They chop the vegetables, wash the dishes, clean the toilets, mow the lawns, drive the hired cars.

And some wind up in the commercial sex trade. Making money for a pimp in an airport motel in South Jamaica. Waiting for the next client in a dingy building along Roosevelt Avenue in Corona. Or, like Song Yang, standing on a Flushing street on a cold November night, hiding behind her cute nickname, calling out to men. Playing her role in a shadow economy that benefited others through the exorbitant rent she paid.

“I hear she was No. 1: young, pretty, and her service was great,” said Michael Chu, a travel agent and community advocate who worked across the street from her on 40th Road. “People just lined up for her.”

For years now, Flushing has been an ever-replenishing repository of immigrants entangled in the underground sex economy. The commonplace raids of illicit massage operations across the country routinely lead to the arrests of women with Flushing addresses.

These parlors disappear and reappear with regularity, undermining the police crackdowns often prompted by neighborhood complaints. The industry’s opaqueness adds to the confusion. Some parlors have legitimate state licenses; some legitimate operations have masseuses making sex-for-money side deals; and some are illegally unlicensed, with no interest at all in addressing someone’s sore neck.

Emotionally manipulated by their bosses, ashamed of what they do, afraid to trust, the women rarely confide in the police or even their lawyers about their circumstances. They might be supporting a family in China, or paying back a smuggling debt, or choosing this more profitable endeavor over, say, restaurant work. No matter the backstory, the police say their collective silence further complicates law-enforcement efforts to build racketeering and trafficking cases against the operators.

But society has become increasingly aware of the complexities and inequities of the commercial sex economy, including a criminal justice system that has tended to target the exploited — often immigrant women and members of the transgender community — while rarely holding accountable their customers and traffickers.

In early 2017, New York’s police commissioner, James O’Neill, announced at a news conference that he would redirect his vice division to address prostitution and sex trafficking. This would include training intended to alter what he called the “law-enforcement mind-set.”

“We’ve already switched much of our emphasis away from prostitutes, and begun focusing much more on the pimps who sell them and the johns who pay for their services,” he said. “Like all crime, we can’t just arrest our way out of this problem.”

Since the establishment of this new “mind-set,” the police have continued to struggle at building criminal cases against the operators. But prostitution arrests in New York City have dropped more than 20 percent in the last year, while the arrests of customers have spiked.

Still, this change in attitude at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan had not necessarily crossed the East River to benefit an immigrant now lying on her side, unable to speak, gazing up at a plainclothes officer trying to calm her until an ambulance arrived. Beside a spent cigarette, her blood pooled on the pavement she had so often worked.

By morning, Song Yang would be dead, shattering a tight Chinese family that would never accept the police version of events. Her death would also come to reflect the seemingly intractable nature of policing the sex industry, and cast an unwelcome light on the furtive but ubiquitous business of illicit massage parlors.

In the epic of Queens, this stretch of 40th Road is little more than an asphalt hyphen. But along its short expanse exist worlds within worlds within worlds.

Baba, I want to go, I want to go.

I want to go to work, the little girl would say to her parents. I want to pick ginseng. She was a born worker, their Song Yang.

She and her younger brother lived with their parents in a remote village in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, where they grew crops on land allotted to them by their local village committee. Little Song Yang was especially efficient at harvesting the family’s ginseng crop, her mother, Shi Yumei, recalled. “The more her father praised her, the harder she worked.”

Her father, Song Xigui, eventually found moderate success selling construction-grade sand he bulldozed from a nearby river, and by the 1990s the family had replaced its thatched-roof home with a modern brick house that included two “kang” bed-stoves, heated slate platforms that provided warmth during the severe winters. Still, they continued to work the crops, with Song Yang often responsible for running home to light the stove, cut the vegetables and mind her brother.

As she grew older, she began to collect specimens of the enchanting butterflies zigzagging down by the river, and became meticulous in preserving their fragile iridescence. When friends came for boisterous sleepovers, they would marvel at her book of butterflies, and take turns asking to keep one.

Butterflies became Song Yang’s gift.

At 19, she moved 2,200 miles south to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth, where she became one of the thousands of young Chinese women who labored in sweatshops to produce apparel bearing the guilt-absolving label “Made in America.” Sharing a room with five other women in a dormitory, she covered her bottom-bunk bed with a silken cloth curtain, and adorned her small rectangle of privacy with family photographs.

Saipan’s garment industry was shrinking by the early 2000s, and Song Yang left to become a waitress on the island. She married a worldly divorced father named Chau Chuong, an American citizen who had worked for years in New York’s restaurant grind. He was so much older — 67 to her 27 — that her family was slow to accept him.

In 2006, the couple opened a small Vietnamese restaurant on Saipan that became so successful they opened a second place, with 150 tables. He worked the kitchen and she worked the front. “She attracted a lot of friendly customers,” her husband recalled.

Her brother, Song Hai, joined her after his high school graduation, eventually opening a henna tattoo parlor with a friend. When their mother came for a visit, she posed for photographs beside her daughter’s well-stocked restaurant bar, her smile radiating pride.

“We had a real sense of accomplishment,” Mr. Song said in Mandarin.

But a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, disrupting a main source of tourism to Saipan, as well as the fortunes of Song Yang and Song Hai. The restaurants were sold, the tattoo parlor shuttered.

Photographs from her brother’s wedding in March 2013 capture the last happy times that Song Yang spent with her family. Here she is back home, posing with the bride and groom. Here she is, sharing a restaurant meal with the growing family. Here she is.

A month later, Song Yang joined the hundreds who arrive daily at Kennedy Airport, direct from China. Straight to Flushing she went, like so many before, where she hoped that she and her husband would succeed again as restaurateurs.

But there is the dream of Flushing, and the reality.

With her husband now too old for kitchen work, Song Yang became their sole source of income. A waitressing job failed, as did a short-lived Chinese fast-food venture on Main Street. So she became a home health aide, and took a massage-therapy course in the hope of earning additional money. Then a friend told her of a more lucrative opportunity, to be found along 40th Road.

The understanding of her parents and brother was that Song Yang worked in reflexology. They knew that gifts arrived from New York. That she called regularly for video chats while sitting in a black office chair, sometimes eating a bowl of porridge. That when her nephew was born, she proudly announced on social media that she had become an aunt — a “gugu.”

That she seemed happy, mostly. But there was that time when she refused to video-chat for several days, after which she explained that a man had beaten her about the face. And that other time, when she revealed that a man — a law-enforcement officer, she said — had held a gun to her head while forcing her to perform oral sex. Family members reassured her: She had no choice.

Song Yang told her family last fall that she had booked a flight to China for December, and was looking forward to meeting her nephew for the first time. So far she had connected with him only online, through the popular WeChat app, where her avatar sometimes featured a butterfly.

What kind of present do you want Gugu to bring home? she would ask the child, her image beamed halfway around the world from some exotic place called Flushing.

The thoroughfare known as 40th Road was Grove Street, once.

In the 19th century it had a volunteer firehouse, a nursery and residents with Irish surnames. Just in living memory, there was Harry Barlow’s auto garage, the mimeograph services of Case the Printer, an appliance store proud of its color Zenith television sets and, of course, the Old Roma restaurant — famous for its veal cutlets on linguine, and that yellow sponge cake with pineapple filling.

It is all long gone, replaced by ginger duck rice casserole and a shaved ice treat called red bean baobing. The 40th Road of today is almost entirely Chinese, its restaurant signs often featuring no English at all — one more reminder that the only New York constant is change.

The street’s 20 buildings, including Song Yang’s, are mostly three- and four-story structures from the 1980s and ’90s that evoke a utilitarian, Soviet-bloc drabness. Narrow and claustrophobic, they loom like set pieces for a film noir.

The one-way street itself always feels like a wrong turn, an obstacle course of idling delivery trucks and construction equipment. One end elbows past a small playground; the other runs into the ever-clogged Main Street intersection, where plainclothes police officers can often be seen sitting in an unmarked vehicle in an attempt to deter quality-of-life crimes. Pickpocketing is so prevalent that a nearby grocery displays signs of a stick figure reaching into another stick figure’s handbag.

Above, looming airliners grumble as they approach LaGuardia Airport, across Flushing Bay. Just behind 40th Road, Long Island Rail Road trains grind and whine along the raised tracks. Up and down the block, the earthy aromas of produce stands and restaurant waste commingle with the classical Chinese instrumental music emanating from a soup-dumpling restaurant.

And here, beside the upturned fruit crates and the overloaded garbage bags, stand the women of the massage parlors. In their 40s and 50s, mostly, they check their cellphones, drag on untaxed Korean cigarettes bought in bulk, and chat, but with eyes scanning for unattached men lacking a law-enforcement vibe.

Massage?

The offer is understood, if not explicit. If the man consents, he is led up the stairs of one of the dull buildings, where massage operations are often crammed amid barbershops, driving schools and employment agencies.

Massage parlors offering sex are hardly a recent phenomenon, and business models vary. But the trade along 40th Road is especially audacious. The women stand on both sides of the street — five, 10, a dozen at a time — as ubiquitous as the delivery trucks. In the merciless heat and cold, they sweat and shiver on staked ground, prompting resentful neighborhood complaints about lost business and children exposed to the seamy daily spectacle.

A common arrangement on 40th Road is one in which a “boss” rents an apartment or office from one of the building’s tenants, then provides space to women for a $20 cut of whatever they charge each client. The general expectation is that each woman will generate at least $100 a day for the boss.

But the bosses provide no meaningful protection. The women are at the mercy of the street, where they have been robbed, beaten, raped, thrown down stairs. The surveillance cameras nearly always present are intended less for security, perhaps, than to provide the boss with a way to count the clients who walk through the door.

Over several months, the women along 40th Road shared in Mandarin the stories of how they came to be standing here, offering sex to strangers. They use names like masks. Some have chosen Americanized names — Jenny, for example — while others have been rechristened by bosses with nicknames that sound like Lala, or Kiki, or Yoyo.

They came from all over China, and from myriad backgrounds. One woman said she used to clean houses. Another said she was a former reporter who covered Chinese real estate. Several described the circumstances that left them in economic straits: a failed bus company, a bankrupt jade dealership, a gambling-addicted husband.

One woman often positions herself near a standpipe at the corner of Main Street, so as to be the first to approach any man venturing west. She is in her 60s, small-framed and usually dressed in layers, with long hair dyed black. She said in a raspy voice that she was from the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi, and that she was trying to pay off a debt incurred by her adult son in a business deal gone wrong.

She had visited two job agencies on 40th Road, looking for work as a nanny, but nothing panned out. And now she was here, on the corner, where her half-joking refrain — “I’m too old” — did not seem to deter clients.

Another woman, who gave her name as Xiao Li — or Little Li — said she was from the city of Dexing, in Jiangxi Province, home to a well-known copper mine, where she once was a welder. Thin and often wearing a simple black dress, she said she had briefly left the street to study legitimate massage — “So my heart could have a little bit of peace” — but had concluded that the classes were a waste of money. Back she came to 40th Road.

“My body can’t take it,” Ms. Li, 50, said. “My body can’t take so many men.”

Others were even more expansive, including a stocky, 40-ish woman with cropped black hair and a lazy eye who called herself Rachel. Eating a sweet baked potato at a dumpling stall on Main Street, she recalled that while working at a job she loathed — waitressing at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle — she began hunting through WeChat forums for leads on other work, and came across an offer that she recalled saying:

Massage Woman to Stand on Street. $20,000 a month. Flushing, N.Y.

Rachel called the number to ask what the job entailed. The boss replied: Everything.

After her first day, Rachel said, “I got home and took a shower, and cried.”

She paused at the memory, and added, “But then I just thought to myself, ‘I have to keep thinking positively.’”

Michael Chu, the longtime neighborhood advocate, has befriended some of the women who stand outside his building on 40th Road, and occasionally offers them assistance with police matters. His office, where an old dog named Scout is usually napping on some cardboard, is furnished with desks left behind by an accountant who moved rather than work beside a massage parlor.

A bespectacled man of 65, Mr. Chu has listened to the travails of these women, whom he calls “sisters.” The beatings, the robberies, the harassment from teenagers in the playground, the pressure to attract enough clients to cover their “rent” to the boss. The hopes they harbor for permanent residence, for having enough money, for finally not doing this.

“They also have an American dream,” Mr. Chu said. “The sisters have an American dream.”

The man spotted her on the street one night after stopping at a 40th Road restaurant known for its cheap and plentiful food. She was pretty, younger than the other women and conversant in English, so he paid for a session. She said her name was SiSi.

His was Paul Hayes. Single, in his early 40s and living in Queens, he carried himself with a seen-it-all air — but she beguiled him. They gradually became lovers, then good friends with vague plans to rekindle their romance someday. But she lived with her husband in an apartment a block away. It was complicated.

She had a good sense of humor, and often solicited his advice — although she ignored him when he recommended bolstering the building’s security system. She also confided about the dangers and vagaries of her work life.

“She really hated doing it,” Mr. Hayes said.

Even so, Song Yang established herself as a fierce competitor in the circumscribed world of 40th Road. Fueled by coffee and Red Bull, she toiled nearly nonstop, as if facing some self-imposed deadline. Word was that she was trying to save up to open her own Vietnamese restaurant, or to buy a house in New York for her aging parents, or to just move on.

Her sharp elbows and inexhaustible style irked some of the other women, leading to arguments, shoves and occasional hair pulling. One competitor recalled that if a man chose another masseuse, Song Yang would tease the client about preferring older women.

But another woman remembered a gentler, more generous Song Yang. She said that when she arrived at 40th Road, Song Yang insisted that she accept several pairs of pants to ward against winter.

Song Yang’s domain was a fourth-floor apartment at 135-32 40th Road, directly above another massage operation. The apartment door faced a boiler room and a makeshift gate that was intended to keep vagrants from sleeping on the roof, but also to protect the hot pepper plants nurtured there by the aged custodian.

As were most things on 40th Road, her rental arrangement was convoluted.

The building was constructed in 1992 by Jentai Tsai, 85, a prominent, even revered, banker in Flushing, and is owned by a real estate company overseen by his son, Eugene Morimoto Tsai. In a brief conversation last month, the younger Tsai, 42, said that he did not know that a woman had fallen from his building last year, or that his building had long been a hub of illicit massage activity.

They both said, and city records confirm, that the building’s managing agent — responsible for collecting rent — was another man of local distinction: Peter Tu, 62, the longtime director of the Flushing Chinese Business Association, a member of Community Board 7 and a district leader for the Democratic Party.

Outside his office around the corner, Mr. Tu at first denied that he was involved with the 40th Road building, but then said that he had merely tried to assist the Tsai family by collecting the $18,500 monthly rent from the main, first-floor tenant, the Shi Li Xiang seafood restaurant. He said he no longer served in this role, had never taken any payment “from the street,” and had no idea what arrangements the restaurant had with the tenants and subtenants upstairs.

“I’m always in the middle,” Mr. Tu said.

A man identifying himself as the boss of the first-floor restaurant began to shout when asked about the tenants upstairs. “How am I supposed to know the names of the people to whom I rent?” he asked in Mandarin. “You want me to go up and ask everyone who they are?”

Above the restaurant, in this building owned and managed by Flushing men of stature, Song Yang paid a flat fee for her apartment — as much as $400 a night, competitors say — to a square-headed, elusive “boss” who goes by Lao Li, or Old Li, a kind of avuncular nickname conveying familiarity with the women who work for him. But the particulars of his subleasing arrangements are as difficult to pin down as he is.

One spring midnight, Lao Li made a rare appearance on 40th Road to mediate a dispute over clients that had erupted among the women. When a reporter approached and called him by name, Lao Li looked up — and bolted. He dashed east down the center of 40th Road, dodging cars, before vanishing into the dark Flushing night.

Although Song Yang and other women often quarreled, they occasionally gathered with Lao Li at the restaurant downstairs, or at a nearby karaoke bar. They’d watch him blow out a candle on his birthday cake, or sing along to a song popular in his native northeast China. At the Chinese New Year, he would hand out red envelopes containing small cash gifts.

In cellphone videos and photographs of these get-togethers, the participants could easily be mistaken for co-workers at an accounting firm, making a night of it. They seemed untroubled by their profession’s many perils, including robbery, bodily harm — and, especially, arrest.

Arrest attracted unwelcome attention. It jeopardized applications for permanent residency. It magnified the humiliation. And it usually meant an appearance at the Human Trafficking Intervention Court, held on Fridays in the basement of the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens, where Mandarin sometimes seems as common as English.

Established nearly 15 years ago, the court set out to treat women in the commercial sex trade less as accused criminals than as victims of trafficking and exploitation. They are told that charges will be dismissed and records sealed if they complete several individualized counseling sessions — focused, say, on job training, or education — with Garden of Hope, Restore NYC, Womankind or another outreach organization. A group called Sanctuary for Families is also on hand to provide immigration services.

Song Yang went through this process more than once. In addition to expunging the arrests from her record, these court appearances provided pause, forcing her to confront the consequences of her work life.

In the summer of 2016, Song Yang began frequent WeChat dialogues with a Flushing lawyer, Chen Mingli, that at first focused on acquiring permanent residency — a process that he repeatedly told her could take months and months. Still, she fretted that her arrest history would thwart her application for a green card.

I am having a lot of anxiety, she wrote in Chinese.

Gradually, though, their conversations came to reflect the darker realities of her 40th Road realm, with sobbing emoticons peppering her messages.

Good morning, Lawyer Chen, she wrote in mid-October 2016. A police officer put a gun to my head today and forced me to perform oral sex.

At the insistence of a friend, she had filed a complaint with the 109th Precinct. Investigators spent the day in her “shop,” looking for evidence and checking the building’s surveillance video, which had captured a heavyset bald man in a suit ascending the stairs.

Mr. Chen assured her that the matter would not affect the status of her immigration case, and implored her to cooperate with the police. But her intense desire to avoid attention, coupled with fear of retaliation from her attacker, overshadowed everything.

The police said that this won’t affect me in any way, but I’m afraid that it will … Lawyer Chen, what am I going to do now? … (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

The police circulated a wanted poster based on a hazy photograph of the man lifted from the surveillance video. A retired United States Marshal, who surrendered after someone mentioned him as a possible suspect, participated in a lineup.

But Song Yang identified another man, wrongly, as her attacker. In addition, a DNA sample from the retired marshal did not match samples taken from Song Yang’s clothing. The case was eventually closed.

Several months later, in late September 2017, she was arrested a third time on a prostitution charge. Handcuffed, led away from 40th Road, held overnight.

A few days later, Mr. Chen asked, You’ve been arrested again?

Song Yang answered:

Yeah. (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

She explained that she had been forced to make hard decisions and that it had been difficult to suppress her feelings while married to a much older man who seemed increasingly removed from her day-to-day life. She felt “morally depraved,” and sometimes thought about giving it all up and going home — or worse.

I’ve been having thoughts of jumping from a building, but what should I do? she wrote early one morning.

Mr. Chen was never formally hired by Song Yang, but now his central role seemed to be to buoy her spirits.

Don’t be scared, he wrote hours later. Don’t think that way.

Song Yang only sank deeper.

I’ve fallen so low I can’t be saved.

She continued:

Without purpose, without direction, what meaning is there to keep on living?

I used to be a woman who was very strong in her life. I strove for perfection in everything I did. I never thought that my life would turn out this way. I’ve truly failed.

At the end of October, Song Yang made one last visit to Mr. Chen’s office. She confided that another client had badly beaten her a couple of weeks earlier — an assault she had not reported to the police — and showed him photographs of her bruised and swollen face.

“Why am I so unlucky?” he remembers her asking.

The case began with an anonymous complaint: Several women were said to be “selling intimacy” at the building at 135-32 40th Road.

The tip hardly came as a revelation, since shady activities at this address had generated scores of 911 calls over the years. To some, the building even had the aura of being cursed, following a horrific crime in 2010, in which a deranged stalker stabbed a woman in the second-floor hallway and removed her heart and lungs.

Forty-three arrests had taken place in the building over the last decade, more than a few sex-related, the most recent that of Song Yang. Ensnared in an undercover sting in late September, she had tried but failed to hide in the cramped boiler room across from her apartment, and was charged with offering sex for $70.

Her case, which had prompted those despairing messages to the lawyer Mr. Chen, was one of 91 massage-parlor-related arrests in the 109th Precinct in 2017, and one of six along 40th Road. According to court records, none of those arrests were for pimping, solicitation or operating an unlicensed massage parlor.

A few nights after the anonymous complaint, a sergeant and a detective ended a brief surveillance by venturing into the notorious building. The only thing they found suspicious was a handwritten sign in Chinese on the second floor, which they believed to say, in effect, There are no girls on this floor; please go to the third floor.

The police later determined that the sign actually said, “Attention, the driving school is on the third floor next door.”

An undercover officer then telephoned a woman associated with the building who was known as SiSi. They arranged an appointment for the next evening, Saturday, Nov. 25. Her price: $120.

On the appointed day, members of the Queens North Vice Enforcement Squad met at their base in College Point to discuss the seven locations they planned to hit that night. The closest target became the first: the bleak building at 135-32 40th Road.

The vice officers went over their safety plan. They chose their identifying color of the day. They agreed upon the mission’s assorted distress signals and code words, including what the primary undercover officer would say to indicate that sex had been offered for money. Now they were ready.

The 10-member team headed out into the evening, unseasonably mild for late November. They parked along Prince Street, across from the White Bear dumpling place and just short of where the one-way street bends east to become 40th Road. The team leader and two arresting officers sat in the first car, with two more arresting officers in the second car. The third vehicle was for prisoner transport.

The team tested its recording device, which used Bluetooth to transmit one-way audio. No problem. The green light was given: Go.

Minutes later, the undercover officer approached his target, Song Yang, just inside her building’s entrance. He wore an olive-green jacket, jeans and a cap. She wore a short winter coat, a red-and-black scarf, leggings and one of her signature headbands — with a small bow that resembled a butterfly.

The officer could not have known that this woman had just attempted a video chat with her younger brother, who was still asleep in China. That she had plans to fly home in December. That she had kept her court-mandated appointments with Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization that helps foreign-born victims of sex trafficking. That her fifth and last session with Restore was four days away.

About all he knew was her police nickname for the night: “JD Ponytail.”

Jane Doe Ponytail.

She led him up the worn stairs. She gave him a peck of a kiss in the hall, and opened her apartment door. Another woman, brand-new to Flushing and known as Momo, was already occupied with a man in the second bedroom.

Song Yang walked her client to her bedroom, where, according to the police, she offered sexual intercourse for the reduced price of $80. He consented to the arrangement and, heading to the bathroom, managed to utter the code word into his transmitter that a positive — that is, illegal — agreement had been reached. He also hoped to signal to colleagues that it was time to move in, but a wary Song Yang prevented him from having privacy, telling him to keep the bathroom door open.

“This is bad service,” the officer said.

Once in the bedroom, Song Yang became even more suspicious. Why aren’t you taking off your clothes? she asked. Are you a cop?

No, he answered. But he complained again about the service and grabbed his hat, prepared to leave. She pushed him out and closed the door.

Responding to the undercover officer’s signal, the three idling police vehicles turned onto 40th Road, smack into its everlasting gridlock. Four officers got out and hustled to the building. Climbing the dreary stairs, they passed their undercover colleague, who pointed to Song Yang’s door as he descended — and as she watched on the monitor in her apartment.

With the police demanding that she open the door, and preparing to break it down, a panicked Song Yang hurried to the apartment’s north balcony. The other woman, Momo, emerged naked from her bedroom to investigate the noise, but hustled back to hide when she realized it was the police.

The balcony was not equipped with surveillance cameras, leaving what happened next to the imagination. It is possible that Song Yang was hoping to escape, perhaps by reaching for a wire that ran vertically past her balcony. It is possible that she was trying to land on the protruding metal sign of the restaurant below. It is also possible that she intended to kill herself.

It is fact that she hit the pavement directly in front of the undercover officer she had pecked on the cheek just five minutes earlier. His supervisors say that the officer remains shaken to this day.

Later that night, while Song Yang was lying in a hospital bed with multiple fractures to her face, head and body, the police placed her under arrest. She died in the morning — and the arrest was, in the parlance of the police, “voided.”

In the dark of an early December morning, two weary travelers shuffled through the multicultural scrum of Kennedy Airport. One was a tall, reedy man named Song Hai; the other, a slight, older woman named Shi Yumei, whose protracted weeping on the long flight from Beijing had concerned an attendant.

Song Yang’s mother and brother had traveled 7,000 miles to better understand the how and the why of her death.

A telephone call from her husband several nights earlier had disrupted everything. Song Yang is dead, he had said. Police say she jumped from a building.

Her distraught parents had telephoned their other child, Song Hai, to deliver words so heavy that he dropped his smartphone, cracking its glass. Not accepting what he heard, he sent a WeChat message to his sister that depicted a pair of clinking coffee mugs, along with a gentle request to please call home.

The lack of an answer was the answer.

The mother and brother spent their first two weeks in Flushing tending to the affairs of death. Then, on a dismal day of late December rain, they made their way to the Chun Fook funeral home, a few blocks from 40th Road. Though some had recommended a modest ceremony, the family had insisted on a more elaborate service, in a spacious room with a chandelier.

The dark wood coffin sat at the front before rows of chairs that would remain empty. No women from 40th Road. No Lao Li. A pair of vertical scrolls with parallel aphorisms written in Chinese calligraphy — “Put Down Your Burdens and Return to the Lord” and “Take Up Tranquillity and Celebrate Everlasting Life” — hung on either side.

One minister delivered prayers in English, while another repeated those prayers in Mandarin. The few mourners included Song Yang’s close friend Paul Hayes; the community advocate Michael Chu; Chen Mingli, the lawyer who had tried to help her seek permanent residency; her husband, Chau Chuong, now 78, who had come from California, where he had been living for his health; and her mother and brother, their heads bowed and hands folded.

The ceremony ended with the reading from the Book of Common Prayer that we are all from dust, and to dust we shall return. Alleluia, the mourners mumbled. Alleluia.

Then it was a short drive along the Grand Central Parkway to the All Souls Chapel and Crematory at St. Michael’s Cemetery. This is where Song Yang’s battered body was returned to dust, and where, in his frustration and grief, her brother vowed justice and punched a wall.

The official explanation for his only sibling’s death made no sense to Mr. Song. After all, she had already paid for her flight home to celebrate their mother’s upcoming birthday and to meet, for the first time, his 5-year-old son. Suicide was not possible, he reasoned. Darker forces might be at play. He had already begun his own investigation.

One snowy night soon after arriving from China, Mr. Song appeared at his sister’s 40th Road building with Mr. Hayes. Their plan was to break into her apartment, collect her belongings — and, if possible, retrieve any surveillance video.

Mr. Song, a learning specialist by trade, and Mr. Hayes, a computer consultant, crept up the 50 tiled steps to the fourth-floor door, which was secured with a locked chain. Fearing the noise of the hammer and small acetylene torch they had planned to use, Mr. Hayes hustled to a Home Depot a mile away and returned with a hacksaw.

After a few minutes of sawing, the chain gave way, and the two men pushed open the dull-gray door to enter the setting of a life interrupted. The police had taken the surveillance equipment, but everything else made it seem as if Song Yang might return at any minute.

In the two bedrooms, rumpled sheets. In the kitchen, a Pepsi and a half-empty bottle of Bacardi, sliced carrots and apples, and the black chair that Mr. Song recognized as the one his sister sat in while video-chatting with her family. In the living room, a raised table with a red curtained skirt, on which sat a CD player, a pair of sunglasses and a lucky cat figurine. Placed neatly on the floor, a pair of pink shoes.

On the snow-dusted front balcony, a broom, an upside-down bucket, a stool, a few plastic bags containing fruit and eggs. And, just beyond, the beckoning lights and shadows of the street below.

Song Hai returned often to 40th Road, a spectral presence in his dark hooded coat and black cap, a cigarette cupped in his hand. He cajoled and confronted the sidewalk’s denizens, asking questions, taking photographs, recording conversations. He saw himself as a lone-wolf investigator, working to prove that corrupt officers of this strange city had thrown Song Yang over the railing.

His ever-evolving theory:

That his sister had been sexually assaulted by a police officer. That she had filed a complaint. That the subsequent police lineup was fixed to protect the assailant. Then it was payback, which explained why, of all the women along 40th Road, only Song Yang was arrested in September, and was about to be arrested again in late November.

As is standard when a death occurs during a police action, the Queens district attorney and the police department’s Force Investigation Division were investigating. But Mr. Song was already beginning to believe that nearly every corner of the American criminal justice system — from the police to the medical examiner — was colluding to hide the truth.

He patrolled downtown Flushing. He interrogated women and shopkeepers. He plastered the streets with leaflets featuring photographs of his sister and promising a “Big Reward!” The plea appeared in Chinese and in fractured English:

Hello! When you saw the photo, SiSi (Song Yang) was no longer alive. She fell from and died on 11/25/2017 at 135-32 4FL in Flushing. Families as well as the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau are eager to find out the truth of her death. If you have ANY CLUES, please contact me ASAP. Absolutely Confidential … (Her brother Song Hai)

The dozens of responses yielded little. One man called to say that Song Hai’s sister was a whore — a word he did not quite understand, and so he continued the conversation: Yes, yes. And do you have information?

His sleuthing occasionally paid off. One evening, amid the Main Street crush, Mr. Song spotted a man he recognized from his sister’s WeChat photographs: short, solidly built, and with a distinctive, block-shaped head.

Excited, Mr. Song crossed the street and, right at the Roosevelt Avenue intersection, near the subway entrance, grabbed the man by the arm. Mr. Song recalled what happened next:

Are you Li? he asked.

You’re mistaken, replied the startled Lao Li, the boss who controlled Song Yang’s apartment. My name is not Li.

Mr. Song waved down a passing police car, as a crowd gathered and the agitated man in his grip implored him not to involve the authorities. Let’s resolve this ourselves.

The two officers understood Mr. Song’s intentions, he later recalled, but they explained that this was America, not China, and that he was unlawfully detaining a man who wasn’t present when his sister’s fall took place. They separated the men, and Lao Li floated away in the rush-hour stream.

Later that evening, an angry Lao Li telephoned Mr. Song. In the conversation that Mr. Song duly recorded on his phone, Lao Li vented about the audacity of summoning the police — “If you don’t have evidence, how could you say I’m the boss?” — before giving his version of the realities on 40th Road.

He said that he rented the apartment to Song Yang for $3,100 a month — hardly the $12,000 that was rumored on the street. “She and I really didn’t have any employment relationship,” he said. “Just that at the start of the month, I would take the rent.”

Lao Li said she called him her “boss” so that others wouldn’t bully her, but he insisted that she was her own boss: prone to arrest, sure, but also smart, tenacious and tough.

Throughout the conversation, Lao Li characteristically remained at a distance — even when describing that fateful night. He rushed to 40th Road after receiving a call that “SiSi had jumped from the building,” he said, but by the time he got there, “your sister had already been taken away.”

As Mr. Song conducted his frustrating investigation, his mother spent her days in the numbing cocoon of grief. Once so proud of her entrepreneurial children, Shi Yumei was now a sorrowful woman in a foreign world, gingerly navigating a small cart down crowded Main Street, her pale gray knit cap pulled low, her mind occupied with worry. How, for example, would she and her son, here on temporary visas, survive on the little money they had brought with them?

An encounter with a bellowing street evangelist eventually led her to St. George’s, the old Episcopal church on Main Street whose steeple has long been a Flushing landmark. Its congregation embraced her, smothering her with food, clothing and compassion. Locking hands and forming a prayer circle one day, strangers asked God to grant peace to this new person among them, who felt so blessed that she began to volunteer at the church’s food pantry as a way of giving back.

One cool April morning, she donned an orange apron and joined 40 other volunteers, nearly all of them immigrants, as they prepared for the ritual that unfolds every Wednesday along the old church’s north side, opposite a Lucille Roberts fitness center. They unloaded the crates from trucks, bagged the fruit and vegetables, and established an assembly line of food down the sidewalk: turnips and fennel, lettuce and apples, onions and melons.

The decade-old operation had gradually adapted to the ways of Flushing, with organizers taking note of the tensions caused by different understandings of personal space among ethnic groups. The solution: two alternating lines — one that was entirely Asian, and the other a mix of black, white and Latino.

On this morning, the Asian line ran alongside the church’s cemetery wall, and the other line stretched down to a firehouse. But things moved apace, thanks in large part to the high-spirited efficiency of the volunteers — including Shi Yumei, who smiled at her sense of belonging as she proffered bags of onions.

Each evening, after long days of volunteering and investigating, mother and son returned to a worn apartment catering to transients, not far from 40th Road. Some lodgers paid $20 a night for a narrow bed in the living room. But with some financial help from the church and a few nonprofit organizations, Mr. Song and Ms. Shi managed to pay $1,000 a month for a cramped bedroom and first dibs on a shared kitchen.

They slept beside a closet packed with clothes and accessories that Song Yang left behind. Tears were shed over a single strand of black hair found on a coat. They lived in the presence of her absence.

To find sleep, the mother would hold a small audio device close to her ear and listen to lively recorded stories about historical Chinese triumphs, cuddled beside one of her daughter’s plush teddy bears. This way, Ms. Shi said in Mandarin, “I know my daughter is here with me.”

Two feet away, her son would lie in his twin bed near the window, cigarettes on the nightstand, spent beer cans under the bed, another Long Island Rail Road train clattering in the distance. Here he would try to piece together the stray bits of his investigation.

He had found a grainy photograph from his sister’s WeChat feed of the stocky, bald man who had supposedly sexually assaulted her, and convinced himself that a bald police detective, appearing in cellphone videos taken on the sidewalk after his sister’s fall, was the same man.

He had also obtained photographs and forensic notes from the autopsy. Poring over the graphic images, he decided that the discoloration around his sister’s face came from a beating, and that her broken fingernails suggested some kind of struggle — and, therefore, a cover-up.

This was America. Not China. Exactly.

On a sunny spring day, those invested in the proceedings of the human trafficking court filed into the basement courtroom in Kew Gardens. Among them were Song Hai, in a black blazer and brown work boots, and Shi Yumei, her blue-and-orange scarf recalling the colors seen on the Staten Island Ferry, on Knicks uniforms, on Mets baseball caps — the colors of New York.

They took their seats among the defendants, including a woman in glasses often seen calling out to men on 40th Road. Mr. Song sat with his hands clasped and back erect; his mother was bent forward, as if in prayer. They waited.

An air of empathy defines the court, which is intended to encourage women engaged in the commercial sex trade to avail themselves of counseling and other diversionary programs. On most Fridays, the judge, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are women, and the lanky head court officer is determined to make the defendants feel safe and respected. He does his best to dissuade any pimps or bosses from taking a seat.

Prominent in the dozen pews are Chinese women facing the usual massage-parlor-related charges of prostitution or unlicensed massage. Court-appointed lawyers from the Legal Aid Society or Queens Law Associates usually guide them through the process, along with a Mandarin-speaking interpreter and advocates from one of the nonprofit groups specializing in sex-trafficking outreach and immigration services.

Defenders of the program maintain that until a better approach is developed, arrests — followed by appearances in trafficking court — provide the best chance for intervention. Even if a woman returns to 40th Road, they say, she will at least have the names of people to contact if she needs help.

Others, though, counter that for many women caught in the commercial sex trade, an arrest only exacerbates their trauma. Besides, they say, one doesn’t need to be arrested in order to receive helpful contact information.

Judge Toko Serita, who has presided over the trafficking court for a decade, summons the defendants, one by one, to stand before her, as a court officer calls out, “Mandarin interpreter required, and present.” The judge has short black hair, glasses and a welcoming, even reassuring demeanor, whether it’s the defendant’s first appearance or her last.

How are you today? … Are you studying English? … This is a really good streak … I want to congratulate you for completing all your sessions with Garden of Hope … Stay out of trouble, lead a law-abiding life for the next six months, and the record will be expunged … Good luck to you.

On this morning, several cases were heard before a court officer finally called out: “03585 dash 17. Yang Song!”

Even though she was five months dead, Song Yang still had an open criminal case: the arrest on a prostitution charge two months before her fatal fall. The sprawling New York City judicial system may seem overwhelmed, even chaotic, but in the end its books must be balanced. This meant that a formality known as an “abatement by death” — a dismissal, in effect — was required to close the short chapter on Song Yang, or Yang Song, as the system sometimes rendered her name.

Judge Serita was informed that the deceased defendant’s mother and son were present and would like to thank the court. The request stilled the courtroom. The judge sighed in sympathy.

“Thank you,” she said. “Um. All right. This case is now going to be abated by death.”

She went on to tell Song Yang’s mother and brother that everyone involved in the trafficking court was deeply saddened by their loved one’s “tragic and untimely death.” She expressed hope that they “somehow find peace with these unfortunate circumstances.”

Mr. Song and Ms. Shi acknowledged her words with nods. They walked out of the courtroom, past an “Exit Only — No Re-Entry” sign, and into the late-morning brightness. He lit a cigarette. She adjusted her backpack. They continued on in silence.

Two weeks later, the mother and brother returned to Kew Gardens for a long-awaited meeting with investigators from the Homicide Investigations Bureau of the Queens district attorney’s office. With everyone seated around a dark-wood conference table in a windowless room, the investigators shared the results of their monthslong inquiry, including 22 minutes of video culled from cameras positioned both inside and outside the building at 135-32 40th Road.

In these images, their beloved daughter and sister appears in the fullness of life. Here is Song Yang, leading the undercover officer up the stairs. Here she is, kicking him out of the apartment, watching the officers ascend the stairs — rushing in alarm toward the balcony.

Here, from street level, something falling, and then a beloved daughter and sister, crumpled on the pavement. Watching the video again a few days later, Ms. Shi noticed the headband that flies off her daughter’s head.

“She especially loved butterflies,” the mother said.

The video over, the investigators laid out their sober findings: The police involved in a bust-and-buy sting on 40th Road the night of Nov. 25, 2017, did not cause the death of Song Yang. To begin with, no officer was even in the fourth-floor apartment when she jumped or fell.

Her brother scoffed at this conclusion. He said something rude in Mandarin. Meeting over.

Night comes to 40th Road.

The fruit and vegetable peddlers have boxed up and boarded up, and the last patrons of air-conditioned restaurants have stepped out to evaporate in the late June warmth. But the women are here, as always, calling out an invitation that sounds almost like a plea.

Massage?

They stand outside the same doorways, including the one for 135-32, where Song Yang once lingered. Very soon after she died, her fourth-floor apartment became the address for a new massage business. Its name: Heaven on Fourth.

A few steps away, at the entrance to another of the gloomy buildings owned and operated by prominent Flushing businessmen, a thin woman in a brown dress sits in a metal chair with a square of Styrofoam for padding, studying her cellphone through the smoke of her cigarette. Then she pulls out a bag of overripe cherries from the building’s broken mailbox and, between the repeated offerings of her services, spits out the pits and tosses them into the street, not far from a lamppost adorned with a poster bearing the face of Song Yang (“Big Reward!”).

To the woman’s right, roasted duck carcasses hang in the window of the Corner 28 restaurant, where a man is mop-swabbing the sticky floor. To her left, sorrowful creatures loll in a seafood restaurant’s murky tank. Above her head, scaffolding provides protection from the stucco that city officials say has been coming loose from the buildings. Rain begins to fall.

A nearby tanker truck groans as it sucks away a restaurant’s used cooking oil through a large hose that snakes across the sidewalk and into the bowels of a building. The women adapt: They step over the hose, ignore the smell, raise their voices.

One of the women leads a potential client to a building’s threshold, but he keeps walking; she mutters an epithet in Mandarin. Then a buzz-cut junkie, who just hours before was asleep on the pavement, begins to harass the women, disrupting their business by hovering, touching, dropping his sweatpants and simulating sex acts. He enters one of their buildings and urinates in the hall.

The rain hardens. The whoosh of a shuttered metal gate resounds. A kitchen worker emerges at the end of his shift and wishes the women a good night. They wish him the same.

It is all ephemeral, of course, a realization reinforced daily by the laborers trudging down this street to the subway, bone-weary from working another of the construction projects that are redefining Flushing. Few today remember the Old Roma restaurant that once thrived on 40th Road, just as few tomorrow will remember a Chinese immigrant who once died on 40th Road.

For now, at least, if you linger on the street, you will encounter those who remember her — including, occasionally, clients still looking for SiSi.

You might see Lala, and Kiki, and Yoyo, along with other women who competed with Song Yang. You might see her lanky brother, Song Hai, who still struggles to understand why no one will be brought to justice for all that his sister went through in her adopted country. His grief smolders, as does his distrust of America.

Lastly, you might see Song Yang’s mother, Shi Yumei.

One evening, Ms. Shi paused outside a building where some women were offering massages to passing men. Raising the drooping bags held in her hands, she explained that she had just left the food pantry at the Episcopal church on Main Street, where she had recently been baptized. She said the pastor had emphasized the importance of sharing what you have.

The mother placed a bag of sweet potatoes in the doorway that had once been Song Yang’s domain. It was an offering of sorts, a gift to women like her daughter. Then she was gone, assumed into the Flushing blur.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/11/nyregion/sex-workers-massage-parlor.html |

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail, in 2018-10-12 12:47:26

[blogparadiseisland]

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-case-of-jane-doe-ponytail/

Nature

A woman begins to fall. With her long dark hair in a ponytail and her black-and-red scarf loose around her neck, she is plummeting from a fourth-floor balcony, through the neon-charged November night.

Below awaits 40th Road, a gritty street of commerce in the Flushing section of Queens. Chinese restaurants and narrow storefronts, and dim stairwells leading to private transactions. Strivers and dawdlers and passers-by, all oblivious to what is transpiring above.

But before the pavement ends the woman’s descent, a few feet from a restaurant’s glittering Christmas tree, imagine her fall suddenly suspended — her body freeze-framed in midair. If only for a moment.

She toils in the netherworld of Flushing massage parlors, where she goes by the street name of SiSi. A youthful 38, she is in a platonic marriage to a man more than twice her age; harbors fading hopes of American citizenship; and is fond of Heineken, Red Bull and the rotisserie chicken at a Colombian place on Kissena Boulevard. Among her competitors, she is considered territorial and tireless.

It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and SiSi is in a shabby building’s top-floor apartment, for which she pays her “boss” a hefty fee. She has returned from a market with provisions. She has tried calling her younger brother in China, but he is asleep. She has been on the phone with friends and clients, unaware that she is in the sights of a 10-member police team working vice.

She heads downstairs to stand at her building’s entrance, a necessity of her job. Soon she is leading a man back upstairs — an officer working undercover — as her closely held cellphone casts a glow about her face. Their awkward conversation in her apartment convinces him that SiSi has broken the law, just as it convinces SiSi that he is a cop. She pushes him out and closes the door, though not to the inevitable. She knows from experience what comes next:

More police. Tromping through the dusky vestibule of her building, across the worn scarlet rug and up the 50 tiled steps. Past the Chinese sign that says if you’re looking for the driving school, you’re in the wrong place. Then right to her door.

The handcuffs. The hurried escort to a police vehicle. The humiliation. Again.

SiSi watches the officers ascend on the video monitor she keeps near the door. Under the fixed gaze of one of those lucky cat figurines perched on a table, its paw raised in a wish of good fortune, she begins to pace.

Now they are pounding on the door and shouting Police! Open up! SiSi rushes to the apartment’s north balcony, with its panoramic view of the street hustle below. Day and night, sun or sleet, this is where she and her sister competitors sing their plaintive song to passing men: Massage? Massage?

On the narrow balcony, barely two feet deep, she keeps a broom, a bucket and a small blue stool. Up she steps — and now she is falling, plunging toward the hard tenth of a New York mile that is 40th Road.

A tenth of a mile. Where Mandarin trumps English and a glance trumps the spoken word. Where sex is sold beside cloudy tanks of fish and crabs. Where seedy quarters controlled by local powers are rented to illicit massage operations, and the police make sporadic sweeps, and immigrant women are arrested again and again, and few in this city take notice.

Gravity prevails.

The undercover officer, his job done, exits the building and turns right — at the very moment that the woman who has just offered him intimacy for money hits the pavement at his feet. A woman known along 40th Road as SiSi, but whose given name was Song Yang.

In the Google Maps of the mind, pull back from this tiny street to take in the borough’s 178-square-mile sprawl: a pulsating hive of parkways and boulevards, apartment buildings and single-family homes, two airports, a major league ballpark, remnants of a world’s fair — all bracketed north and south by ocean, river and bay.

A striving borough of comity and contradiction, Queens is both the birthplace of the American president — elected in part on an anti-immigration platform — and home to 2.3 million people, nearly half of them foreign-born. With hundreds of languages spoken here, it may be the most linguistically diverse place on earth.

Every day, airplanes alight at Kennedy International Airport in southeast Queens, their passengers including many immigrants who join the borough’s anonymous, aspirational ranks. They chop the vegetables, wash the dishes, clean the toilets, mow the lawns, drive the hired cars.

And some wind up in the commercial sex trade. Making money for a pimp in an airport motel in South Jamaica. Waiting for the next client in a dingy building along Roosevelt Avenue in Corona. Or, like Song Yang, standing on a Flushing street on a cold November night, hiding behind her cute nickname, calling out to men. Playing her role in a shadow economy that benefited others through the exorbitant rent she paid.

“I hear she was No. 1: young, pretty, and her service was great,” said Michael Chu, a travel agent and community advocate who worked across the street from her on 40th Road. “People just lined up for her.”

For years now, Flushing has been an ever-replenishing repository of immigrants entangled in the underground sex economy. The commonplace raids of illicit massage operations across the country routinely lead to the arrests of women with Flushing addresses.

These parlors disappear and reappear with regularity, undermining the police crackdowns often prompted by neighborhood complaints. The industry’s opaqueness adds to the confusion. Some parlors have legitimate state licenses; some legitimate operations have masseuses making sex-for-money side deals; and some are illegally unlicensed, with no interest at all in addressing someone’s sore neck.

Emotionally manipulated by their bosses, ashamed of what they do, afraid to trust, the women rarely confide in the police or even their lawyers about their circumstances. They might be supporting a family in China, or paying back a smuggling debt, or choosing this more profitable endeavor over, say, restaurant work. No matter the backstory, the police say their collective silence further complicates law-enforcement efforts to build racketeering and trafficking cases against the operators.

But society has become increasingly aware of the complexities and inequities of the commercial sex economy, including a criminal justice system that has tended to target the exploited — often immigrant women and members of the transgender community — while rarely holding accountable their customers and traffickers.

In early 2017, New York’s police commissioner, James O’Neill, announced at a news conference that he would redirect his vice division to address prostitution and sex trafficking. This would include training intended to alter what he called the “law-enforcement mind-set.”

“We’ve already switched much of our emphasis away from prostitutes, and begun focusing much more on the pimps who sell them and the johns who pay for their services,” he said. “Like all crime, we can’t just arrest our way out of this problem.”

Since the establishment of this new “mind-set,” the police have continued to struggle at building criminal cases against the operators. But prostitution arrests in New York City have dropped more than 20 percent in the last year, while the arrests of customers have spiked.

Still, this change in attitude at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan had not necessarily crossed the East River to benefit an immigrant now lying on her side, unable to speak, gazing up at a plainclothes officer trying to calm her until an ambulance arrived. Beside a spent cigarette, her blood pooled on the pavement she had so often worked.

By morning, Song Yang would be dead, shattering a tight Chinese family that would never accept the police version of events. Her death would also come to reflect the seemingly intractable nature of policing the sex industry, and cast an unwelcome light on the furtive but ubiquitous business of illicit massage parlors.

In the epic of Queens, this stretch of 40th Road is little more than an asphalt hyphen. But along its short expanse exist worlds within worlds within worlds.

Baba, I want to go, I want to go.

I want to go to work, the little girl would say to her parents. I want to pick ginseng. She was a born worker, their Song Yang.

She and her younger brother lived with their parents in a remote village in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, where they grew crops on land allotted to them by their local village committee. Little Song Yang was especially efficient at harvesting the family’s ginseng crop, her mother, Shi Yumei, recalled. “The more her father praised her, the harder she worked.”

Her father, Song Xigui, eventually found moderate success selling construction-grade sand he bulldozed from a nearby river, and by the 1990s the family had replaced its thatched-roof home with a modern brick house that included two “kang” bed-stoves, heated slate platforms that provided warmth during the severe winters. Still, they continued to work the crops, with Song Yang often responsible for running home to light the stove, cut the vegetables and mind her brother.

As she grew older, she began to collect specimens of the enchanting butterflies zigzagging down by the river, and became meticulous in preserving their fragile iridescence. When friends came for boisterous sleepovers, they would marvel at her book of butterflies, and take turns asking to keep one.

Butterflies became Song Yang’s gift.

At 19, she moved 2,200 miles south to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth, where she became one of the thousands of young Chinese women who labored in sweatshops to produce apparel bearing the guilt-absolving label “Made in America.” Sharing a room with five other women in a dormitory, she covered her bottom-bunk bed with a silken cloth curtain, and adorned her small rectangle of privacy with family photographs.

Saipan’s garment industry was shrinking by the early 2000s, and Song Yang left to become a waitress on the island. She married a worldly divorced father named Chau Chuong, an American citizen who had worked for years in New York’s restaurant grind. He was so much older — 67 to her 27 — that her family was slow to accept him.

In 2006, the couple opened a small Vietnamese restaurant on Saipan that became so successful they opened a second place, with 150 tables. He worked the kitchen and she worked the front. “She attracted a lot of friendly customers,” her husband recalled.

Her brother, Song Hai, joined her after his high school graduation, eventually opening a henna tattoo parlor with a friend. When their mother came for a visit, she posed for photographs beside her daughter’s well-stocked restaurant bar, her smile radiating pride.

“We had a real sense of accomplishment,” Mr. Song said in Mandarin.

But a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, disrupting a main source of tourism to Saipan, as well as the fortunes of Song Yang and Song Hai. The restaurants were sold, the tattoo parlor shuttered.

Photographs from her brother’s wedding in March 2013 capture the last happy times that Song Yang spent with her family. Here she is back home, posing with the bride and groom. Here she is, sharing a restaurant meal with the growing family. Here she is.

A month later, Song Yang joined the hundreds who arrive daily at Kennedy Airport, direct from China. Straight to Flushing she went, like so many before, where she hoped that she and her husband would succeed again as restaurateurs.

But there is the dream of Flushing, and the reality.

With her husband now too old for kitchen work, Song Yang became their sole source of income. A waitressing job failed, as did a short-lived Chinese fast-food venture on Main Street. So she became a home health aide, and took a massage-therapy course in the hope of earning additional money. Then a friend told her of a more lucrative opportunity, to be found along 40th Road.

The understanding of her parents and brother was that Song Yang worked in reflexology. They knew that gifts arrived from New York. That she called regularly for video chats while sitting in a black office chair, sometimes eating a bowl of porridge. That when her nephew was born, she proudly announced on social media that she had become an aunt — a “gugu.”

That she seemed happy, mostly. But there was that time when she refused to video-chat for several days, after which she explained that a man had beaten her about the face. And that other time, when she revealed that a man — a law-enforcement officer, she said — had held a gun to her head while forcing her to perform oral sex. Family members reassured her: She had no choice.

Song Yang told her family last fall that she had booked a flight to China for December, and was looking forward to meeting her nephew for the first time. So far she had connected with him only online, through the popular WeChat app, where her avatar sometimes featured a butterfly.

What kind of present do you want Gugu to bring home? she would ask the child, her image beamed halfway around the world from some exotic place called Flushing.

The thoroughfare known as 40th Road was Grove Street, once.

In the 19th century it had a volunteer firehouse, a nursery and residents with Irish surnames. Just in living memory, there was Harry Barlow’s auto garage, the mimeograph services of Case the Printer, an appliance store proud of its color Zenith television sets and, of course, the Old Roma restaurant — famous for its veal cutlets on linguine, and that yellow sponge cake with pineapple filling.

It is all long gone, replaced by ginger duck rice casserole and a shaved ice treat called red bean baobing. The 40th Road of today is almost entirely Chinese, its restaurant signs often featuring no English at all — one more reminder that the only New York constant is change.

The street’s 20 buildings, including Song Yang’s, are mostly three- and four-story structures from the 1980s and ’90s that evoke a utilitarian, Soviet-bloc drabness. Narrow and claustrophobic, they loom like set pieces for a film noir.

The one-way street itself always feels like a wrong turn, an obstacle course of idling delivery trucks and construction equipment. One end elbows past a small playground; the other runs into the ever-clogged Main Street intersection, where plainclothes police officers can often be seen sitting in an unmarked vehicle in an attempt to deter quality-of-life crimes. Pickpocketing is so prevalent that a nearby grocery displays signs of a stick figure reaching into another stick figure’s handbag.

Above, looming airliners grumble as they approach LaGuardia Airport, across Flushing Bay. Just behind 40th Road, Long Island Rail Road trains grind and whine along the raised tracks. Up and down the block, the earthy aromas of produce stands and restaurant waste commingle with the classical Chinese instrumental music emanating from a soup-dumpling restaurant.

And here, beside the upturned fruit crates and the overloaded garbage bags, stand the women of the massage parlors. In their 40s and 50s, mostly, they check their cellphones, drag on untaxed Korean cigarettes bought in bulk, and chat, but with eyes scanning for unattached men lacking a law-enforcement vibe.

Massage?

The offer is understood, if not explicit. If the man consents, he is led up the stairs of one of the dull buildings, where massage operations are often crammed amid barbershops, driving schools and employment agencies.

Massage parlors offering sex are hardly a recent phenomenon, and business models vary. But the trade along 40th Road is especially audacious. The women stand on both sides of the street — five, 10, a dozen at a time — as ubiquitous as the delivery trucks. In the merciless heat and cold, they sweat and shiver on staked ground, prompting resentful neighborhood complaints about lost business and children exposed to the seamy daily spectacle.

A common arrangement on 40th Road is one in which a “boss” rents an apartment or office from one of the building’s tenants, then provides space to women for a $20 cut of whatever they charge each client. The general expectation is that each woman will generate at least $100 a day for the boss.

But the bosses provide no meaningful protection. The women are at the mercy of the street, where they have been robbed, beaten, raped, thrown down stairs. The surveillance cameras nearly always present are intended less for security, perhaps, than to provide the boss with a way to count the clients who walk through the door.

Over several months, the women along 40th Road shared in Mandarin the stories of how they came to be standing here, offering sex to strangers. They use names like masks. Some have chosen Americanized names — Jenny, for example — while others have been rechristened by bosses with nicknames that sound like Lala, or Kiki, or Yoyo.

They came from all over China, and from myriad backgrounds. One woman said she used to clean houses. Another said she was a former reporter who covered Chinese real estate. Several described the circumstances that left them in economic straits: a failed bus company, a bankrupt jade dealership, a gambling-addicted husband.

One woman often positions herself near a standpipe at the corner of Main Street, so as to be the first to approach any man venturing west. She is in her 60s, small-framed and usually dressed in layers, with long hair dyed black. She said in a raspy voice that she was from the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi, and that she was trying to pay off a debt incurred by her adult son in a business deal gone wrong.

She had visited two job agencies on 40th Road, looking for work as a nanny, but nothing panned out. And now she was here, on the corner, where her half-joking refrain — “I’m too old” — did not seem to deter clients.

Another woman, who gave her name as Xiao Li — or Little Li — said she was from the city of Dexing, in Jiangxi Province, home to a well-known copper mine, where she once was a welder. Thin and often wearing a simple black dress, she said she had briefly left the street to study legitimate massage — “So my heart could have a little bit of peace” — but had concluded that the classes were a waste of money. Back she came to 40th Road.

“My body can’t take it,” Ms. Li, 50, said. “My body can’t take so many men.”

Others were even more expansive, including a stocky, 40-ish woman with cropped black hair and a lazy eye who called herself Rachel. Eating a sweet baked potato at a dumpling stall on Main Street, she recalled that while working at a job she loathed — waitressing at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle — she began hunting through WeChat forums for leads on other work, and came across an offer that she recalled saying:

Massage Woman to Stand on Street. $20,000 a month. Flushing, N.Y.

Rachel called the number to ask what the job entailed. The boss replied: Everything.

After her first day, Rachel said, “I got home and took a shower, and cried.”

She paused at the memory, and added, “But then I just thought to myself, ‘I have to keep thinking positively.’”

Michael Chu, the longtime neighborhood advocate, has befriended some of the women who stand outside his building on 40th Road, and occasionally offers them assistance with police matters. His office, where an old dog named Scout is usually napping on some cardboard, is furnished with desks left behind by an accountant who moved rather than work beside a massage parlor.

A bespectacled man of 65, Mr. Chu has listened to the travails of these women, whom he calls “sisters.” The beatings, the robberies, the harassment from teenagers in the playground, the pressure to attract enough clients to cover their “rent” to the boss. The hopes they harbor for permanent residence, for having enough money, for finally not doing this.

“They also have an American dream,” Mr. Chu said. “The sisters have an American dream.”

The man spotted her on the street one night after stopping at a 40th Road restaurant known for its cheap and plentiful food. She was pretty, younger than the other women and conversant in English, so he paid for a session. She said her name was SiSi.

His was Paul Hayes. Single, in his early 40s and living in Queens, he carried himself with a seen-it-all air — but she beguiled him. They gradually became lovers, then good friends with vague plans to rekindle their romance someday. But she lived with her husband in an apartment a block away. It was complicated.

She had a good sense of humor, and often solicited his advice — although she ignored him when he recommended bolstering the building’s security system. She also confided about the dangers and vagaries of her work life.

“She really hated doing it,” Mr. Hayes said.

Even so, Song Yang established herself as a fierce competitor in the circumscribed world of 40th Road. Fueled by coffee and Red Bull, she toiled nearly nonstop, as if facing some self-imposed deadline. Word was that she was trying to save up to open her own Vietnamese restaurant, or to buy a house in New York for her aging parents, or to just move on.

Her sharp elbows and inexhaustible style irked some of the other women, leading to arguments, shoves and occasional hair pulling. One competitor recalled that if a man chose another masseuse, Song Yang would tease the client about preferring older women.

But another woman remembered a gentler, more generous Song Yang. She said that when she arrived at 40th Road, Song Yang insisted that she accept several pairs of pants to ward against winter.

Song Yang’s domain was a fourth-floor apartment at 135-32 40th Road, directly above another massage operation. The apartment door faced a boiler room and a makeshift gate that was intended to keep vagrants from sleeping on the roof, but also to protect the hot pepper plants nurtured there by the aged custodian.

As were most things on 40th Road, her rental arrangement was convoluted.

The building was constructed in 1992 by Jentai Tsai, 85, a prominent, even revered, banker in Flushing, and is owned by a real estate company overseen by his son, Eugene Morimoto Tsai. In a brief conversation last month, the younger Tsai, 42, said that he did not know that a woman had fallen from his building last year, or that his building had long been a hub of illicit massage activity.

They both said, and city records confirm, that the building’s managing agent — responsible for collecting rent — was another man of local distinction: Peter Tu, 62, the longtime director of the Flushing Chinese Business Association, a member of Community Board 7 and a district leader for the Democratic Party.

Outside his office around the corner, Mr. Tu at first denied that he was involved with the 40th Road building, but then said that he had merely tried to assist the Tsai family by collecting the $18,500 monthly rent from the main, first-floor tenant, the Shi Li Xiang seafood restaurant. He said he no longer served in this role, had never taken any payment “from the street,” and had no idea what arrangements the restaurant had with the tenants and subtenants upstairs.

“I’m always in the middle,” Mr. Tu said.

A man identifying himself as the boss of the first-floor restaurant began to shout when asked about the tenants upstairs. “How am I supposed to know the names of the people to whom I rent?” he asked in Mandarin. “You want me to go up and ask everyone who they are?”

Above the restaurant, in this building owned and managed by Flushing men of stature, Song Yang paid a flat fee for her apartment — as much as $400 a night, competitors say — to a square-headed, elusive “boss” who goes by Lao Li, or Old Li, a kind of avuncular nickname conveying familiarity with the women who work for him. But the particulars of his subleasing arrangements are as difficult to pin down as he is.

One spring midnight, Lao Li made a rare appearance on 40th Road to mediate a dispute over clients that had erupted among the women. When a reporter approached and called him by name, Lao Li looked up — and bolted. He dashed east down the center of 40th Road, dodging cars, before vanishing into the dark Flushing night.

Although Song Yang and other women often quarreled, they occasionally gathered with Lao Li at the restaurant downstairs, or at a nearby karaoke bar. They’d watch him blow out a candle on his birthday cake, or sing along to a song popular in his native northeast China. At the Chinese New Year, he would hand out red envelopes containing small cash gifts.

In cellphone videos and photographs of these get-togethers, the participants could easily be mistaken for co-workers at an accounting firm, making a night of it. They seemed untroubled by their profession’s many perils, including robbery, bodily harm — and, especially, arrest.

Arrest attracted unwelcome attention. It jeopardized applications for permanent residency. It magnified the humiliation. And it usually meant an appearance at the Human Trafficking Intervention Court, held on Fridays in the basement of the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens, where Mandarin sometimes seems as common as English.

Established nearly 15 years ago, the court set out to treat women in the commercial sex trade less as accused criminals than as victims of trafficking and exploitation. They are told that charges will be dismissed and records sealed if they complete several individualized counseling sessions — focused, say, on job training, or education — with Garden of Hope, Restore NYC, Womankind or another outreach organization. A group called Sanctuary for Families is also on hand to provide immigration services.

Song Yang went through this process more than once. In addition to expunging the arrests from her record, these court appearances provided pause, forcing her to confront the consequences of her work life.

In the summer of 2016, Song Yang began frequent WeChat dialogues with a Flushing lawyer, Chen Mingli, that at first focused on acquiring permanent residency — a process that he repeatedly told her could take months and months. Still, she fretted that her arrest history would thwart her application for a green card.

I am having a lot of anxiety, she wrote in Chinese.

Gradually, though, their conversations came to reflect the darker realities of her 40th Road realm, with sobbing emoticons peppering her messages.

Good morning, Lawyer Chen, she wrote in mid-October 2016. A police officer put a gun to my head today and forced me to perform oral sex.

At the insistence of a friend, she had filed a complaint with the 109th Precinct. Investigators spent the day in her “shop,” looking for evidence and checking the building’s surveillance video, which had captured a heavyset bald man in a suit ascending the stairs.

Mr. Chen assured her that the matter would not affect the status of her immigration case, and implored her to cooperate with the police. But her intense desire to avoid attention, coupled with fear of retaliation from her attacker, overshadowed everything.

The police said that this won’t affect me in any way, but I’m afraid that it will … Lawyer Chen, what am I going to do now? … (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

The police circulated a wanted poster based on a hazy photograph of the man lifted from the surveillance video. A retired United States Marshal, who surrendered after someone mentioned him as a possible suspect, participated in a lineup.

But Song Yang identified another man, wrongly, as her attacker. In addition, a DNA sample from the retired marshal did not match samples taken from Song Yang’s clothing. The case was eventually closed.

Several months later, in late September 2017, she was arrested a third time on a prostitution charge. Handcuffed, led away from 40th Road, held overnight.

A few days later, Mr. Chen asked, You’ve been arrested again?

Song Yang answered:

Yeah. (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

She explained that she had been forced to make hard decisions and that it had been difficult to suppress her feelings while married to a much older man who seemed increasingly removed from her day-to-day life. She felt “morally depraved,” and sometimes thought about giving it all up and going home — or worse.

I’ve been having thoughts of jumping from a building, but what should I do? she wrote early one morning.

Mr. Chen was never formally hired by Song Yang, but now his central role seemed to be to buoy her spirits.

Don’t be scared, he wrote hours later. Don’t think that way.

Song Yang only sank deeper.

I’ve fallen so low I can’t be saved.

She continued:

Without purpose, without direction, what meaning is there to keep on living?

I used to be a woman who was very strong in her life. I strove for perfection in everything I did. I never thought that my life would turn out this way. I’ve truly failed.

At the end of October, Song Yang made one last visit to Mr. Chen’s office. She confided that another client had badly beaten her a couple of weeks earlier — an assault she had not reported to the police — and showed him photographs of her bruised and swollen face.

“Why am I so unlucky?” he remembers her asking.

The case began with an anonymous complaint: Several women were said to be “selling intimacy” at the building at 135-32 40th Road.

The tip hardly came as a revelation, since shady activities at this address had generated scores of 911 calls over the years. To some, the building even had the aura of being cursed, following a horrific crime in 2010, in which a deranged stalker stabbed a woman in the second-floor hallway and removed her heart and lungs.

Forty-three arrests had taken place in the building over the last decade, more than a few sex-related, the most recent that of Song Yang. Ensnared in an undercover sting in late September, she had tried but failed to hide in the cramped boiler room across from her apartment, and was charged with offering sex for $70.

Her case, which had prompted those despairing messages to the lawyer Mr. Chen, was one of 91 massage-parlor-related arrests in the 109th Precinct in 2017, and one of six along 40th Road. According to court records, none of those arrests were for pimping, solicitation or operating an unlicensed massage parlor.

A few nights after the anonymous complaint, a sergeant and a detective ended a brief surveillance by venturing into the notorious building. The only thing they found suspicious was a handwritten sign in Chinese on the second floor, which they believed to say, in effect, There are no girls on this floor; please go to the third floor.

The police later determined that the sign actually said, “Attention, the driving school is on the third floor next door.”

An undercover officer then telephoned a woman associated with the building who was known as SiSi. They arranged an appointment for the next evening, Saturday, Nov. 25. Her price: $120.

On the appointed day, members of the Queens North Vice Enforcement Squad met at their base in College Point to discuss the seven locations they planned to hit that night. The closest target became the first: the bleak building at 135-32 40th Road.

The vice officers went over their safety plan. They chose their identifying color of the day. They agreed upon the mission’s assorted distress signals and code words, including what the primary undercover officer would say to indicate that sex had been offered for money. Now they were ready.

The 10-member team headed out into the evening, unseasonably mild for late November. They parked along Prince Street, across from the White Bear dumpling place and just short of where the one-way street bends east to become 40th Road. The team leader and two arresting officers sat in the first car, with two more arresting officers in the second car. The third vehicle was for prisoner transport.

The team tested its recording device, which used Bluetooth to transmit one-way audio. No problem. The green light was given: Go.

Minutes later, the undercover officer approached his target, Song Yang, just inside her building’s entrance. He wore an olive-green jacket, jeans and a cap. She wore a short winter coat, a red-and-black scarf, leggings and one of her signature headbands — with a small bow that resembled a butterfly.

The officer could not have known that this woman had just attempted a video chat with her younger brother, who was still asleep in China. That she had plans to fly home in December. That she had kept her court-mandated appointments with Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization that helps foreign-born victims of sex trafficking. That her fifth and last session with Restore was four days away.

About all he knew was her police nickname for the night: “JD Ponytail.”

Jane Doe Ponytail.

She led him up the worn stairs. She gave him a peck of a kiss in the hall, and opened her apartment door. Another woman, brand-new to Flushing and known as Momo, was already occupied with a man in the second bedroom.

Song Yang walked her client to her bedroom, where, according to the police, she offered sexual intercourse for the reduced price of $80. He consented to the arrangement and, heading to the bathroom, managed to utter the code word into his transmitter that a positive — that is, illegal — agreement had been reached. He also hoped to signal to colleagues that it was time to move in, but a wary Song Yang prevented him from having privacy, telling him to keep the bathroom door open.

“This is bad service,” the officer said.

Once in the bedroom, Song Yang became even more suspicious. Why aren’t you taking off your clothes? she asked. Are you a cop?

No, he answered. But he complained again about the service and grabbed his hat, prepared to leave. She pushed him out and closed the door.

Responding to the undercover officer’s signal, the three idling police vehicles turned onto 40th Road, smack into its everlasting gridlock. Four officers got out and hustled to the building. Climbing the dreary stairs, they passed their undercover colleague, who pointed to Song Yang’s door as he descended — and as she watched on the monitor in her apartment.

With the police demanding that she open the door, and preparing to break it down, a panicked Song Yang hurried to the apartment’s north balcony. The other woman, Momo, emerged naked from her bedroom to investigate the noise, but hustled back to hide when she realized it was the police.

The balcony was not equipped with surveillance cameras, leaving what happened next to the imagination. It is possible that Song Yang was hoping to escape, perhaps by reaching for a wire that ran vertically past her balcony. It is possible that she was trying to land on the protruding metal sign of the restaurant below. It is also possible that she intended to kill herself.

It is fact that she hit the pavement directly in front of the undercover officer she had pecked on the cheek just five minutes earlier. His supervisors say that the officer remains shaken to this day.

Later that night, while Song Yang was lying in a hospital bed with multiple fractures to her face, head and body, the police placed her under arrest. She died in the morning — and the arrest was, in the parlance of the police, “voided.”

In the dark of an early December morning, two weary travelers shuffled through the multicultural scrum of Kennedy Airport. One was a tall, reedy man named Song Hai; the other, a slight, older woman named Shi Yumei, whose protracted weeping on the long flight from Beijing had concerned an attendant.

Song Yang’s mother and brother had traveled 7,000 miles to better understand the how and the why of her death.

A telephone call from her husband several nights earlier had disrupted everything. Song Yang is dead, he had said. Police say she jumped from a building.

Her distraught parents had telephoned their other child, Song Hai, to deliver words so heavy that he dropped his smartphone, cracking its glass. Not accepting what he heard, he sent a WeChat message to his sister that depicted a pair of clinking coffee mugs, along with a gentle request to please call home.

The lack of an answer was the answer.

The mother and brother spent their first two weeks in Flushing tending to the affairs of death. Then, on a dismal day of late December rain, they made their way to the Chun Fook funeral home, a few blocks from 40th Road. Though some had recommended a modest ceremony, the family had insisted on a more elaborate service, in a spacious room with a chandelier.

The dark wood coffin sat at the front before rows of chairs that would remain empty. No women from 40th Road. No Lao Li. A pair of vertical scrolls with parallel aphorisms written in Chinese calligraphy — “Put Down Your Burdens and Return to the Lord” and “Take Up Tranquillity and Celebrate Everlasting Life” — hung on either side.

One minister delivered prayers in English, while another repeated those prayers in Mandarin. The few mourners included Song Yang’s close friend Paul Hayes; the community advocate Michael Chu; Chen Mingli, the lawyer who had tried to help her seek permanent residency; her husband, Chau Chuong, now 78, who had come from California, where he had been living for his health; and her mother and brother, their heads bowed and hands folded.

The ceremony ended with the reading from the Book of Common Prayer that we are all from dust, and to dust we shall return. Alleluia, the mourners mumbled. Alleluia.

Then it was a short drive along the Grand Central Parkway to the All Souls Chapel and Crematory at St. Michael’s Cemetery. This is where Song Yang’s battered body was returned to dust, and where, in his frustration and grief, her brother vowed justice and punched a wall.

The official explanation for his only sibling’s death made no sense to Mr. Song. After all, she had already paid for her flight home to celebrate their mother’s upcoming birthday and to meet, for the first time, his 5-year-old son. Suicide was not possible, he reasoned. Darker forces might be at play. He had already begun his own investigation.

One snowy night soon after arriving from China, Mr. Song appeared at his sister’s 40th Road building with Mr. Hayes. Their plan was to break into her apartment, collect her belongings — and, if possible, retrieve any surveillance video.

Mr. Song, a learning specialist by trade, and Mr. Hayes, a computer consultant, crept up the 50 tiled steps to the fourth-floor door, which was secured with a locked chain. Fearing the noise of the hammer and small acetylene torch they had planned to use, Mr. Hayes hustled to a Home Depot a mile away and returned with a hacksaw.

After a few minutes of sawing, the chain gave way, and the two men pushed open the dull-gray door to enter the setting of a life interrupted. The police had taken the surveillance equipment, but everything else made it seem as if Song Yang might return at any minute.

In the two bedrooms, rumpled sheets. In the kitchen, a Pepsi and a half-empty bottle of Bacardi, sliced carrots and apples, and the black chair that Mr. Song recognized as the one his sister sat in while video-chatting with her family. In the living room, a raised table with a red curtained skirt, on which sat a CD player, a pair of sunglasses and a lucky cat figurine. Placed neatly on the floor, a pair of pink shoes.

On the snow-dusted front balcony, a broom, an upside-down bucket, a stool, a few plastic bags containing fruit and eggs. And, just beyond, the beckoning lights and shadows of the street below.

Song Hai returned often to 40th Road, a spectral presence in his dark hooded coat and black cap, a cigarette cupped in his hand. He cajoled and confronted the sidewalk’s denizens, asking questions, taking photographs, recording conversations. He saw himself as a lone-wolf investigator, working to prove that corrupt officers of this strange city had thrown Song Yang over the railing.

His ever-evolving theory:

That his sister had been sexually assaulted by a police officer. That she had filed a complaint. That the subsequent police lineup was fixed to protect the assailant. Then it was payback, which explained why, of all the women along 40th Road, only Song Yang was arrested in September, and was about to be arrested again in late November.

As is standard when a death occurs during a police action, the Queens district attorney and the police department’s Force Investigation Division were investigating. But Mr. Song was already beginning to believe that nearly every corner of the American criminal justice system — from the police to the medical examiner — was colluding to hide the truth.

He patrolled downtown Flushing. He interrogated women and shopkeepers. He plastered the streets with leaflets featuring photographs of his sister and promising a “Big Reward!” The plea appeared in Chinese and in fractured English:

Hello! When you saw the photo, SiSi (Song Yang) was no longer alive. She fell from and died on 11/25/2017 at 135-32 4FL in Flushing. Families as well as the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau are eager to find out the truth of her death. If you have ANY CLUES, please contact me ASAP. Absolutely Confidential … (Her brother Song Hai)

The dozens of responses yielded little. One man called to say that Song Hai’s sister was a whore — a word he did not quite understand, and so he continued the conversation: Yes, yes. And do you have information?

His sleuthing occasionally paid off. One evening, amid the Main Street crush, Mr. Song spotted a man he recognized from his sister’s WeChat photographs: short, solidly built, and with a distinctive, block-shaped head.

Excited, Mr. Song crossed the street and, right at the Roosevelt Avenue intersection, near the subway entrance, grabbed the man by the arm. Mr. Song recalled what happened next:

Are you Li? he asked.

You’re mistaken, replied the startled Lao Li, the boss who controlled Song Yang’s apartment. My name is not Li.

Mr. Song waved down a passing police car, as a crowd gathered and the agitated man in his grip implored him not to involve the authorities. Let’s resolve this ourselves.

The two officers understood Mr. Song’s intentions, he later recalled, but they explained that this was America, not China, and that he was unlawfully detaining a man who wasn’t present when his sister’s fall took place. They separated the men, and Lao Li floated away in the rush-hour stream.

Later that evening, an angry Lao Li telephoned Mr. Song. In the conversation that Mr. Song duly recorded on his phone, Lao Li vented about the audacity of summoning the police — “If you don’t have evidence, how could you say I’m the boss?” — before giving his version of the realities on 40th Road.

He said that he rented the apartment to Song Yang for $3,100 a month — hardly the $12,000 that was rumored on the street. “She and I really didn’t have any employment relationship,” he said. “Just that at the start of the month, I would take the rent.”

Lao Li said she called him her “boss” so that others wouldn’t bully her, but he insisted that she was her own boss: prone to arrest, sure, but also smart, tenacious and tough.

Throughout the conversation, Lao Li characteristically remained at a distance — even when describing that fateful night. He rushed to 40th Road after receiving a call that “SiSi had jumped from the building,” he said, but by the time he got there, “your sister had already been taken away.”

As Mr. Song conducted his frustrating investigation, his mother spent her days in the numbing cocoon of grief. Once so proud of her entrepreneurial children, Shi Yumei was now a sorrowful woman in a foreign world, gingerly navigating a small cart down crowded Main Street, her pale gray knit cap pulled low, her mind occupied with worry. How, for example, would she and her son, here on temporary visas, survive on the little money they had brought with them?

An encounter with a bellowing street evangelist eventually led her to St. George’s, the old Episcopal church on Main Street whose steeple has long been a Flushing landmark. Its congregation embraced her, smothering her with food, clothing and compassion. Locking hands and forming a prayer circle one day, strangers asked God to grant peace to this new person among them, who felt so blessed that she began to volunteer at the church’s food pantry as a way of giving back.

One cool April morning, she donned an orange apron and joined 40 other volunteers, nearly all of them immigrants, as they prepared for the ritual that unfolds every Wednesday along the old church’s north side, opposite a Lucille Roberts fitness center. They unloaded the crates from trucks, bagged the fruit and vegetables, and established an assembly line of food down the sidewalk: turnips and fennel, lettuce and apples, onions and melons.

The decade-old operation had gradually adapted to the ways of Flushing, with organizers taking note of the tensions caused by different understandings of personal space among ethnic groups. The solution: two alternating lines — one that was entirely Asian, and the other a mix of black, white and Latino.

On this morning, the Asian line ran alongside the church’s cemetery wall, and the other line stretched down to a firehouse. But things moved apace, thanks in large part to the high-spirited efficiency of the volunteers — including Shi Yumei, who smiled at her sense of belonging as she proffered bags of onions.

Each evening, after long days of volunteering and investigating, mother and son returned to a worn apartment catering to transients, not far from 40th Road. Some lodgers paid $20 a night for a narrow bed in the living room. But with some financial help from the church and a few nonprofit organizations, Mr. Song and Ms. Shi managed to pay $1,000 a month for a cramped bedroom and first dibs on a shared kitchen.

They slept beside a closet packed with clothes and accessories that Song Yang left behind. Tears were shed over a single strand of black hair found on a coat. They lived in the presence of her absence.

To find sleep, the mother would hold a small audio device close to her ear and listen to lively recorded stories about historical Chinese triumphs, cuddled beside one of her daughter’s plush teddy bears. This way, Ms. Shi said in Mandarin, “I know my daughter is here with me.”

Two feet away, her son would lie in his twin bed near the window, cigarettes on the nightstand, spent beer cans under the bed, another Long Island Rail Road train clattering in the distance. Here he would try to piece together the stray bits of his investigation.

He had found a grainy photograph from his sister’s WeChat feed of the stocky, bald man who had supposedly sexually assaulted her, and convinced himself that a bald police detective, appearing in cellphone videos taken on the sidewalk after his sister’s fall, was the same man.

He had also obtained photographs and forensic notes from the autopsy. Poring over the graphic images, he decided that the discoloration around his sister’s face came from a beating, and that her broken fingernails suggested some kind of struggle — and, therefore, a cover-up.

This was America. Not China. Exactly.

On a sunny spring day, those invested in the proceedings of the human trafficking court filed into the basement courtroom in Kew Gardens. Among them were Song Hai, in a black blazer and brown work boots, and Shi Yumei, her blue-and-orange scarf recalling the colors seen on the Staten Island Ferry, on Knicks uniforms, on Mets baseball caps — the colors of New York.

They took their seats among the defendants, including a woman in glasses often seen calling out to men on 40th Road. Mr. Song sat with his hands clasped and back erect; his mother was bent forward, as if in prayer. They waited.

An air of empathy defines the court, which is intended to encourage women engaged in the commercial sex trade to avail themselves of counseling and other diversionary programs. On most Fridays, the judge, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are women, and the lanky head court officer is determined to make the defendants feel safe and respected. He does his best to dissuade any pimps or bosses from taking a seat.

Prominent in the dozen pews are Chinese women facing the usual massage-parlor-related charges of prostitution or unlicensed massage. Court-appointed lawyers from the Legal Aid Society or Queens Law Associates usually guide them through the process, along with a Mandarin-speaking interpreter and advocates from one of the nonprofit groups specializing in sex-trafficking outreach and immigration services.

Defenders of the program maintain that until a better approach is developed, arrests — followed by appearances in trafficking court — provide the best chance for intervention. Even if a woman returns to 40th Road, they say, she will at least have the names of people to contact if she needs help.

Others, though, counter that for many women caught in the commercial sex trade, an arrest only exacerbates their trauma. Besides, they say, one doesn’t need to be arrested in order to receive helpful contact information.

Judge Toko Serita, who has presided over the trafficking court for a decade, summons the defendants, one by one, to stand before her, as a court officer calls out, “Mandarin interpreter required, and present.” The judge has short black hair, glasses and a welcoming, even reassuring demeanor, whether it’s the defendant’s first appearance or her last.

How are you today? … Are you studying English? … This is a really good streak … I want to congratulate you for completing all your sessions with Garden of Hope … Stay out of trouble, lead a law-abiding life for the next six months, and the record will be expunged … Good luck to you.

On this morning, several cases were heard before a court officer finally called out: “03585 dash 17. Yang Song!”

Even though she was five months dead, Song Yang still had an open criminal case: the arrest on a prostitution charge two months before her fatal fall. The sprawling New York City judicial system may seem overwhelmed, even chaotic, but in the end its books must be balanced. This meant that a formality known as an “abatement by death” — a dismissal, in effect — was required to close the short chapter on Song Yang, or Yang Song, as the system sometimes rendered her name.

Judge Serita was informed that the deceased defendant’s mother and son were present and would like to thank the court. The request stilled the courtroom. The judge sighed in sympathy.

“Thank you,” she said. “Um. All right. This case is now going to be abated by death.”

She went on to tell Song Yang’s mother and brother that everyone involved in the trafficking court was deeply saddened by their loved one’s “tragic and untimely death.” She expressed hope that they “somehow find peace with these unfortunate circumstances.”

Mr. Song and Ms. Shi acknowledged her words with nods. They walked out of the courtroom, past an “Exit Only — No Re-Entry” sign, and into the late-morning brightness. He lit a cigarette. She adjusted her backpack. They continued on in silence.

Two weeks later, the mother and brother returned to Kew Gardens for a long-awaited meeting with investigators from the Homicide Investigations Bureau of the Queens district attorney’s office. With everyone seated around a dark-wood conference table in a windowless room, the investigators shared the results of their monthslong inquiry, including 22 minutes of video culled from cameras positioned both inside and outside the building at 135-32 40th Road.

In these images, their beloved daughter and sister appears in the fullness of life. Here is Song Yang, leading the undercover officer up the stairs. Here she is, kicking him out of the apartment, watching the officers ascend the stairs — rushing in alarm toward the balcony.

Here, from street level, something falling, and then a beloved daughter and sister, crumpled on the pavement. Watching the video again a few days later, Ms. Shi noticed the headband that flies off her daughter’s head.

“She especially loved butterflies,” the mother said.

The video over, the investigators laid out their sober findings: The police involved in a bust-and-buy sting on 40th Road the night of Nov. 25, 2017, did not cause the death of Song Yang. To begin with, no officer was even in the fourth-floor apartment when she jumped or fell.

Her brother scoffed at this conclusion. He said something rude in Mandarin. Meeting over.

Night comes to 40th Road.

The fruit and vegetable peddlers have boxed up and boarded up, and the last patrons of air-conditioned restaurants have stepped out to evaporate in the late June warmth. But the women are here, as always, calling out an invitation that sounds almost like a plea.

Massage?

They stand outside the same doorways, including the one for 135-32, where Song Yang once lingered. Very soon after she died, her fourth-floor apartment became the address for a new massage business. Its name: Heaven on Fourth.

A few steps away, at the entrance to another of the gloomy buildings owned and operated by prominent Flushing businessmen, a thin woman in a brown dress sits in a metal chair with a square of Styrofoam for padding, studying her cellphone through the smoke of her cigarette. Then she pulls out a bag of overripe cherries from the building’s broken mailbox and, between the repeated offerings of her services, spits out the pits and tosses them into the street, not far from a lamppost adorned with a poster bearing the face of Song Yang (“Big Reward!”).

To the woman’s right, roasted duck carcasses hang in the window of the Corner 28 restaurant, where a man is mop-swabbing the sticky floor. To her left, sorrowful creatures loll in a seafood restaurant’s murky tank. Above her head, scaffolding provides protection from the stucco that city officials say has been coming loose from the buildings. Rain begins to fall.

A nearby tanker truck groans as it sucks away a restaurant’s used cooking oil through a large hose that snakes across the sidewalk and into the bowels of a building. The women adapt: They step over the hose, ignore the smell, raise their voices.

One of the women leads a potential client to a building’s threshold, but he keeps walking; she mutters an epithet in Mandarin. Then a buzz-cut junkie, who just hours before was asleep on the pavement, begins to harass the women, disrupting their business by hovering, touching, dropping his sweatpants and simulating sex acts. He enters one of their buildings and urinates in the hall.

The rain hardens. The whoosh of a shuttered metal gate resounds. A kitchen worker emerges at the end of his shift and wishes the women a good night. They wish him the same.

It is all ephemeral, of course, a realization reinforced daily by the laborers trudging down this street to the subway, bone-weary from working another of the construction projects that are redefining Flushing. Few today remember the Old Roma restaurant that once thrived on 40th Road, just as few tomorrow will remember a Chinese immigrant who once died on 40th Road.

For now, at least, if you linger on the street, you will encounter those who remember her — including, occasionally, clients still looking for SiSi.

You might see Lala, and Kiki, and Yoyo, along with other women who competed with Song Yang. You might see her lanky brother, Song Hai, who still struggles to understand why no one will be brought to justice for all that his sister went through in her adopted country. His grief smolders, as does his distrust of America.

Lastly, you might see Song Yang’s mother, Shi Yumei.

One evening, Ms. Shi paused outside a building where some women were offering massages to passing men. Raising the drooping bags held in her hands, she explained that she had just left the food pantry at the Episcopal church on Main Street, where she had recently been baptized. She said the pastor had emphasized the importance of sharing what you have.

The mother placed a bag of sweet potatoes in the doorway that had once been Song Yang’s domain. It was an offering of sorts, a gift to women like her daughter. Then she was gone, assumed into the Flushing blur.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/11/nyregion/sex-workers-massage-parlor.html |

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail, in 2018-10-12 12:47:26

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Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-case-of-jane-doe-ponytail/

Nature

A woman begins to fall. With her long dark hair in a ponytail and her black-and-red scarf loose around her neck, she is plummeting from a fourth-floor balcony, through the neon-charged November night.

Below awaits 40th Road, a gritty street of commerce in the Flushing section of Queens. Chinese restaurants and narrow storefronts, and dim stairwells leading to private transactions. Strivers and dawdlers and passers-by, all oblivious to what is transpiring above.

But before the pavement ends the woman’s descent, a few feet from a restaurant’s glittering Christmas tree, imagine her fall suddenly suspended — her body freeze-framed in midair. If only for a moment.

She toils in the netherworld of Flushing massage parlors, where she goes by the street name of SiSi. A youthful 38, she is in a platonic marriage to a man more than twice her age; harbors fading hopes of American citizenship; and is fond of Heineken, Red Bull and the rotisserie chicken at a Colombian place on Kissena Boulevard. Among her competitors, she is considered territorial and tireless.

It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and SiSi is in a shabby building’s top-floor apartment, for which she pays her “boss” a hefty fee. She has returned from a market with provisions. She has tried calling her younger brother in China, but he is asleep. She has been on the phone with friends and clients, unaware that she is in the sights of a 10-member police team working vice.

She heads downstairs to stand at her building’s entrance, a necessity of her job. Soon she is leading a man back upstairs — an officer working undercover — as her closely held cellphone casts a glow about her face. Their awkward conversation in her apartment convinces him that SiSi has broken the law, just as it convinces SiSi that he is a cop. She pushes him out and closes the door, though not to the inevitable. She knows from experience what comes next:

More police. Tromping through the dusky vestibule of her building, across the worn scarlet rug and up the 50 tiled steps. Past the Chinese sign that says if you’re looking for the driving school, you’re in the wrong place. Then right to her door.

The handcuffs. The hurried escort to a police vehicle. The humiliation. Again.

SiSi watches the officers ascend on the video monitor she keeps near the door. Under the fixed gaze of one of those lucky cat figurines perched on a table, its paw raised in a wish of good fortune, she begins to pace.

Now they are pounding on the door and shouting Police! Open up! SiSi rushes to the apartment’s north balcony, with its panoramic view of the street hustle below. Day and night, sun or sleet, this is where she and her sister competitors sing their plaintive song to passing men: Massage? Massage?

On the narrow balcony, barely two feet deep, she keeps a broom, a bucket and a small blue stool. Up she steps — and now she is falling, plunging toward the hard tenth of a New York mile that is 40th Road.

A tenth of a mile. Where Mandarin trumps English and a glance trumps the spoken word. Where sex is sold beside cloudy tanks of fish and crabs. Where seedy quarters controlled by local powers are rented to illicit massage operations, and the police make sporadic sweeps, and immigrant women are arrested again and again, and few in this city take notice.

Gravity prevails.

The undercover officer, his job done, exits the building and turns right — at the very moment that the woman who has just offered him intimacy for money hits the pavement at his feet. A woman known along 40th Road as SiSi, but whose given name was Song Yang.

In the Google Maps of the mind, pull back from this tiny street to take in the borough’s 178-square-mile sprawl: a pulsating hive of parkways and boulevards, apartment buildings and single-family homes, two airports, a major league ballpark, remnants of a world’s fair — all bracketed north and south by ocean, river and bay.

A striving borough of comity and contradiction, Queens is both the birthplace of the American president — elected in part on an anti-immigration platform — and home to 2.3 million people, nearly half of them foreign-born. With hundreds of languages spoken here, it may be the most linguistically diverse place on earth.

Every day, airplanes alight at Kennedy International Airport in southeast Queens, their passengers including many immigrants who join the borough’s anonymous, aspirational ranks. They chop the vegetables, wash the dishes, clean the toilets, mow the lawns, drive the hired cars.

And some wind up in the commercial sex trade. Making money for a pimp in an airport motel in South Jamaica. Waiting for the next client in a dingy building along Roosevelt Avenue in Corona. Or, like Song Yang, standing on a Flushing street on a cold November night, hiding behind her cute nickname, calling out to men. Playing her role in a shadow economy that benefited others through the exorbitant rent she paid.

“I hear she was No. 1: young, pretty, and her service was great,” said Michael Chu, a travel agent and community advocate who worked across the street from her on 40th Road. “People just lined up for her.”

For years now, Flushing has been an ever-replenishing repository of immigrants entangled in the underground sex economy. The commonplace raids of illicit massage operations across the country routinely lead to the arrests of women with Flushing addresses.

These parlors disappear and reappear with regularity, undermining the police crackdowns often prompted by neighborhood complaints. The industry’s opaqueness adds to the confusion. Some parlors have legitimate state licenses; some legitimate operations have masseuses making sex-for-money side deals; and some are illegally unlicensed, with no interest at all in addressing someone’s sore neck.

Emotionally manipulated by their bosses, ashamed of what they do, afraid to trust, the women rarely confide in the police or even their lawyers about their circumstances. They might be supporting a family in China, or paying back a smuggling debt, or choosing this more profitable endeavor over, say, restaurant work. No matter the backstory, the police say their collective silence further complicates law-enforcement efforts to build racketeering and trafficking cases against the operators.

But society has become increasingly aware of the complexities and inequities of the commercial sex economy, including a criminal justice system that has tended to target the exploited — often immigrant women and members of the transgender community — while rarely holding accountable their customers and traffickers.

In early 2017, New York’s police commissioner, James O’Neill, announced at a news conference that he would redirect his vice division to address prostitution and sex trafficking. This would include training intended to alter what he called the “law-enforcement mind-set.”

“We’ve already switched much of our emphasis away from prostitutes, and begun focusing much more on the pimps who sell them and the johns who pay for their services,” he said. “Like all crime, we can’t just arrest our way out of this problem.”

Since the establishment of this new “mind-set,” the police have continued to struggle at building criminal cases against the operators. But prostitution arrests in New York City have dropped more than 20 percent in the last year, while the arrests of customers have spiked.

Still, this change in attitude at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan had not necessarily crossed the East River to benefit an immigrant now lying on her side, unable to speak, gazing up at a plainclothes officer trying to calm her until an ambulance arrived. Beside a spent cigarette, her blood pooled on the pavement she had so often worked.

By morning, Song Yang would be dead, shattering a tight Chinese family that would never accept the police version of events. Her death would also come to reflect the seemingly intractable nature of policing the sex industry, and cast an unwelcome light on the furtive but ubiquitous business of illicit massage parlors.

In the epic of Queens, this stretch of 40th Road is little more than an asphalt hyphen. But along its short expanse exist worlds within worlds within worlds.

Baba, I want to go, I want to go.

I want to go to work, the little girl would say to her parents. I want to pick ginseng. She was a born worker, their Song Yang.

She and her younger brother lived with their parents in a remote village in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, where they grew crops on land allotted to them by their local village committee. Little Song Yang was especially efficient at harvesting the family’s ginseng crop, her mother, Shi Yumei, recalled. “The more her father praised her, the harder she worked.”

Her father, Song Xigui, eventually found moderate success selling construction-grade sand he bulldozed from a nearby river, and by the 1990s the family had replaced its thatched-roof home with a modern brick house that included two “kang” bed-stoves, heated slate platforms that provided warmth during the severe winters. Still, they continued to work the crops, with Song Yang often responsible for running home to light the stove, cut the vegetables and mind her brother.

As she grew older, she began to collect specimens of the enchanting butterflies zigzagging down by the river, and became meticulous in preserving their fragile iridescence. When friends came for boisterous sleepovers, they would marvel at her book of butterflies, and take turns asking to keep one.

Butterflies became Song Yang’s gift.

At 19, she moved 2,200 miles south to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth, where she became one of the thousands of young Chinese women who labored in sweatshops to produce apparel bearing the guilt-absolving label “Made in America.” Sharing a room with five other women in a dormitory, she covered her bottom-bunk bed with a silken cloth curtain, and adorned her small rectangle of privacy with family photographs.

Saipan’s garment industry was shrinking by the early 2000s, and Song Yang left to become a waitress on the island. She married a worldly divorced father named Chau Chuong, an American citizen who had worked for years in New York’s restaurant grind. He was so much older — 67 to her 27 — that her family was slow to accept him.

In 2006, the couple opened a small Vietnamese restaurant on Saipan that became so successful they opened a second place, with 150 tables. He worked the kitchen and she worked the front. “She attracted a lot of friendly customers,” her husband recalled.

Her brother, Song Hai, joined her after his high school graduation, eventually opening a henna tattoo parlor with a friend. When their mother came for a visit, she posed for photographs beside her daughter’s well-stocked restaurant bar, her smile radiating pride.

“We had a real sense of accomplishment,” Mr. Song said in Mandarin.

But a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, disrupting a main source of tourism to Saipan, as well as the fortunes of Song Yang and Song Hai. The restaurants were sold, the tattoo parlor shuttered.

Photographs from her brother’s wedding in March 2013 capture the last happy times that Song Yang spent with her family. Here she is back home, posing with the bride and groom. Here she is, sharing a restaurant meal with the growing family. Here she is.

A month later, Song Yang joined the hundreds who arrive daily at Kennedy Airport, direct from China. Straight to Flushing she went, like so many before, where she hoped that she and her husband would succeed again as restaurateurs.

But there is the dream of Flushing, and the reality.

With her husband now too old for kitchen work, Song Yang became their sole source of income. A waitressing job failed, as did a short-lived Chinese fast-food venture on Main Street. So she became a home health aide, and took a massage-therapy course in the hope of earning additional money. Then a friend told her of a more lucrative opportunity, to be found along 40th Road.

The understanding of her parents and brother was that Song Yang worked in reflexology. They knew that gifts arrived from New York. That she called regularly for video chats while sitting in a black office chair, sometimes eating a bowl of porridge. That when her nephew was born, she proudly announced on social media that she had become an aunt — a “gugu.”

That she seemed happy, mostly. But there was that time when she refused to video-chat for several days, after which she explained that a man had beaten her about the face. And that other time, when she revealed that a man — a law-enforcement officer, she said — had held a gun to her head while forcing her to perform oral sex. Family members reassured her: She had no choice.

Song Yang told her family last fall that she had booked a flight to China for December, and was looking forward to meeting her nephew for the first time. So far she had connected with him only online, through the popular WeChat app, where her avatar sometimes featured a butterfly.

What kind of present do you want Gugu to bring home? she would ask the child, her image beamed halfway around the world from some exotic place called Flushing.

The thoroughfare known as 40th Road was Grove Street, once.

In the 19th century it had a volunteer firehouse, a nursery and residents with Irish surnames. Just in living memory, there was Harry Barlow’s auto garage, the mimeograph services of Case the Printer, an appliance store proud of its color Zenith television sets and, of course, the Old Roma restaurant — famous for its veal cutlets on linguine, and that yellow sponge cake with pineapple filling.

It is all long gone, replaced by ginger duck rice casserole and a shaved ice treat called red bean baobing. The 40th Road of today is almost entirely Chinese, its restaurant signs often featuring no English at all — one more reminder that the only New York constant is change.

The street’s 20 buildings, including Song Yang’s, are mostly three- and four-story structures from the 1980s and ’90s that evoke a utilitarian, Soviet-bloc drabness. Narrow and claustrophobic, they loom like set pieces for a film noir.

The one-way street itself always feels like a wrong turn, an obstacle course of idling delivery trucks and construction equipment. One end elbows past a small playground; the other runs into the ever-clogged Main Street intersection, where plainclothes police officers can often be seen sitting in an unmarked vehicle in an attempt to deter quality-of-life crimes. Pickpocketing is so prevalent that a nearby grocery displays signs of a stick figure reaching into another stick figure’s handbag.

Above, looming airliners grumble as they approach LaGuardia Airport, across Flushing Bay. Just behind 40th Road, Long Island Rail Road trains grind and whine along the raised tracks. Up and down the block, the earthy aromas of produce stands and restaurant waste commingle with the classical Chinese instrumental music emanating from a soup-dumpling restaurant.

And here, beside the upturned fruit crates and the overloaded garbage bags, stand the women of the massage parlors. In their 40s and 50s, mostly, they check their cellphones, drag on untaxed Korean cigarettes bought in bulk, and chat, but with eyes scanning for unattached men lacking a law-enforcement vibe.

Massage?

The offer is understood, if not explicit. If the man consents, he is led up the stairs of one of the dull buildings, where massage operations are often crammed amid barbershops, driving schools and employment agencies.

Massage parlors offering sex are hardly a recent phenomenon, and business models vary. But the trade along 40th Road is especially audacious. The women stand on both sides of the street — five, 10, a dozen at a time — as ubiquitous as the delivery trucks. In the merciless heat and cold, they sweat and shiver on staked ground, prompting resentful neighborhood complaints about lost business and children exposed to the seamy daily spectacle.

A common arrangement on 40th Road is one in which a “boss” rents an apartment or office from one of the building’s tenants, then provides space to women for a $20 cut of whatever they charge each client. The general expectation is that each woman will generate at least $100 a day for the boss.

But the bosses provide no meaningful protection. The women are at the mercy of the street, where they have been robbed, beaten, raped, thrown down stairs. The surveillance cameras nearly always present are intended less for security, perhaps, than to provide the boss with a way to count the clients who walk through the door.

Over several months, the women along 40th Road shared in Mandarin the stories of how they came to be standing here, offering sex to strangers. They use names like masks. Some have chosen Americanized names — Jenny, for example — while others have been rechristened by bosses with nicknames that sound like Lala, or Kiki, or Yoyo.

They came from all over China, and from myriad backgrounds. One woman said she used to clean houses. Another said she was a former reporter who covered Chinese real estate. Several described the circumstances that left them in economic straits: a failed bus company, a bankrupt jade dealership, a gambling-addicted husband.

One woman often positions herself near a standpipe at the corner of Main Street, so as to be the first to approach any man venturing west. She is in her 60s, small-framed and usually dressed in layers, with long hair dyed black. She said in a raspy voice that she was from the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi, and that she was trying to pay off a debt incurred by her adult son in a business deal gone wrong.

She had visited two job agencies on 40th Road, looking for work as a nanny, but nothing panned out. And now she was here, on the corner, where her half-joking refrain — “I’m too old” — did not seem to deter clients.

Another woman, who gave her name as Xiao Li — or Little Li — said she was from the city of Dexing, in Jiangxi Province, home to a well-known copper mine, where she once was a welder. Thin and often wearing a simple black dress, she said she had briefly left the street to study legitimate massage — “So my heart could have a little bit of peace” — but had concluded that the classes were a waste of money. Back she came to 40th Road.

“My body can’t take it,” Ms. Li, 50, said. “My body can’t take so many men.”

Others were even more expansive, including a stocky, 40-ish woman with cropped black hair and a lazy eye who called herself Rachel. Eating a sweet baked potato at a dumpling stall on Main Street, she recalled that while working at a job she loathed — waitressing at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle — she began hunting through WeChat forums for leads on other work, and came across an offer that she recalled saying:

Massage Woman to Stand on Street. $20,000 a month. Flushing, N.Y.

Rachel called the number to ask what the job entailed. The boss replied: Everything.

After her first day, Rachel said, “I got home and took a shower, and cried.”

She paused at the memory, and added, “But then I just thought to myself, ‘I have to keep thinking positively.’”

Michael Chu, the longtime neighborhood advocate, has befriended some of the women who stand outside his building on 40th Road, and occasionally offers them assistance with police matters. His office, where an old dog named Scout is usually napping on some cardboard, is furnished with desks left behind by an accountant who moved rather than work beside a massage parlor.

A bespectacled man of 65, Mr. Chu has listened to the travails of these women, whom he calls “sisters.” The beatings, the robberies, the harassment from teenagers in the playground, the pressure to attract enough clients to cover their “rent” to the boss. The hopes they harbor for permanent residence, for having enough money, for finally not doing this.

“They also have an American dream,” Mr. Chu said. “The sisters have an American dream.”

The man spotted her on the street one night after stopping at a 40th Road restaurant known for its cheap and plentiful food. She was pretty, younger than the other women and conversant in English, so he paid for a session. She said her name was SiSi.

His was Paul Hayes. Single, in his early 40s and living in Queens, he carried himself with a seen-it-all air — but she beguiled him. They gradually became lovers, then good friends with vague plans to rekindle their romance someday. But she lived with her husband in an apartment a block away. It was complicated.

She had a good sense of humor, and often solicited his advice — although she ignored him when he recommended bolstering the building’s security system. She also confided about the dangers and vagaries of her work life.

“She really hated doing it,” Mr. Hayes said.

Even so, Song Yang established herself as a fierce competitor in the circumscribed world of 40th Road. Fueled by coffee and Red Bull, she toiled nearly nonstop, as if facing some self-imposed deadline. Word was that she was trying to save up to open her own Vietnamese restaurant, or to buy a house in New York for her aging parents, or to just move on.

Her sharp elbows and inexhaustible style irked some of the other women, leading to arguments, shoves and occasional hair pulling. One competitor recalled that if a man chose another masseuse, Song Yang would tease the client about preferring older women.

But another woman remembered a gentler, more generous Song Yang. She said that when she arrived at 40th Road, Song Yang insisted that she accept several pairs of pants to ward against winter.

Song Yang’s domain was a fourth-floor apartment at 135-32 40th Road, directly above another massage operation. The apartment door faced a boiler room and a makeshift gate that was intended to keep vagrants from sleeping on the roof, but also to protect the hot pepper plants nurtured there by the aged custodian.

As were most things on 40th Road, her rental arrangement was convoluted.

The building was constructed in 1992 by Jentai Tsai, 85, a prominent, even revered, banker in Flushing, and is owned by a real estate company overseen by his son, Eugene Morimoto Tsai. In a brief conversation last month, the younger Tsai, 42, said that he did not know that a woman had fallen from his building last year, or that his building had long been a hub of illicit massage activity.

They both said, and city records confirm, that the building’s managing agent — responsible for collecting rent — was another man of local distinction: Peter Tu, 62, the longtime director of the Flushing Chinese Business Association, a member of Community Board 7 and a district leader for the Democratic Party.

Outside his office around the corner, Mr. Tu at first denied that he was involved with the 40th Road building, but then said that he had merely tried to assist the Tsai family by collecting the $18,500 monthly rent from the main, first-floor tenant, the Shi Li Xiang seafood restaurant. He said he no longer served in this role, had never taken any payment “from the street,” and had no idea what arrangements the restaurant had with the tenants and subtenants upstairs.

“I’m always in the middle,” Mr. Tu said.

A man identifying himself as the boss of the first-floor restaurant began to shout when asked about the tenants upstairs. “How am I supposed to know the names of the people to whom I rent?” he asked in Mandarin. “You want me to go up and ask everyone who they are?”

Above the restaurant, in this building owned and managed by Flushing men of stature, Song Yang paid a flat fee for her apartment — as much as $400 a night, competitors say — to a square-headed, elusive “boss” who goes by Lao Li, or Old Li, a kind of avuncular nickname conveying familiarity with the women who work for him. But the particulars of his subleasing arrangements are as difficult to pin down as he is.

One spring midnight, Lao Li made a rare appearance on 40th Road to mediate a dispute over clients that had erupted among the women. When a reporter approached and called him by name, Lao Li looked up — and bolted. He dashed east down the center of 40th Road, dodging cars, before vanishing into the dark Flushing night.

Although Song Yang and other women often quarreled, they occasionally gathered with Lao Li at the restaurant downstairs, or at a nearby karaoke bar. They’d watch him blow out a candle on his birthday cake, or sing along to a song popular in his native northeast China. At the Chinese New Year, he would hand out red envelopes containing small cash gifts.

In cellphone videos and photographs of these get-togethers, the participants could easily be mistaken for co-workers at an accounting firm, making a night of it. They seemed untroubled by their profession’s many perils, including robbery, bodily harm — and, especially, arrest.

Arrest attracted unwelcome attention. It jeopardized applications for permanent residency. It magnified the humiliation. And it usually meant an appearance at the Human Trafficking Intervention Court, held on Fridays in the basement of the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens, where Mandarin sometimes seems as common as English.

Established nearly 15 years ago, the court set out to treat women in the commercial sex trade less as accused criminals than as victims of trafficking and exploitation. They are told that charges will be dismissed and records sealed if they complete several individualized counseling sessions — focused, say, on job training, or education — with Garden of Hope, Restore NYC, Womankind or another outreach organization. A group called Sanctuary for Families is also on hand to provide immigration services.

Song Yang went through this process more than once. In addition to expunging the arrests from her record, these court appearances provided pause, forcing her to confront the consequences of her work life.

In the summer of 2016, Song Yang began frequent WeChat dialogues with a Flushing lawyer, Chen Mingli, that at first focused on acquiring permanent residency — a process that he repeatedly told her could take months and months. Still, she fretted that her arrest history would thwart her application for a green card.

I am having a lot of anxiety, she wrote in Chinese.

Gradually, though, their conversations came to reflect the darker realities of her 40th Road realm, with sobbing emoticons peppering her messages.

Good morning, Lawyer Chen, she wrote in mid-October 2016. A police officer put a gun to my head today and forced me to perform oral sex.

At the insistence of a friend, she had filed a complaint with the 109th Precinct. Investigators spent the day in her “shop,” looking for evidence and checking the building’s surveillance video, which had captured a heavyset bald man in a suit ascending the stairs.

Mr. Chen assured her that the matter would not affect the status of her immigration case, and implored her to cooperate with the police. But her intense desire to avoid attention, coupled with fear of retaliation from her attacker, overshadowed everything.

The police said that this won’t affect me in any way, but I’m afraid that it will … Lawyer Chen, what am I going to do now? … (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

The police circulated a wanted poster based on a hazy photograph of the man lifted from the surveillance video. A retired United States Marshal, who surrendered after someone mentioned him as a possible suspect, participated in a lineup.

But Song Yang identified another man, wrongly, as her attacker. In addition, a DNA sample from the retired marshal did not match samples taken from Song Yang’s clothing. The case was eventually closed.

Several months later, in late September 2017, she was arrested a third time on a prostitution charge. Handcuffed, led away from 40th Road, held overnight.

A few days later, Mr. Chen asked, You’ve been arrested again?

Song Yang answered:

Yeah. (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

She explained that she had been forced to make hard decisions and that it had been difficult to suppress her feelings while married to a much older man who seemed increasingly removed from her day-to-day life. She felt “morally depraved,” and sometimes thought about giving it all up and going home — or worse.

I’ve been having thoughts of jumping from a building, but what should I do? she wrote early one morning.

Mr. Chen was never formally hired by Song Yang, but now his central role seemed to be to buoy her spirits.

Don’t be scared, he wrote hours later. Don’t think that way.

Song Yang only sank deeper.

I’ve fallen so low I can’t be saved.

She continued:

Without purpose, without direction, what meaning is there to keep on living?

I used to be a woman who was very strong in her life. I strove for perfection in everything I did. I never thought that my life would turn out this way. I’ve truly failed.

At the end of October, Song Yang made one last visit to Mr. Chen’s office. She confided that another client had badly beaten her a couple of weeks earlier — an assault she had not reported to the police — and showed him photographs of her bruised and swollen face.

“Why am I so unlucky?” he remembers her asking.

The case began with an anonymous complaint: Several women were said to be “selling intimacy” at the building at 135-32 40th Road.

The tip hardly came as a revelation, since shady activities at this address had generated scores of 911 calls over the years. To some, the building even had the aura of being cursed, following a horrific crime in 2010, in which a deranged stalker stabbed a woman in the second-floor hallway and removed her heart and lungs.

Forty-three arrests had taken place in the building over the last decade, more than a few sex-related, the most recent that of Song Yang. Ensnared in an undercover sting in late September, she had tried but failed to hide in the cramped boiler room across from her apartment, and was charged with offering sex for $70.

Her case, which had prompted those despairing messages to the lawyer Mr. Chen, was one of 91 massage-parlor-related arrests in the 109th Precinct in 2017, and one of six along 40th Road. According to court records, none of those arrests were for pimping, solicitation or operating an unlicensed massage parlor.

A few nights after the anonymous complaint, a sergeant and a detective ended a brief surveillance by venturing into the notorious building. The only thing they found suspicious was a handwritten sign in Chinese on the second floor, which they believed to say, in effect, There are no girls on this floor; please go to the third floor.

The police later determined that the sign actually said, “Attention, the driving school is on the third floor next door.”

An undercover officer then telephoned a woman associated with the building who was known as SiSi. They arranged an appointment for the next evening, Saturday, Nov. 25. Her price: $120.

On the appointed day, members of the Queens North Vice Enforcement Squad met at their base in College Point to discuss the seven locations they planned to hit that night. The closest target became the first: the bleak building at 135-32 40th Road.

The vice officers went over their safety plan. They chose their identifying color of the day. They agreed upon the mission’s assorted distress signals and code words, including what the primary undercover officer would say to indicate that sex had been offered for money. Now they were ready.

The 10-member team headed out into the evening, unseasonably mild for late November. They parked along Prince Street, across from the White Bear dumpling place and just short of where the one-way street bends east to become 40th Road. The team leader and two arresting officers sat in the first car, with two more arresting officers in the second car. The third vehicle was for prisoner transport.

The team tested its recording device, which used Bluetooth to transmit one-way audio. No problem. The green light was given: Go.

Minutes later, the undercover officer approached his target, Song Yang, just inside her building’s entrance. He wore an olive-green jacket, jeans and a cap. She wore a short winter coat, a red-and-black scarf, leggings and one of her signature headbands — with a small bow that resembled a butterfly.

The officer could not have known that this woman had just attempted a video chat with her younger brother, who was still asleep in China. That she had plans to fly home in December. That she had kept her court-mandated appointments with Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization that helps foreign-born victims of sex trafficking. That her fifth and last session with Restore was four days away.

About all he knew was her police nickname for the night: “JD Ponytail.”

Jane Doe Ponytail.

She led him up the worn stairs. She gave him a peck of a kiss in the hall, and opened her apartment door. Another woman, brand-new to Flushing and known as Momo, was already occupied with a man in the second bedroom.

Song Yang walked her client to her bedroom, where, according to the police, she offered sexual intercourse for the reduced price of $80. He consented to the arrangement and, heading to the bathroom, managed to utter the code word into his transmitter that a positive — that is, illegal — agreement had been reached. He also hoped to signal to colleagues that it was time to move in, but a wary Song Yang prevented him from having privacy, telling him to keep the bathroom door open.

“This is bad service,” the officer said.

Once in the bedroom, Song Yang became even more suspicious. Why aren’t you taking off your clothes? she asked. Are you a cop?

No, he answered. But he complained again about the service and grabbed his hat, prepared to leave. She pushed him out and closed the door.

Responding to the undercover officer’s signal, the three idling police vehicles turned onto 40th Road, smack into its everlasting gridlock. Four officers got out and hustled to the building. Climbing the dreary stairs, they passed their undercover colleague, who pointed to Song Yang’s door as he descended — and as she watched on the monitor in her apartment.

With the police demanding that she open the door, and preparing to break it down, a panicked Song Yang hurried to the apartment’s north balcony. The other woman, Momo, emerged naked from her bedroom to investigate the noise, but hustled back to hide when she realized it was the police.

The balcony was not equipped with surveillance cameras, leaving what happened next to the imagination. It is possible that Song Yang was hoping to escape, perhaps by reaching for a wire that ran vertically past her balcony. It is possible that she was trying to land on the protruding metal sign of the restaurant below. It is also possible that she intended to kill herself.

It is fact that she hit the pavement directly in front of the undercover officer she had pecked on the cheek just five minutes earlier. His supervisors say that the officer remains shaken to this day.

Later that night, while Song Yang was lying in a hospital bed with multiple fractures to her face, head and body, the police placed her under arrest. She died in the morning — and the arrest was, in the parlance of the police, “voided.”

In the dark of an early December morning, two weary travelers shuffled through the multicultural scrum of Kennedy Airport. One was a tall, reedy man named Song Hai; the other, a slight, older woman named Shi Yumei, whose protracted weeping on the long flight from Beijing had concerned an attendant.

Song Yang’s mother and brother had traveled 7,000 miles to better understand the how and the why of her death.

A telephone call from her husband several nights earlier had disrupted everything. Song Yang is dead, he had said. Police say she jumped from a building.

Her distraught parents had telephoned their other child, Song Hai, to deliver words so heavy that he dropped his smartphone, cracking its glass. Not accepting what he heard, he sent a WeChat message to his sister that depicted a pair of clinking coffee mugs, along with a gentle request to please call home.

The lack of an answer was the answer.

The mother and brother spent their first two weeks in Flushing tending to the affairs of death. Then, on a dismal day of late December rain, they made their way to the Chun Fook funeral home, a few blocks from 40th Road. Though some had recommended a modest ceremony, the family had insisted on a more elaborate service, in a spacious room with a chandelier.

The dark wood coffin sat at the front before rows of chairs that would remain empty. No women from 40th Road. No Lao Li. A pair of vertical scrolls with parallel aphorisms written in Chinese calligraphy — “Put Down Your Burdens and Return to the Lord” and “Take Up Tranquillity and Celebrate Everlasting Life” — hung on either side.

One minister delivered prayers in English, while another repeated those prayers in Mandarin. The few mourners included Song Yang’s close friend Paul Hayes; the community advocate Michael Chu; Chen Mingli, the lawyer who had tried to help her seek permanent residency; her husband, Chau Chuong, now 78, who had come from California, where he had been living for his health; and her mother and brother, their heads bowed and hands folded.

The ceremony ended with the reading from the Book of Common Prayer that we are all from dust, and to dust we shall return. Alleluia, the mourners mumbled. Alleluia.

Then it was a short drive along the Grand Central Parkway to the All Souls Chapel and Crematory at St. Michael’s Cemetery. This is where Song Yang’s battered body was returned to dust, and where, in his frustration and grief, her brother vowed justice and punched a wall.

The official explanation for his only sibling’s death made no sense to Mr. Song. After all, she had already paid for her flight home to celebrate their mother’s upcoming birthday and to meet, for the first time, his 5-year-old son. Suicide was not possible, he reasoned. Darker forces might be at play. He had already begun his own investigation.

One snowy night soon after arriving from China, Mr. Song appeared at his sister’s 40th Road building with Mr. Hayes. Their plan was to break into her apartment, collect her belongings — and, if possible, retrieve any surveillance video.

Mr. Song, a learning specialist by trade, and Mr. Hayes, a computer consultant, crept up the 50 tiled steps to the fourth-floor door, which was secured with a locked chain. Fearing the noise of the hammer and small acetylene torch they had planned to use, Mr. Hayes hustled to a Home Depot a mile away and returned with a hacksaw.

After a few minutes of sawing, the chain gave way, and the two men pushed open the dull-gray door to enter the setting of a life interrupted. The police had taken the surveillance equipment, but everything else made it seem as if Song Yang might return at any minute.

In the two bedrooms, rumpled sheets. In the kitchen, a Pepsi and a half-empty bottle of Bacardi, sliced carrots and apples, and the black chair that Mr. Song recognized as the one his sister sat in while video-chatting with her family. In the living room, a raised table with a red curtained skirt, on which sat a CD player, a pair of sunglasses and a lucky cat figurine. Placed neatly on the floor, a pair of pink shoes.

On the snow-dusted front balcony, a broom, an upside-down bucket, a stool, a few plastic bags containing fruit and eggs. And, just beyond, the beckoning lights and shadows of the street below.

Song Hai returned often to 40th Road, a spectral presence in his dark hooded coat and black cap, a cigarette cupped in his hand. He cajoled and confronted the sidewalk’s denizens, asking questions, taking photographs, recording conversations. He saw himself as a lone-wolf investigator, working to prove that corrupt officers of this strange city had thrown Song Yang over the railing.

His ever-evolving theory:

That his sister had been sexually assaulted by a police officer. That she had filed a complaint. That the subsequent police lineup was fixed to protect the assailant. Then it was payback, which explained why, of all the women along 40th Road, only Song Yang was arrested in September, and was about to be arrested again in late November.

As is standard when a death occurs during a police action, the Queens district attorney and the police department’s Force Investigation Division were investigating. But Mr. Song was already beginning to believe that nearly every corner of the American criminal justice system — from the police to the medical examiner — was colluding to hide the truth.

He patrolled downtown Flushing. He interrogated women and shopkeepers. He plastered the streets with leaflets featuring photographs of his sister and promising a “Big Reward!” The plea appeared in Chinese and in fractured English:

Hello! When you saw the photo, SiSi (Song Yang) was no longer alive. She fell from and died on 11/25/2017 at 135-32 4FL in Flushing. Families as well as the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau are eager to find out the truth of her death. If you have ANY CLUES, please contact me ASAP. Absolutely Confidential … (Her brother Song Hai)

The dozens of responses yielded little. One man called to say that Song Hai’s sister was a whore — a word he did not quite understand, and so he continued the conversation: Yes, yes. And do you have information?

His sleuthing occasionally paid off. One evening, amid the Main Street crush, Mr. Song spotted a man he recognized from his sister’s WeChat photographs: short, solidly built, and with a distinctive, block-shaped head.

Excited, Mr. Song crossed the street and, right at the Roosevelt Avenue intersection, near the subway entrance, grabbed the man by the arm. Mr. Song recalled what happened next:

Are you Li? he asked.

You’re mistaken, replied the startled Lao Li, the boss who controlled Song Yang’s apartment. My name is not Li.

Mr. Song waved down a passing police car, as a crowd gathered and the agitated man in his grip implored him not to involve the authorities. Let’s resolve this ourselves.

The two officers understood Mr. Song’s intentions, he later recalled, but they explained that this was America, not China, and that he was unlawfully detaining a man who wasn’t present when his sister’s fall took place. They separated the men, and Lao Li floated away in the rush-hour stream.

Later that evening, an angry Lao Li telephoned Mr. Song. In the conversation that Mr. Song duly recorded on his phone, Lao Li vented about the audacity of summoning the police — “If you don’t have evidence, how could you say I’m the boss?” — before giving his version of the realities on 40th Road.

He said that he rented the apartment to Song Yang for $3,100 a month — hardly the $12,000 that was rumored on the street. “She and I really didn’t have any employment relationship,” he said. “Just that at the start of the month, I would take the rent.”

Lao Li said she called him her “boss” so that others wouldn’t bully her, but he insisted that she was her own boss: prone to arrest, sure, but also smart, tenacious and tough.

Throughout the conversation, Lao Li characteristically remained at a distance — even when describing that fateful night. He rushed to 40th Road after receiving a call that “SiSi had jumped from the building,” he said, but by the time he got there, “your sister had already been taken away.”

As Mr. Song conducted his frustrating investigation, his mother spent her days in the numbing cocoon of grief. Once so proud of her entrepreneurial children, Shi Yumei was now a sorrowful woman in a foreign world, gingerly navigating a small cart down crowded Main Street, her pale gray knit cap pulled low, her mind occupied with worry. How, for example, would she and her son, here on temporary visas, survive on the little money they had brought with them?

An encounter with a bellowing street evangelist eventually led her to St. George’s, the old Episcopal church on Main Street whose steeple has long been a Flushing landmark. Its congregation embraced her, smothering her with food, clothing and compassion. Locking hands and forming a prayer circle one day, strangers asked God to grant peace to this new person among them, who felt so blessed that she began to volunteer at the church’s food pantry as a way of giving back.

One cool April morning, she donned an orange apron and joined 40 other volunteers, nearly all of them immigrants, as they prepared for the ritual that unfolds every Wednesday along the old church’s north side, opposite a Lucille Roberts fitness center. They unloaded the crates from trucks, bagged the fruit and vegetables, and established an assembly line of food down the sidewalk: turnips and fennel, lettuce and apples, onions and melons.

The decade-old operation had gradually adapted to the ways of Flushing, with organizers taking note of the tensions caused by different understandings of personal space among ethnic groups. The solution: two alternating lines — one that was entirely Asian, and the other a mix of black, white and Latino.

On this morning, the Asian line ran alongside the church’s cemetery wall, and the other line stretched down to a firehouse. But things moved apace, thanks in large part to the high-spirited efficiency of the volunteers — including Shi Yumei, who smiled at her sense of belonging as she proffered bags of onions.

Each evening, after long days of volunteering and investigating, mother and son returned to a worn apartment catering to transients, not far from 40th Road. Some lodgers paid $20 a night for a narrow bed in the living room. But with some financial help from the church and a few nonprofit organizations, Mr. Song and Ms. Shi managed to pay $1,000 a month for a cramped bedroom and first dibs on a shared kitchen.

They slept beside a closet packed with clothes and accessories that Song Yang left behind. Tears were shed over a single strand of black hair found on a coat. They lived in the presence of her absence.

To find sleep, the mother would hold a small audio device close to her ear and listen to lively recorded stories about historical Chinese triumphs, cuddled beside one of her daughter’s plush teddy bears. This way, Ms. Shi said in Mandarin, “I know my daughter is here with me.”

Two feet away, her son would lie in his twin bed near the window, cigarettes on the nightstand, spent beer cans under the bed, another Long Island Rail Road train clattering in the distance. Here he would try to piece together the stray bits of his investigation.

He had found a grainy photograph from his sister’s WeChat feed of the stocky, bald man who had supposedly sexually assaulted her, and convinced himself that a bald police detective, appearing in cellphone videos taken on the sidewalk after his sister’s fall, was the same man.

He had also obtained photographs and forensic notes from the autopsy. Poring over the graphic images, he decided that the discoloration around his sister’s face came from a beating, and that her broken fingernails suggested some kind of struggle — and, therefore, a cover-up.

This was America. Not China. Exactly.

On a sunny spring day, those invested in the proceedings of the human trafficking court filed into the basement courtroom in Kew Gardens. Among them were Song Hai, in a black blazer and brown work boots, and Shi Yumei, her blue-and-orange scarf recalling the colors seen on the Staten Island Ferry, on Knicks uniforms, on Mets baseball caps — the colors of New York.

They took their seats among the defendants, including a woman in glasses often seen calling out to men on 40th Road. Mr. Song sat with his hands clasped and back erect; his mother was bent forward, as if in prayer. They waited.

An air of empathy defines the court, which is intended to encourage women engaged in the commercial sex trade to avail themselves of counseling and other diversionary programs. On most Fridays, the judge, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are women, and the lanky head court officer is determined to make the defendants feel safe and respected. He does his best to dissuade any pimps or bosses from taking a seat.

Prominent in the dozen pews are Chinese women facing the usual massage-parlor-related charges of prostitution or unlicensed massage. Court-appointed lawyers from the Legal Aid Society or Queens Law Associates usually guide them through the process, along with a Mandarin-speaking interpreter and advocates from one of the nonprofit groups specializing in sex-trafficking outreach and immigration services.

Defenders of the program maintain that until a better approach is developed, arrests — followed by appearances in trafficking court — provide the best chance for intervention. Even if a woman returns to 40th Road, they say, she will at least have the names of people to contact if she needs help.

Others, though, counter that for many women caught in the commercial sex trade, an arrest only exacerbates their trauma. Besides, they say, one doesn’t need to be arrested in order to receive helpful contact information.

Judge Toko Serita, who has presided over the trafficking court for a decade, summons the defendants, one by one, to stand before her, as a court officer calls out, “Mandarin interpreter required, and present.” The judge has short black hair, glasses and a welcoming, even reassuring demeanor, whether it’s the defendant’s first appearance or her last.

How are you today? … Are you studying English? … This is a really good streak … I want to congratulate you for completing all your sessions with Garden of Hope … Stay out of trouble, lead a law-abiding life for the next six months, and the record will be expunged … Good luck to you.

On this morning, several cases were heard before a court officer finally called out: “03585 dash 17. Yang Song!”

Even though she was five months dead, Song Yang still had an open criminal case: the arrest on a prostitution charge two months before her fatal fall. The sprawling New York City judicial system may seem overwhelmed, even chaotic, but in the end its books must be balanced. This meant that a formality known as an “abatement by death” — a dismissal, in effect — was required to close the short chapter on Song Yang, or Yang Song, as the system sometimes rendered her name.

Judge Serita was informed that the deceased defendant’s mother and son were present and would like to thank the court. The request stilled the courtroom. The judge sighed in sympathy.

“Thank you,” she said. “Um. All right. This case is now going to be abated by death.”

She went on to tell Song Yang’s mother and brother that everyone involved in the trafficking court was deeply saddened by their loved one’s “tragic and untimely death.” She expressed hope that they “somehow find peace with these unfortunate circumstances.”

Mr. Song and Ms. Shi acknowledged her words with nods. They walked out of the courtroom, past an “Exit Only — No Re-Entry” sign, and into the late-morning brightness. He lit a cigarette. She adjusted her backpack. They continued on in silence.

Two weeks later, the mother and brother returned to Kew Gardens for a long-awaited meeting with investigators from the Homicide Investigations Bureau of the Queens district attorney’s office. With everyone seated around a dark-wood conference table in a windowless room, the investigators shared the results of their monthslong inquiry, including 22 minutes of video culled from cameras positioned both inside and outside the building at 135-32 40th Road.

In these images, their beloved daughter and sister appears in the fullness of life. Here is Song Yang, leading the undercover officer up the stairs. Here she is, kicking him out of the apartment, watching the officers ascend the stairs — rushing in alarm toward the balcony.

Here, from street level, something falling, and then a beloved daughter and sister, crumpled on the pavement. Watching the video again a few days later, Ms. Shi noticed the headband that flies off her daughter’s head.

“She especially loved butterflies,” the mother said.

The video over, the investigators laid out their sober findings: The police involved in a bust-and-buy sting on 40th Road the night of Nov. 25, 2017, did not cause the death of Song Yang. To begin with, no officer was even in the fourth-floor apartment when she jumped or fell.

Her brother scoffed at this conclusion. He said something rude in Mandarin. Meeting over.

Night comes to 40th Road.

The fruit and vegetable peddlers have boxed up and boarded up, and the last patrons of air-conditioned restaurants have stepped out to evaporate in the late June warmth. But the women are here, as always, calling out an invitation that sounds almost like a plea.

Massage?

They stand outside the same doorways, including the one for 135-32, where Song Yang once lingered. Very soon after she died, her fourth-floor apartment became the address for a new massage business. Its name: Heaven on Fourth.

A few steps away, at the entrance to another of the gloomy buildings owned and operated by prominent Flushing businessmen, a thin woman in a brown dress sits in a metal chair with a square of Styrofoam for padding, studying her cellphone through the smoke of her cigarette. Then she pulls out a bag of overripe cherries from the building’s broken mailbox and, between the repeated offerings of her services, spits out the pits and tosses them into the street, not far from a lamppost adorned with a poster bearing the face of Song Yang (“Big Reward!”).

To the woman’s right, roasted duck carcasses hang in the window of the Corner 28 restaurant, where a man is mop-swabbing the sticky floor. To her left, sorrowful creatures loll in a seafood restaurant’s murky tank. Above her head, scaffolding provides protection from the stucco that city officials say has been coming loose from the buildings. Rain begins to fall.

A nearby tanker truck groans as it sucks away a restaurant’s used cooking oil through a large hose that snakes across the sidewalk and into the bowels of a building. The women adapt: They step over the hose, ignore the smell, raise their voices.

One of the women leads a potential client to a building’s threshold, but he keeps walking; she mutters an epithet in Mandarin. Then a buzz-cut junkie, who just hours before was asleep on the pavement, begins to harass the women, disrupting their business by hovering, touching, dropping his sweatpants and simulating sex acts. He enters one of their buildings and urinates in the hall.

The rain hardens. The whoosh of a shuttered metal gate resounds. A kitchen worker emerges at the end of his shift and wishes the women a good night. They wish him the same.

It is all ephemeral, of course, a realization reinforced daily by the laborers trudging down this street to the subway, bone-weary from working another of the construction projects that are redefining Flushing. Few today remember the Old Roma restaurant that once thrived on 40th Road, just as few tomorrow will remember a Chinese immigrant who once died on 40th Road.

For now, at least, if you linger on the street, you will encounter those who remember her — including, occasionally, clients still looking for SiSi.

You might see Lala, and Kiki, and Yoyo, along with other women who competed with Song Yang. You might see her lanky brother, Song Hai, who still struggles to understand why no one will be brought to justice for all that his sister went through in her adopted country. His grief smolders, as does his distrust of America.

Lastly, you might see Song Yang’s mother, Shi Yumei.

One evening, Ms. Shi paused outside a building where some women were offering massages to passing men. Raising the drooping bags held in her hands, she explained that she had just left the food pantry at the Episcopal church on Main Street, where she had recently been baptized. She said the pastor had emphasized the importance of sharing what you have.

The mother placed a bag of sweet potatoes in the doorway that had once been Song Yang’s domain. It was an offering of sorts, a gift to women like her daughter. Then she was gone, assumed into the Flushing blur.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/11/nyregion/sex-workers-massage-parlor.html |

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail, in 2018-10-12 12:47:26

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Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail http://www.nature-business.com/nature-the-case-of-jane-doe-ponytail/

Nature

A woman begins to fall. With her long dark hair in a ponytail and her black-and-red scarf loose around her neck, she is plummeting from a fourth-floor balcony, through the neon-charged November night.

Below awaits 40th Road, a gritty street of commerce in the Flushing section of Queens. Chinese restaurants and narrow storefronts, and dim stairwells leading to private transactions. Strivers and dawdlers and passers-by, all oblivious to what is transpiring above.

But before the pavement ends the woman’s descent, a few feet from a restaurant’s glittering Christmas tree, imagine her fall suddenly suspended — her body freeze-framed in midair. If only for a moment.

She toils in the netherworld of Flushing massage parlors, where she goes by the street name of SiSi. A youthful 38, she is in a platonic marriage to a man more than twice her age; harbors fading hopes of American citizenship; and is fond of Heineken, Red Bull and the rotisserie chicken at a Colombian place on Kissena Boulevard. Among her competitors, she is considered territorial and tireless.

It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and SiSi is in a shabby building’s top-floor apartment, for which she pays her “boss” a hefty fee. She has returned from a market with provisions. She has tried calling her younger brother in China, but he is asleep. She has been on the phone with friends and clients, unaware that she is in the sights of a 10-member police team working vice.

She heads downstairs to stand at her building’s entrance, a necessity of her job. Soon she is leading a man back upstairs — an officer working undercover — as her closely held cellphone casts a glow about her face. Their awkward conversation in her apartment convinces him that SiSi has broken the law, just as it convinces SiSi that he is a cop. She pushes him out and closes the door, though not to the inevitable. She knows from experience what comes next:

More police. Tromping through the dusky vestibule of her building, across the worn scarlet rug and up the 50 tiled steps. Past the Chinese sign that says if you’re looking for the driving school, you’re in the wrong place. Then right to her door.

The handcuffs. The hurried escort to a police vehicle. The humiliation. Again.

SiSi watches the officers ascend on the video monitor she keeps near the door. Under the fixed gaze of one of those lucky cat figurines perched on a table, its paw raised in a wish of good fortune, she begins to pace.

Now they are pounding on the door and shouting Police! Open up! SiSi rushes to the apartment’s north balcony, with its panoramic view of the street hustle below. Day and night, sun or sleet, this is where she and her sister competitors sing their plaintive song to passing men: Massage? Massage?

On the narrow balcony, barely two feet deep, she keeps a broom, a bucket and a small blue stool. Up she steps — and now she is falling, plunging toward the hard tenth of a New York mile that is 40th Road.

A tenth of a mile. Where Mandarin trumps English and a glance trumps the spoken word. Where sex is sold beside cloudy tanks of fish and crabs. Where seedy quarters controlled by local powers are rented to illicit massage operations, and the police make sporadic sweeps, and immigrant women are arrested again and again, and few in this city take notice.

Gravity prevails.

The undercover officer, his job done, exits the building and turns right — at the very moment that the woman who has just offered him intimacy for money hits the pavement at his feet. A woman known along 40th Road as SiSi, but whose given name was Song Yang.

In the Google Maps of the mind, pull back from this tiny street to take in the borough’s 178-square-mile sprawl: a pulsating hive of parkways and boulevards, apartment buildings and single-family homes, two airports, a major league ballpark, remnants of a world’s fair — all bracketed north and south by ocean, river and bay.

A striving borough of comity and contradiction, Queens is both the birthplace of the American president — elected in part on an anti-immigration platform — and home to 2.3 million people, nearly half of them foreign-born. With hundreds of languages spoken here, it may be the most linguistically diverse place on earth.

Every day, airplanes alight at Kennedy International Airport in southeast Queens, their passengers including many immigrants who join the borough’s anonymous, aspirational ranks. They chop the vegetables, wash the dishes, clean the toilets, mow the lawns, drive the hired cars.

And some wind up in the commercial sex trade. Making money for a pimp in an airport motel in South Jamaica. Waiting for the next client in a dingy building along Roosevelt Avenue in Corona. Or, like Song Yang, standing on a Flushing street on a cold November night, hiding behind her cute nickname, calling out to men. Playing her role in a shadow economy that benefited others through the exorbitant rent she paid.

“I hear she was No. 1: young, pretty, and her service was great,” said Michael Chu, a travel agent and community advocate who worked across the street from her on 40th Road. “People just lined up for her.”

For years now, Flushing has been an ever-replenishing repository of immigrants entangled in the underground sex economy. The commonplace raids of illicit massage operations across the country routinely lead to the arrests of women with Flushing addresses.

These parlors disappear and reappear with regularity, undermining the police crackdowns often prompted by neighborhood complaints. The industry’s opaqueness adds to the confusion. Some parlors have legitimate state licenses; some legitimate operations have masseuses making sex-for-money side deals; and some are illegally unlicensed, with no interest at all in addressing someone’s sore neck.

Emotionally manipulated by their bosses, ashamed of what they do, afraid to trust, the women rarely confide in the police or even their lawyers about their circumstances. They might be supporting a family in China, or paying back a smuggling debt, or choosing this more profitable endeavor over, say, restaurant work. No matter the backstory, the police say their collective silence further complicates law-enforcement efforts to build racketeering and trafficking cases against the operators.

But society has become increasingly aware of the complexities and inequities of the commercial sex economy, including a criminal justice system that has tended to target the exploited — often immigrant women and members of the transgender community — while rarely holding accountable their customers and traffickers.

In early 2017, New York’s police commissioner, James O’Neill, announced at a news conference that he would redirect his vice division to address prostitution and sex trafficking. This would include training intended to alter what he called the “law-enforcement mind-set.”

“We’ve already switched much of our emphasis away from prostitutes, and begun focusing much more on the pimps who sell them and the johns who pay for their services,” he said. “Like all crime, we can’t just arrest our way out of this problem.”

Since the establishment of this new “mind-set,” the police have continued to struggle at building criminal cases against the operators. But prostitution arrests in New York City have dropped more than 20 percent in the last year, while the arrests of customers have spiked.

Still, this change in attitude at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan had not necessarily crossed the East River to benefit an immigrant now lying on her side, unable to speak, gazing up at a plainclothes officer trying to calm her until an ambulance arrived. Beside a spent cigarette, her blood pooled on the pavement she had so often worked.

By morning, Song Yang would be dead, shattering a tight Chinese family that would never accept the police version of events. Her death would also come to reflect the seemingly intractable nature of policing the sex industry, and cast an unwelcome light on the furtive but ubiquitous business of illicit massage parlors.

In the epic of Queens, this stretch of 40th Road is little more than an asphalt hyphen. But along its short expanse exist worlds within worlds within worlds.

Baba, I want to go, I want to go.

I want to go to work, the little girl would say to her parents. I want to pick ginseng. She was a born worker, their Song Yang.

She and her younger brother lived with their parents in a remote village in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, where they grew crops on land allotted to them by their local village committee. Little Song Yang was especially efficient at harvesting the family’s ginseng crop, her mother, Shi Yumei, recalled. “The more her father praised her, the harder she worked.”

Her father, Song Xigui, eventually found moderate success selling construction-grade sand he bulldozed from a nearby river, and by the 1990s the family had replaced its thatched-roof home with a modern brick house that included two “kang” bed-stoves, heated slate platforms that provided warmth during the severe winters. Still, they continued to work the crops, with Song Yang often responsible for running home to light the stove, cut the vegetables and mind her brother.

As she grew older, she began to collect specimens of the enchanting butterflies zigzagging down by the river, and became meticulous in preserving their fragile iridescence. When friends came for boisterous sleepovers, they would marvel at her book of butterflies, and take turns asking to keep one.

Butterflies became Song Yang’s gift.

At 19, she moved 2,200 miles south to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth, where she became one of the thousands of young Chinese women who labored in sweatshops to produce apparel bearing the guilt-absolving label “Made in America.” Sharing a room with five other women in a dormitory, she covered her bottom-bunk bed with a silken cloth curtain, and adorned her small rectangle of privacy with family photographs.

Saipan’s garment industry was shrinking by the early 2000s, and Song Yang left to become a waitress on the island. She married a worldly divorced father named Chau Chuong, an American citizen who had worked for years in New York’s restaurant grind. He was so much older — 67 to her 27 — that her family was slow to accept him.

In 2006, the couple opened a small Vietnamese restaurant on Saipan that became so successful they opened a second place, with 150 tables. He worked the kitchen and she worked the front. “She attracted a lot of friendly customers,” her husband recalled.

Her brother, Song Hai, joined her after his high school graduation, eventually opening a henna tattoo parlor with a friend. When their mother came for a visit, she posed for photographs beside her daughter’s well-stocked restaurant bar, her smile radiating pride.

“We had a real sense of accomplishment,” Mr. Song said in Mandarin.

But a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, disrupting a main source of tourism to Saipan, as well as the fortunes of Song Yang and Song Hai. The restaurants were sold, the tattoo parlor shuttered.

Photographs from her brother’s wedding in March 2013 capture the last happy times that Song Yang spent with her family. Here she is back home, posing with the bride and groom. Here she is, sharing a restaurant meal with the growing family. Here she is.

A month later, Song Yang joined the hundreds who arrive daily at Kennedy Airport, direct from China. Straight to Flushing she went, like so many before, where she hoped that she and her husband would succeed again as restaurateurs.

But there is the dream of Flushing, and the reality.

With her husband now too old for kitchen work, Song Yang became their sole source of income. A waitressing job failed, as did a short-lived Chinese fast-food venture on Main Street. So she became a home health aide, and took a massage-therapy course in the hope of earning additional money. Then a friend told her of a more lucrative opportunity, to be found along 40th Road.

The understanding of her parents and brother was that Song Yang worked in reflexology. They knew that gifts arrived from New York. That she called regularly for video chats while sitting in a black office chair, sometimes eating a bowl of porridge. That when her nephew was born, she proudly announced on social media that she had become an aunt — a “gugu.”

That she seemed happy, mostly. But there was that time when she refused to video-chat for several days, after which she explained that a man had beaten her about the face. And that other time, when she revealed that a man — a law-enforcement officer, she said — had held a gun to her head while forcing her to perform oral sex. Family members reassured her: She had no choice.

Song Yang told her family last fall that she had booked a flight to China for December, and was looking forward to meeting her nephew for the first time. So far she had connected with him only online, through the popular WeChat app, where her avatar sometimes featured a butterfly.

What kind of present do you want Gugu to bring home? she would ask the child, her image beamed halfway around the world from some exotic place called Flushing.

The thoroughfare known as 40th Road was Grove Street, once.

In the 19th century it had a volunteer firehouse, a nursery and residents with Irish surnames. Just in living memory, there was Harry Barlow’s auto garage, the mimeograph services of Case the Printer, an appliance store proud of its color Zenith television sets and, of course, the Old Roma restaurant — famous for its veal cutlets on linguine, and that yellow sponge cake with pineapple filling.

It is all long gone, replaced by ginger duck rice casserole and a shaved ice treat called red bean baobing. The 40th Road of today is almost entirely Chinese, its restaurant signs often featuring no English at all — one more reminder that the only New York constant is change.

The street’s 20 buildings, including Song Yang’s, are mostly three- and four-story structures from the 1980s and ’90s that evoke a utilitarian, Soviet-bloc drabness. Narrow and claustrophobic, they loom like set pieces for a film noir.

The one-way street itself always feels like a wrong turn, an obstacle course of idling delivery trucks and construction equipment. One end elbows past a small playground; the other runs into the ever-clogged Main Street intersection, where plainclothes police officers can often be seen sitting in an unmarked vehicle in an attempt to deter quality-of-life crimes. Pickpocketing is so prevalent that a nearby grocery displays signs of a stick figure reaching into another stick figure’s handbag.

Above, looming airliners grumble as they approach LaGuardia Airport, across Flushing Bay. Just behind 40th Road, Long Island Rail Road trains grind and whine along the raised tracks. Up and down the block, the earthy aromas of produce stands and restaurant waste commingle with the classical Chinese instrumental music emanating from a soup-dumpling restaurant.

And here, beside the upturned fruit crates and the overloaded garbage bags, stand the women of the massage parlors. In their 40s and 50s, mostly, they check their cellphones, drag on untaxed Korean cigarettes bought in bulk, and chat, but with eyes scanning for unattached men lacking a law-enforcement vibe.

Massage?

The offer is understood, if not explicit. If the man consents, he is led up the stairs of one of the dull buildings, where massage operations are often crammed amid barbershops, driving schools and employment agencies.

Massage parlors offering sex are hardly a recent phenomenon, and business models vary. But the trade along 40th Road is especially audacious. The women stand on both sides of the street — five, 10, a dozen at a time — as ubiquitous as the delivery trucks. In the merciless heat and cold, they sweat and shiver on staked ground, prompting resentful neighborhood complaints about lost business and children exposed to the seamy daily spectacle.

A common arrangement on 40th Road is one in which a “boss” rents an apartment or office from one of the building’s tenants, then provides space to women for a $20 cut of whatever they charge each client. The general expectation is that each woman will generate at least $100 a day for the boss.

But the bosses provide no meaningful protection. The women are at the mercy of the street, where they have been robbed, beaten, raped, thrown down stairs. The surveillance cameras nearly always present are intended less for security, perhaps, than to provide the boss with a way to count the clients who walk through the door.

Over several months, the women along 40th Road shared in Mandarin the stories of how they came to be standing here, offering sex to strangers. They use names like masks. Some have chosen Americanized names — Jenny, for example — while others have been rechristened by bosses with nicknames that sound like Lala, or Kiki, or Yoyo.

They came from all over China, and from myriad backgrounds. One woman said she used to clean houses. Another said she was a former reporter who covered Chinese real estate. Several described the circumstances that left them in economic straits: a failed bus company, a bankrupt jade dealership, a gambling-addicted husband.

One woman often positions herself near a standpipe at the corner of Main Street, so as to be the first to approach any man venturing west. She is in her 60s, small-framed and usually dressed in layers, with long hair dyed black. She said in a raspy voice that she was from the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi, and that she was trying to pay off a debt incurred by her adult son in a business deal gone wrong.

She had visited two job agencies on 40th Road, looking for work as a nanny, but nothing panned out. And now she was here, on the corner, where her half-joking refrain — “I’m too old” — did not seem to deter clients.

Another woman, who gave her name as Xiao Li — or Little Li — said she was from the city of Dexing, in Jiangxi Province, home to a well-known copper mine, where she once was a welder. Thin and often wearing a simple black dress, she said she had briefly left the street to study legitimate massage — “So my heart could have a little bit of peace” — but had concluded that the classes were a waste of money. Back she came to 40th Road.

“My body can’t take it,” Ms. Li, 50, said. “My body can’t take so many men.”

Others were even more expansive, including a stocky, 40-ish woman with cropped black hair and a lazy eye who called herself Rachel. Eating a sweet baked potato at a dumpling stall on Main Street, she recalled that while working at a job she loathed — waitressing at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle — she began hunting through WeChat forums for leads on other work, and came across an offer that she recalled saying:

Massage Woman to Stand on Street. $20,000 a month. Flushing, N.Y.

Rachel called the number to ask what the job entailed. The boss replied: Everything.

After her first day, Rachel said, “I got home and took a shower, and cried.”

She paused at the memory, and added, “But then I just thought to myself, ‘I have to keep thinking positively.’”

Michael Chu, the longtime neighborhood advocate, has befriended some of the women who stand outside his building on 40th Road, and occasionally offers them assistance with police matters. His office, where an old dog named Scout is usually napping on some cardboard, is furnished with desks left behind by an accountant who moved rather than work beside a massage parlor.

A bespectacled man of 65, Mr. Chu has listened to the travails of these women, whom he calls “sisters.” The beatings, the robberies, the harassment from teenagers in the playground, the pressure to attract enough clients to cover their “rent” to the boss. The hopes they harbor for permanent residence, for having enough money, for finally not doing this.

“They also have an American dream,” Mr. Chu said. “The sisters have an American dream.”

The man spotted her on the street one night after stopping at a 40th Road restaurant known for its cheap and plentiful food. She was pretty, younger than the other women and conversant in English, so he paid for a session. She said her name was SiSi.

His was Paul Hayes. Single, in his early 40s and living in Queens, he carried himself with a seen-it-all air — but she beguiled him. They gradually became lovers, then good friends with vague plans to rekindle their romance someday. But she lived with her husband in an apartment a block away. It was complicated.

She had a good sense of humor, and often solicited his advice — although she ignored him when he recommended bolstering the building’s security system. She also confided about the dangers and vagaries of her work life.

“She really hated doing it,” Mr. Hayes said.

Even so, Song Yang established herself as a fierce competitor in the circumscribed world of 40th Road. Fueled by coffee and Red Bull, she toiled nearly nonstop, as if facing some self-imposed deadline. Word was that she was trying to save up to open her own Vietnamese restaurant, or to buy a house in New York for her aging parents, or to just move on.

Her sharp elbows and inexhaustible style irked some of the other women, leading to arguments, shoves and occasional hair pulling. One competitor recalled that if a man chose another masseuse, Song Yang would tease the client about preferring older women.

But another woman remembered a gentler, more generous Song Yang. She said that when she arrived at 40th Road, Song Yang insisted that she accept several pairs of pants to ward against winter.

Song Yang’s domain was a fourth-floor apartment at 135-32 40th Road, directly above another massage operation. The apartment door faced a boiler room and a makeshift gate that was intended to keep vagrants from sleeping on the roof, but also to protect the hot pepper plants nurtured there by the aged custodian.

As were most things on 40th Road, her rental arrangement was convoluted.

The building was constructed in 1992 by Jentai Tsai, 85, a prominent, even revered, banker in Flushing, and is owned by a real estate company overseen by his son, Eugene Morimoto Tsai. In a brief conversation last month, the younger Tsai, 42, said that he did not know that a woman had fallen from his building last year, or that his building had long been a hub of illicit massage activity.

They both said, and city records confirm, that the building’s managing agent — responsible for collecting rent — was another man of local distinction: Peter Tu, 62, the longtime director of the Flushing Chinese Business Association, a member of Community Board 7 and a district leader for the Democratic Party.

Outside his office around the corner, Mr. Tu at first denied that he was involved with the 40th Road building, but then said that he had merely tried to assist the Tsai family by collecting the $18,500 monthly rent from the main, first-floor tenant, the Shi Li Xiang seafood restaurant. He said he no longer served in this role, had never taken any payment “from the street,” and had no idea what arrangements the restaurant had with the tenants and subtenants upstairs.

“I’m always in the middle,” Mr. Tu said.

A man identifying himself as the boss of the first-floor restaurant began to shout when asked about the tenants upstairs. “How am I supposed to know the names of the people to whom I rent?” he asked in Mandarin. “You want me to go up and ask everyone who they are?”

Above the restaurant, in this building owned and managed by Flushing men of stature, Song Yang paid a flat fee for her apartment — as much as $400 a night, competitors say — to a square-headed, elusive “boss” who goes by Lao Li, or Old Li, a kind of avuncular nickname conveying familiarity with the women who work for him. But the particulars of his subleasing arrangements are as difficult to pin down as he is.

One spring midnight, Lao Li made a rare appearance on 40th Road to mediate a dispute over clients that had erupted among the women. When a reporter approached and called him by name, Lao Li looked up — and bolted. He dashed east down the center of 40th Road, dodging cars, before vanishing into the dark Flushing night.

Although Song Yang and other women often quarreled, they occasionally gathered with Lao Li at the restaurant downstairs, or at a nearby karaoke bar. They’d watch him blow out a candle on his birthday cake, or sing along to a song popular in his native northeast China. At the Chinese New Year, he would hand out red envelopes containing small cash gifts.

In cellphone videos and photographs of these get-togethers, the participants could easily be mistaken for co-workers at an accounting firm, making a night of it. They seemed untroubled by their profession’s many perils, including robbery, bodily harm — and, especially, arrest.

Arrest attracted unwelcome attention. It jeopardized applications for permanent residency. It magnified the humiliation. And it usually meant an appearance at the Human Trafficking Intervention Court, held on Fridays in the basement of the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens, where Mandarin sometimes seems as common as English.

Established nearly 15 years ago, the court set out to treat women in the commercial sex trade less as accused criminals than as victims of trafficking and exploitation. They are told that charges will be dismissed and records sealed if they complete several individualized counseling sessions — focused, say, on job training, or education — with Garden of Hope, Restore NYC, Womankind or another outreach organization. A group called Sanctuary for Families is also on hand to provide immigration services.

Song Yang went through this process more than once. In addition to expunging the arrests from her record, these court appearances provided pause, forcing her to confront the consequences of her work life.

In the summer of 2016, Song Yang began frequent WeChat dialogues with a Flushing lawyer, Chen Mingli, that at first focused on acquiring permanent residency — a process that he repeatedly told her could take months and months. Still, she fretted that her arrest history would thwart her application for a green card.

I am having a lot of anxiety, she wrote in Chinese.

Gradually, though, their conversations came to reflect the darker realities of her 40th Road realm, with sobbing emoticons peppering her messages.

Good morning, Lawyer Chen, she wrote in mid-October 2016. A police officer put a gun to my head today and forced me to perform oral sex.

At the insistence of a friend, she had filed a complaint with the 109th Precinct. Investigators spent the day in her “shop,” looking for evidence and checking the building’s surveillance video, which had captured a heavyset bald man in a suit ascending the stairs.

Mr. Chen assured her that the matter would not affect the status of her immigration case, and implored her to cooperate with the police. But her intense desire to avoid attention, coupled with fear of retaliation from her attacker, overshadowed everything.

The police said that this won’t affect me in any way, but I’m afraid that it will … Lawyer Chen, what am I going to do now? … (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

The police circulated a wanted poster based on a hazy photograph of the man lifted from the surveillance video. A retired United States Marshal, who surrendered after someone mentioned him as a possible suspect, participated in a lineup.

But Song Yang identified another man, wrongly, as her attacker. In addition, a DNA sample from the retired marshal did not match samples taken from Song Yang’s clothing. The case was eventually closed.

Several months later, in late September 2017, she was arrested a third time on a prostitution charge. Handcuffed, led away from 40th Road, held overnight.

A few days later, Mr. Chen asked, You’ve been arrested again?

Song Yang answered:

Yeah. (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

She explained that she had been forced to make hard decisions and that it had been difficult to suppress her feelings while married to a much older man who seemed increasingly removed from her day-to-day life. She felt “morally depraved,” and sometimes thought about giving it all up and going home — or worse.

I’ve been having thoughts of jumping from a building, but what should I do? she wrote early one morning.

Mr. Chen was never formally hired by Song Yang, but now his central role seemed to be to buoy her spirits.

Don’t be scared, he wrote hours later. Don’t think that way.

Song Yang only sank deeper.

I’ve fallen so low I can’t be saved.

She continued:

Without purpose, without direction, what meaning is there to keep on living?

I used to be a woman who was very strong in her life. I strove for perfection in everything I did. I never thought that my life would turn out this way. I’ve truly failed.

At the end of October, Song Yang made one last visit to Mr. Chen’s office. She confided that another client had badly beaten her a couple of weeks earlier — an assault she had not reported to the police — and showed him photographs of her bruised and swollen face.

“Why am I so unlucky?” he remembers her asking.

The case began with an anonymous complaint: Several women were said to be “selling intimacy” at the building at 135-32 40th Road.

The tip hardly came as a revelation, since shady activities at this address had generated scores of 911 calls over the years. To some, the building even had the aura of being cursed, following a horrific crime in 2010, in which a deranged stalker stabbed a woman in the second-floor hallway and removed her heart and lungs.

Forty-three arrests had taken place in the building over the last decade, more than a few sex-related, the most recent that of Song Yang. Ensnared in an undercover sting in late September, she had tried but failed to hide in the cramped boiler room across from her apartment, and was charged with offering sex for $70.

Her case, which had prompted those despairing messages to the lawyer Mr. Chen, was one of 91 massage-parlor-related arrests in the 109th Precinct in 2017, and one of six along 40th Road. According to court records, none of those arrests were for pimping, solicitation or operating an unlicensed massage parlor.

A few nights after the anonymous complaint, a sergeant and a detective ended a brief surveillance by venturing into the notorious building. The only thing they found suspicious was a handwritten sign in Chinese on the second floor, which they believed to say, in effect, There are no girls on this floor; please go to the third floor.

The police later determined that the sign actually said, “Attention, the driving school is on the third floor next door.”

An undercover officer then telephoned a woman associated with the building who was known as SiSi. They arranged an appointment for the next evening, Saturday, Nov. 25. Her price: $120.

On the appointed day, members of the Queens North Vice Enforcement Squad met at their base in College Point to discuss the seven locations they planned to hit that night. The closest target became the first: the bleak building at 135-32 40th Road.

The vice officers went over their safety plan. They chose their identifying color of the day. They agreed upon the mission’s assorted distress signals and code words, including what the primary undercover officer would say to indicate that sex had been offered for money. Now they were ready.

The 10-member team headed out into the evening, unseasonably mild for late November. They parked along Prince Street, across from the White Bear dumpling place and just short of where the one-way street bends east to become 40th Road. The team leader and two arresting officers sat in the first car, with two more arresting officers in the second car. The third vehicle was for prisoner transport.

The team tested its recording device, which used Bluetooth to transmit one-way audio. No problem. The green light was given: Go.

Minutes later, the undercover officer approached his target, Song Yang, just inside her building’s entrance. He wore an olive-green jacket, jeans and a cap. She wore a short winter coat, a red-and-black scarf, leggings and one of her signature headbands — with a small bow that resembled a butterfly.

The officer could not have known that this woman had just attempted a video chat with her younger brother, who was still asleep in China. That she had plans to fly home in December. That she had kept her court-mandated appointments with Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization that helps foreign-born victims of sex trafficking. That her fifth and last session with Restore was four days away.

About all he knew was her police nickname for the night: “JD Ponytail.”

Jane Doe Ponytail.

She led him up the worn stairs. She gave him a peck of a kiss in the hall, and opened her apartment door. Another woman, brand-new to Flushing and known as Momo, was already occupied with a man in the second bedroom.

Song Yang walked her client to her bedroom, where, according to the police, she offered sexual intercourse for the reduced price of $80. He consented to the arrangement and, heading to the bathroom, managed to utter the code word into his transmitter that a positive — that is, illegal — agreement had been reached. He also hoped to signal to colleagues that it was time to move in, but a wary Song Yang prevented him from having privacy, telling him to keep the bathroom door open.

“This is bad service,” the officer said.

Once in the bedroom, Song Yang became even more suspicious. Why aren’t you taking off your clothes? she asked. Are you a cop?

No, he answered. But he complained again about the service and grabbed his hat, prepared to leave. She pushed him out and closed the door.

Responding to the undercover officer’s signal, the three idling police vehicles turned onto 40th Road, smack into its everlasting gridlock. Four officers got out and hustled to the building. Climbing the dreary stairs, they passed their undercover colleague, who pointed to Song Yang’s door as he descended — and as she watched on the monitor in her apartment.

With the police demanding that she open the door, and preparing to break it down, a panicked Song Yang hurried to the apartment’s north balcony. The other woman, Momo, emerged naked from her bedroom to investigate the noise, but hustled back to hide when she realized it was the police.

The balcony was not equipped with surveillance cameras, leaving what happened next to the imagination. It is possible that Song Yang was hoping to escape, perhaps by reaching for a wire that ran vertically past her balcony. It is possible that she was trying to land on the protruding metal sign of the restaurant below. It is also possible that she intended to kill herself.

It is fact that she hit the pavement directly in front of the undercover officer she had pecked on the cheek just five minutes earlier. His supervisors say that the officer remains shaken to this day.

Later that night, while Song Yang was lying in a hospital bed with multiple fractures to her face, head and body, the police placed her under arrest. She died in the morning — and the arrest was, in the parlance of the police, “voided.”

In the dark of an early December morning, two weary travelers shuffled through the multicultural scrum of Kennedy Airport. One was a tall, reedy man named Song Hai; the other, a slight, older woman named Shi Yumei, whose protracted weeping on the long flight from Beijing had concerned an attendant.

Song Yang’s mother and brother had traveled 7,000 miles to better understand the how and the why of her death.

A telephone call from her husband several nights earlier had disrupted everything. Song Yang is dead, he had said. Police say she jumped from a building.

Her distraught parents had telephoned their other child, Song Hai, to deliver words so heavy that he dropped his smartphone, cracking its glass. Not accepting what he heard, he sent a WeChat message to his sister that depicted a pair of clinking coffee mugs, along with a gentle request to please call home.

The lack of an answer was the answer.

The mother and brother spent their first two weeks in Flushing tending to the affairs of death. Then, on a dismal day of late December rain, they made their way to the Chun Fook funeral home, a few blocks from 40th Road. Though some had recommended a modest ceremony, the family had insisted on a more elaborate service, in a spacious room with a chandelier.

The dark wood coffin sat at the front before rows of chairs that would remain empty. No women from 40th Road. No Lao Li. A pair of vertical scrolls with parallel aphorisms written in Chinese calligraphy — “Put Down Your Burdens and Return to the Lord” and “Take Up Tranquillity and Celebrate Everlasting Life” — hung on either side.

One minister delivered prayers in English, while another repeated those prayers in Mandarin. The few mourners included Song Yang’s close friend Paul Hayes; the community advocate Michael Chu; Chen Mingli, the lawyer who had tried to help her seek permanent residency; her husband, Chau Chuong, now 78, who had come from California, where he had been living for his health; and her mother and brother, their heads bowed and hands folded.

The ceremony ended with the reading from the Book of Common Prayer that we are all from dust, and to dust we shall return. Alleluia, the mourners mumbled. Alleluia.

Then it was a short drive along the Grand Central Parkway to the All Souls Chapel and Crematory at St. Michael’s Cemetery. This is where Song Yang’s battered body was returned to dust, and where, in his frustration and grief, her brother vowed justice and punched a wall.

The official explanation for his only sibling’s death made no sense to Mr. Song. After all, she had already paid for her flight home to celebrate their mother’s upcoming birthday and to meet, for the first time, his 5-year-old son. Suicide was not possible, he reasoned. Darker forces might be at play. He had already begun his own investigation.

One snowy night soon after arriving from China, Mr. Song appeared at his sister’s 40th Road building with Mr. Hayes. Their plan was to break into her apartment, collect her belongings — and, if possible, retrieve any surveillance video.

Mr. Song, a learning specialist by trade, and Mr. Hayes, a computer consultant, crept up the 50 tiled steps to the fourth-floor door, which was secured with a locked chain. Fearing the noise of the hammer and small acetylene torch they had planned to use, Mr. Hayes hustled to a Home Depot a mile away and returned with a hacksaw.

After a few minutes of sawing, the chain gave way, and the two men pushed open the dull-gray door to enter the setting of a life interrupted. The police had taken the surveillance equipment, but everything else made it seem as if Song Yang might return at any minute.

In the two bedrooms, rumpled sheets. In the kitchen, a Pepsi and a half-empty bottle of Bacardi, sliced carrots and apples, and the black chair that Mr. Song recognized as the one his sister sat in while video-chatting with her family. In the living room, a raised table with a red curtained skirt, on which sat a CD player, a pair of sunglasses and a lucky cat figurine. Placed neatly on the floor, a pair of pink shoes.

On the snow-dusted front balcony, a broom, an upside-down bucket, a stool, a few plastic bags containing fruit and eggs. And, just beyond, the beckoning lights and shadows of the street below.

Song Hai returned often to 40th Road, a spectral presence in his dark hooded coat and black cap, a cigarette cupped in his hand. He cajoled and confronted the sidewalk’s denizens, asking questions, taking photographs, recording conversations. He saw himself as a lone-wolf investigator, working to prove that corrupt officers of this strange city had thrown Song Yang over the railing.

His ever-evolving theory:

That his sister had been sexually assaulted by a police officer. That she had filed a complaint. That the subsequent police lineup was fixed to protect the assailant. Then it was payback, which explained why, of all the women along 40th Road, only Song Yang was arrested in September, and was about to be arrested again in late November.

As is standard when a death occurs during a police action, the Queens district attorney and the police department’s Force Investigation Division were investigating. But Mr. Song was already beginning to believe that nearly every corner of the American criminal justice system — from the police to the medical examiner — was colluding to hide the truth.

He patrolled downtown Flushing. He interrogated women and shopkeepers. He plastered the streets with leaflets featuring photographs of his sister and promising a “Big Reward!” The plea appeared in Chinese and in fractured English:

Hello! When you saw the photo, SiSi (Song Yang) was no longer alive. She fell from and died on 11/25/2017 at 135-32 4FL in Flushing. Families as well as the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau are eager to find out the truth of her death. If you have ANY CLUES, please contact me ASAP. Absolutely Confidential … (Her brother Song Hai)

The dozens of responses yielded little. One man called to say that Song Hai’s sister was a whore — a word he did not quite understand, and so he continued the conversation: Yes, yes. And do you have information?

His sleuthing occasionally paid off. One evening, amid the Main Street crush, Mr. Song spotted a man he recognized from his sister’s WeChat photographs: short, solidly built, and with a distinctive, block-shaped head.

Excited, Mr. Song crossed the street and, right at the Roosevelt Avenue intersection, near the subway entrance, grabbed the man by the arm. Mr. Song recalled what happened next:

Are you Li? he asked.

You’re mistaken, replied the startled Lao Li, the boss who controlled Song Yang’s apartment. My name is not Li.

Mr. Song waved down a passing police car, as a crowd gathered and the agitated man in his grip implored him not to involve the authorities. Let’s resolve this ourselves.

The two officers understood Mr. Song’s intentions, he later recalled, but they explained that this was America, not China, and that he was unlawfully detaining a man who wasn’t present when his sister’s fall took place. They separated the men, and Lao Li floated away in the rush-hour stream.

Later that evening, an angry Lao Li telephoned Mr. Song. In the conversation that Mr. Song duly recorded on his phone, Lao Li vented about the audacity of summoning the police — “If you don’t have evidence, how could you say I’m the boss?” — before giving his version of the realities on 40th Road.

He said that he rented the apartment to Song Yang for $3,100 a month — hardly the $12,000 that was rumored on the street. “She and I really didn’t have any employment relationship,” he said. “Just that at the start of the month, I would take the rent.”

Lao Li said she called him her “boss” so that others wouldn’t bully her, but he insisted that she was her own boss: prone to arrest, sure, but also smart, tenacious and tough.

Throughout the conversation, Lao Li characteristically remained at a distance — even when describing that fateful night. He rushed to 40th Road after receiving a call that “SiSi had jumped from the building,” he said, but by the time he got there, “your sister had already been taken away.”

As Mr. Song conducted his frustrating investigation, his mother spent her days in the numbing cocoon of grief. Once so proud of her entrepreneurial children, Shi Yumei was now a sorrowful woman in a foreign world, gingerly navigating a small cart down crowded Main Street, her pale gray knit cap pulled low, her mind occupied with worry. How, for example, would she and her son, here on temporary visas, survive on the little money they had brought with them?

An encounter with a bellowing street evangelist eventually led her to St. George’s, the old Episcopal church on Main Street whose steeple has long been a Flushing landmark. Its congregation embraced her, smothering her with food, clothing and compassion. Locking hands and forming a prayer circle one day, strangers asked God to grant peace to this new person among them, who felt so blessed that she began to volunteer at the church’s food pantry as a way of giving back.

One cool April morning, she donned an orange apron and joined 40 other volunteers, nearly all of them immigrants, as they prepared for the ritual that unfolds every Wednesday along the old church’s north side, opposite a Lucille Roberts fitness center. They unloaded the crates from trucks, bagged the fruit and vegetables, and established an assembly line of food down the sidewalk: turnips and fennel, lettuce and apples, onions and melons.

The decade-old operation had gradually adapted to the ways of Flushing, with organizers taking note of the tensions caused by different understandings of personal space among ethnic groups. The solution: two alternating lines — one that was entirely Asian, and the other a mix of black, white and Latino.

On this morning, the Asian line ran alongside the church’s cemetery wall, and the other line stretched down to a firehouse. But things moved apace, thanks in large part to the high-spirited efficiency of the volunteers — including Shi Yumei, who smiled at her sense of belonging as she proffered bags of onions.

Each evening, after long days of volunteering and investigating, mother and son returned to a worn apartment catering to transients, not far from 40th Road. Some lodgers paid $20 a night for a narrow bed in the living room. But with some financial help from the church and a few nonprofit organizations, Mr. Song and Ms. Shi managed to pay $1,000 a month for a cramped bedroom and first dibs on a shared kitchen.

They slept beside a closet packed with clothes and accessories that Song Yang left behind. Tears were shed over a single strand of black hair found on a coat. They lived in the presence of her absence.

To find sleep, the mother would hold a small audio device close to her ear and listen to lively recorded stories about historical Chinese triumphs, cuddled beside one of her daughter’s plush teddy bears. This way, Ms. Shi said in Mandarin, “I know my daughter is here with me.”

Two feet away, her son would lie in his twin bed near the window, cigarettes on the nightstand, spent beer cans under the bed, another Long Island Rail Road train clattering in the distance. Here he would try to piece together the stray bits of his investigation.

He had found a grainy photograph from his sister’s WeChat feed of the stocky, bald man who had supposedly sexually assaulted her, and convinced himself that a bald police detective, appearing in cellphone videos taken on the sidewalk after his sister’s fall, was the same man.

He had also obtained photographs and forensic notes from the autopsy. Poring over the graphic images, he decided that the discoloration around his sister’s face came from a beating, and that her broken fingernails suggested some kind of struggle — and, therefore, a cover-up.

This was America. Not China. Exactly.

On a sunny spring day, those invested in the proceedings of the human trafficking court filed into the basement courtroom in Kew Gardens. Among them were Song Hai, in a black blazer and brown work boots, and Shi Yumei, her blue-and-orange scarf recalling the colors seen on the Staten Island Ferry, on Knicks uniforms, on Mets baseball caps — the colors of New York.

They took their seats among the defendants, including a woman in glasses often seen calling out to men on 40th Road. Mr. Song sat with his hands clasped and back erect; his mother was bent forward, as if in prayer. They waited.

An air of empathy defines the court, which is intended to encourage women engaged in the commercial sex trade to avail themselves of counseling and other diversionary programs. On most Fridays, the judge, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are women, and the lanky head court officer is determined to make the defendants feel safe and respected. He does his best to dissuade any pimps or bosses from taking a seat.

Prominent in the dozen pews are Chinese women facing the usual massage-parlor-related charges of prostitution or unlicensed massage. Court-appointed lawyers from the Legal Aid Society or Queens Law Associates usually guide them through the process, along with a Mandarin-speaking interpreter and advocates from one of the nonprofit groups specializing in sex-trafficking outreach and immigration services.

Defenders of the program maintain that until a better approach is developed, arrests — followed by appearances in trafficking court — provide the best chance for intervention. Even if a woman returns to 40th Road, they say, she will at least have the names of people to contact if she needs help.

Others, though, counter that for many women caught in the commercial sex trade, an arrest only exacerbates their trauma. Besides, they say, one doesn’t need to be arrested in order to receive helpful contact information.

Judge Toko Serita, who has presided over the trafficking court for a decade, summons the defendants, one by one, to stand before her, as a court officer calls out, “Mandarin interpreter required, and present.” The judge has short black hair, glasses and a welcoming, even reassuring demeanor, whether it’s the defendant’s first appearance or her last.

How are you today? … Are you studying English? … This is a really good streak … I want to congratulate you for completing all your sessions with Garden of Hope … Stay out of trouble, lead a law-abiding life for the next six months, and the record will be expunged … Good luck to you.

On this morning, several cases were heard before a court officer finally called out: “03585 dash 17. Yang Song!”

Even though she was five months dead, Song Yang still had an open criminal case: the arrest on a prostitution charge two months before her fatal fall. The sprawling New York City judicial system may seem overwhelmed, even chaotic, but in the end its books must be balanced. This meant that a formality known as an “abatement by death” — a dismissal, in effect — was required to close the short chapter on Song Yang, or Yang Song, as the system sometimes rendered her name.

Judge Serita was informed that the deceased defendant’s mother and son were present and would like to thank the court. The request stilled the courtroom. The judge sighed in sympathy.

“Thank you,” she said. “Um. All right. This case is now going to be abated by death.”

She went on to tell Song Yang’s mother and brother that everyone involved in the trafficking court was deeply saddened by their loved one’s “tragic and untimely death.” She expressed hope that they “somehow find peace with these unfortunate circumstances.”

Mr. Song and Ms. Shi acknowledged her words with nods. They walked out of the courtroom, past an “Exit Only — No Re-Entry” sign, and into the late-morning brightness. He lit a cigarette. She adjusted her backpack. They continued on in silence.

Two weeks later, the mother and brother returned to Kew Gardens for a long-awaited meeting with investigators from the Homicide Investigations Bureau of the Queens district attorney’s office. With everyone seated around a dark-wood conference table in a windowless room, the investigators shared the results of their monthslong inquiry, including 22 minutes of video culled from cameras positioned both inside and outside the building at 135-32 40th Road.

In these images, their beloved daughter and sister appears in the fullness of life. Here is Song Yang, leading the undercover officer up the stairs. Here she is, kicking him out of the apartment, watching the officers ascend the stairs — rushing in alarm toward the balcony.

Here, from street level, something falling, and then a beloved daughter and sister, crumpled on the pavement. Watching the video again a few days later, Ms. Shi noticed the headband that flies off her daughter’s head.

“She especially loved butterflies,” the mother said.

The video over, the investigators laid out their sober findings: The police involved in a bust-and-buy sting on 40th Road the night of Nov. 25, 2017, did not cause the death of Song Yang. To begin with, no officer was even in the fourth-floor apartment when she jumped or fell.

Her brother scoffed at this conclusion. He said something rude in Mandarin. Meeting over.

Night comes to 40th Road.

The fruit and vegetable peddlers have boxed up and boarded up, and the last patrons of air-conditioned restaurants have stepped out to evaporate in the late June warmth. But the women are here, as always, calling out an invitation that sounds almost like a plea.

Massage?

They stand outside the same doorways, including the one for 135-32, where Song Yang once lingered. Very soon after she died, her fourth-floor apartment became the address for a new massage business. Its name: Heaven on Fourth.

A few steps away, at the entrance to another of the gloomy buildings owned and operated by prominent Flushing businessmen, a thin woman in a brown dress sits in a metal chair with a square of Styrofoam for padding, studying her cellphone through the smoke of her cigarette. Then she pulls out a bag of overripe cherries from the building’s broken mailbox and, between the repeated offerings of her services, spits out the pits and tosses them into the street, not far from a lamppost adorned with a poster bearing the face of Song Yang (“Big Reward!”).

To the woman’s right, roasted duck carcasses hang in the window of the Corner 28 restaurant, where a man is mop-swabbing the sticky floor. To her left, sorrowful creatures loll in a seafood restaurant’s murky tank. Above her head, scaffolding provides protection from the stucco that city officials say has been coming loose from the buildings. Rain begins to fall.

A nearby tanker truck groans as it sucks away a restaurant’s used cooking oil through a large hose that snakes across the sidewalk and into the bowels of a building. The women adapt: They step over the hose, ignore the smell, raise their voices.

One of the women leads a potential client to a building’s threshold, but he keeps walking; she mutters an epithet in Mandarin. Then a buzz-cut junkie, who just hours before was asleep on the pavement, begins to harass the women, disrupting their business by hovering, touching, dropping his sweatpants and simulating sex acts. He enters one of their buildings and urinates in the hall.

The rain hardens. The whoosh of a shuttered metal gate resounds. A kitchen worker emerges at the end of his shift and wishes the women a good night. They wish him the same.

It is all ephemeral, of course, a realization reinforced daily by the laborers trudging down this street to the subway, bone-weary from working another of the construction projects that are redefining Flushing. Few today remember the Old Roma restaurant that once thrived on 40th Road, just as few tomorrow will remember a Chinese immigrant who once died on 40th Road.

For now, at least, if you linger on the street, you will encounter those who remember her — including, occasionally, clients still looking for SiSi.

You might see Lala, and Kiki, and Yoyo, along with other women who competed with Song Yang. You might see her lanky brother, Song Hai, who still struggles to understand why no one will be brought to justice for all that his sister went through in her adopted country. His grief smolders, as does his distrust of America.

Lastly, you might see Song Yang’s mother, Shi Yumei.

One evening, Ms. Shi paused outside a building where some women were offering massages to passing men. Raising the drooping bags held in her hands, she explained that she had just left the food pantry at the Episcopal church on Main Street, where she had recently been baptized. She said the pastor had emphasized the importance of sharing what you have.

The mother placed a bag of sweet potatoes in the doorway that had once been Song Yang’s domain. It was an offering of sorts, a gift to women like her daughter. Then she was gone, assumed into the Flushing blur.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/11/nyregion/sex-workers-massage-parlor.html |

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail, in 2018-10-12 12:47:26

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Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail https://ift.tt/2Efc7GX

Nature

A woman begins to fall. With her long dark hair in a ponytail and her black-and-red scarf loose around her neck, she is plummeting from a fourth-floor balcony, through the neon-charged November night.

Below awaits 40th Road, a gritty street of commerce in the Flushing section of Queens. Chinese restaurants and narrow storefronts, and dim stairwells leading to private transactions. Strivers and dawdlers and passers-by, all oblivious to what is transpiring above.

But before the pavement ends the woman’s descent, a few feet from a restaurant’s glittering Christmas tree, imagine her fall suddenly suspended — her body freeze-framed in midair. If only for a moment.

She toils in the netherworld of Flushing massage parlors, where she goes by the street name of SiSi. A youthful 38, she is in a platonic marriage to a man more than twice her age; harbors fading hopes of American citizenship; and is fond of Heineken, Red Bull and the rotisserie chicken at a Colombian place on Kissena Boulevard. Among her competitors, she is considered territorial and tireless.

It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and SiSi is in a shabby building’s top-floor apartment, for which she pays her “boss” a hefty fee. She has returned from a market with provisions. She has tried calling her younger brother in China, but he is asleep. She has been on the phone with friends and clients, unaware that she is in the sights of a 10-member police team working vice.

She heads downstairs to stand at her building’s entrance, a necessity of her job. Soon she is leading a man back upstairs — an officer working undercover — as her closely held cellphone casts a glow about her face. Their awkward conversation in her apartment convinces him that SiSi has broken the law, just as it convinces SiSi that he is a cop. She pushes him out and closes the door, though not to the inevitable. She knows from experience what comes next:

More police. Tromping through the dusky vestibule of her building, across the worn scarlet rug and up the 50 tiled steps. Past the Chinese sign that says if you’re looking for the driving school, you’re in the wrong place. Then right to her door.

The handcuffs. The hurried escort to a police vehicle. The humiliation. Again.

SiSi watches the officers ascend on the video monitor she keeps near the door. Under the fixed gaze of one of those lucky cat figurines perched on a table, its paw raised in a wish of good fortune, she begins to pace.

Now they are pounding on the door and shouting Police! Open up! SiSi rushes to the apartment’s north balcony, with its panoramic view of the street hustle below. Day and night, sun or sleet, this is where she and her sister competitors sing their plaintive song to passing men: Massage? Massage?

On the narrow balcony, barely two feet deep, she keeps a broom, a bucket and a small blue stool. Up she steps — and now she is falling, plunging toward the hard tenth of a New York mile that is 40th Road.

A tenth of a mile. Where Mandarin trumps English and a glance trumps the spoken word. Where sex is sold beside cloudy tanks of fish and crabs. Where seedy quarters controlled by local powers are rented to illicit massage operations, and the police make sporadic sweeps, and immigrant women are arrested again and again, and few in this city take notice.

Gravity prevails.

The undercover officer, his job done, exits the building and turns right — at the very moment that the woman who has just offered him intimacy for money hits the pavement at his feet. A woman known along 40th Road as SiSi, but whose given name was Song Yang.

In the Google Maps of the mind, pull back from this tiny street to take in the borough’s 178-square-mile sprawl: a pulsating hive of parkways and boulevards, apartment buildings and single-family homes, two airports, a major league ballpark, remnants of a world’s fair — all bracketed north and south by ocean, river and bay.

A striving borough of comity and contradiction, Queens is both the birthplace of the American president — elected in part on an anti-immigration platform — and home to 2.3 million people, nearly half of them foreign-born. With hundreds of languages spoken here, it may be the most linguistically diverse place on earth.

Every day, airplanes alight at Kennedy International Airport in southeast Queens, their passengers including many immigrants who join the borough’s anonymous, aspirational ranks. They chop the vegetables, wash the dishes, clean the toilets, mow the lawns, drive the hired cars.

And some wind up in the commercial sex trade. Making money for a pimp in an airport motel in South Jamaica. Waiting for the next client in a dingy building along Roosevelt Avenue in Corona. Or, like Song Yang, standing on a Flushing street on a cold November night, hiding behind her cute nickname, calling out to men. Playing her role in a shadow economy that benefited others through the exorbitant rent she paid.

“I hear she was No. 1: young, pretty, and her service was great,” said Michael Chu, a travel agent and community advocate who worked across the street from her on 40th Road. “People just lined up for her.”

For years now, Flushing has been an ever-replenishing repository of immigrants entangled in the underground sex economy. The commonplace raids of illicit massage operations across the country routinely lead to the arrests of women with Flushing addresses.

These parlors disappear and reappear with regularity, undermining the police crackdowns often prompted by neighborhood complaints. The industry’s opaqueness adds to the confusion. Some parlors have legitimate state licenses; some legitimate operations have masseuses making sex-for-money side deals; and some are illegally unlicensed, with no interest at all in addressing someone’s sore neck.

Emotionally manipulated by their bosses, ashamed of what they do, afraid to trust, the women rarely confide in the police or even their lawyers about their circumstances. They might be supporting a family in China, or paying back a smuggling debt, or choosing this more profitable endeavor over, say, restaurant work. No matter the backstory, the police say their collective silence further complicates law-enforcement efforts to build racketeering and trafficking cases against the operators.

But society has become increasingly aware of the complexities and inequities of the commercial sex economy, including a criminal justice system that has tended to target the exploited — often immigrant women and members of the transgender community — while rarely holding accountable their customers and traffickers.

In early 2017, New York’s police commissioner, James O’Neill, announced at a news conference that he would redirect his vice division to address prostitution and sex trafficking. This would include training intended to alter what he called the “law-enforcement mind-set.”

“We’ve already switched much of our emphasis away from prostitutes, and begun focusing much more on the pimps who sell them and the johns who pay for their services,” he said. “Like all crime, we can’t just arrest our way out of this problem.”

Since the establishment of this new “mind-set,” the police have continued to struggle at building criminal cases against the operators. But prostitution arrests in New York City have dropped more than 20 percent in the last year, while the arrests of customers have spiked.

Still, this change in attitude at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan had not necessarily crossed the East River to benefit an immigrant now lying on her side, unable to speak, gazing up at a plainclothes officer trying to calm her until an ambulance arrived. Beside a spent cigarette, her blood pooled on the pavement she had so often worked.

By morning, Song Yang would be dead, shattering a tight Chinese family that would never accept the police version of events. Her death would also come to reflect the seemingly intractable nature of policing the sex industry, and cast an unwelcome light on the furtive but ubiquitous business of illicit massage parlors.

In the epic of Queens, this stretch of 40th Road is little more than an asphalt hyphen. But along its short expanse exist worlds within worlds within worlds.

Baba, I want to go, I want to go.

I want to go to work, the little girl would say to her parents. I want to pick ginseng. She was a born worker, their Song Yang.

She and her younger brother lived with their parents in a remote village in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, where they grew crops on land allotted to them by their local village committee. Little Song Yang was especially efficient at harvesting the family’s ginseng crop, her mother, Shi Yumei, recalled. “The more her father praised her, the harder she worked.”

Her father, Song Xigui, eventually found moderate success selling construction-grade sand he bulldozed from a nearby river, and by the 1990s the family had replaced its thatched-roof home with a modern brick house that included two “kang” bed-stoves, heated slate platforms that provided warmth during the severe winters. Still, they continued to work the crops, with Song Yang often responsible for running home to light the stove, cut the vegetables and mind her brother.

As she grew older, she began to collect specimens of the enchanting butterflies zigzagging down by the river, and became meticulous in preserving their fragile iridescence. When friends came for boisterous sleepovers, they would marvel at her book of butterflies, and take turns asking to keep one.

Butterflies became Song Yang’s gift.

At 19, she moved 2,200 miles south to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth, where she became one of the thousands of young Chinese women who labored in sweatshops to produce apparel bearing the guilt-absolving label “Made in America.” Sharing a room with five other women in a dormitory, she covered her bottom-bunk bed with a silken cloth curtain, and adorned her small rectangle of privacy with family photographs.

Saipan’s garment industry was shrinking by the early 2000s, and Song Yang left to become a waitress on the island. She married a worldly divorced father named Chau Chuong, an American citizen who had worked for years in New York’s restaurant grind. He was so much older — 67 to her 27 — that her family was slow to accept him.

In 2006, the couple opened a small Vietnamese restaurant on Saipan that became so successful they opened a second place, with 150 tables. He worked the kitchen and she worked the front. “She attracted a lot of friendly customers,” her husband recalled.

Her brother, Song Hai, joined her after his high school graduation, eventually opening a henna tattoo parlor with a friend. When their mother came for a visit, she posed for photographs beside her daughter’s well-stocked restaurant bar, her smile radiating pride.

“We had a real sense of accomplishment,” Mr. Song said in Mandarin.

But a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, disrupting a main source of tourism to Saipan, as well as the fortunes of Song Yang and Song Hai. The restaurants were sold, the tattoo parlor shuttered.

Photographs from her brother’s wedding in March 2013 capture the last happy times that Song Yang spent with her family. Here she is back home, posing with the bride and groom. Here she is, sharing a restaurant meal with the growing family. Here she is.

A month later, Song Yang joined the hundreds who arrive daily at Kennedy Airport, direct from China. Straight to Flushing she went, like so many before, where she hoped that she and her husband would succeed again as restaurateurs.

But there is the dream of Flushing, and the reality.

With her husband now too old for kitchen work, Song Yang became their sole source of income. A waitressing job failed, as did a short-lived Chinese fast-food venture on Main Street. So she became a home health aide, and took a massage-therapy course in the hope of earning additional money. Then a friend told her of a more lucrative opportunity, to be found along 40th Road.

The understanding of her parents and brother was that Song Yang worked in reflexology. They knew that gifts arrived from New York. That she called regularly for video chats while sitting in a black office chair, sometimes eating a bowl of porridge. That when her nephew was born, she proudly announced on social media that she had become an aunt — a “gugu.”

That she seemed happy, mostly. But there was that time when she refused to video-chat for several days, after which she explained that a man had beaten her about the face. And that other time, when she revealed that a man — a law-enforcement officer, she said — had held a gun to her head while forcing her to perform oral sex. Family members reassured her: She had no choice.

Song Yang told her family last fall that she had booked a flight to China for December, and was looking forward to meeting her nephew for the first time. So far she had connected with him only online, through the popular WeChat app, where her avatar sometimes featured a butterfly.

What kind of present do you want Gugu to bring home? she would ask the child, her image beamed halfway around the world from some exotic place called Flushing.

The thoroughfare known as 40th Road was Grove Street, once.

In the 19th century it had a volunteer firehouse, a nursery and residents with Irish surnames. Just in living memory, there was Harry Barlow’s auto garage, the mimeograph services of Case the Printer, an appliance store proud of its color Zenith television sets and, of course, the Old Roma restaurant — famous for its veal cutlets on linguine, and that yellow sponge cake with pineapple filling.

It is all long gone, replaced by ginger duck rice casserole and a shaved ice treat called red bean baobing. The 40th Road of today is almost entirely Chinese, its restaurant signs often featuring no English at all — one more reminder that the only New York constant is change.

The street’s 20 buildings, including Song Yang’s, are mostly three- and four-story structures from the 1980s and ’90s that evoke a utilitarian, Soviet-bloc drabness. Narrow and claustrophobic, they loom like set pieces for a film noir.

The one-way street itself always feels like a wrong turn, an obstacle course of idling delivery trucks and construction equipment. One end elbows past a small playground; the other runs into the ever-clogged Main Street intersection, where plainclothes police officers can often be seen sitting in an unmarked vehicle in an attempt to deter quality-of-life crimes. Pickpocketing is so prevalent that a nearby grocery displays signs of a stick figure reaching into another stick figure’s handbag.

Above, looming airliners grumble as they approach LaGuardia Airport, across Flushing Bay. Just behind 40th Road, Long Island Rail Road trains grind and whine along the raised tracks. Up and down the block, the earthy aromas of produce stands and restaurant waste commingle with the classical Chinese instrumental music emanating from a soup-dumpling restaurant.

And here, beside the upturned fruit crates and the overloaded garbage bags, stand the women of the massage parlors. In their 40s and 50s, mostly, they check their cellphones, drag on untaxed Korean cigarettes bought in bulk, and chat, but with eyes scanning for unattached men lacking a law-enforcement vibe.

Massage?

The offer is understood, if not explicit. If the man consents, he is led up the stairs of one of the dull buildings, where massage operations are often crammed amid barbershops, driving schools and employment agencies.

Massage parlors offering sex are hardly a recent phenomenon, and business models vary. But the trade along 40th Road is especially audacious. The women stand on both sides of the street — five, 10, a dozen at a time — as ubiquitous as the delivery trucks. In the merciless heat and cold, they sweat and shiver on staked ground, prompting resentful neighborhood complaints about lost business and children exposed to the seamy daily spectacle.

A common arrangement on 40th Road is one in which a “boss” rents an apartment or office from one of the building’s tenants, then provides space to women for a $20 cut of whatever they charge each client. The general expectation is that each woman will generate at least $100 a day for the boss.

But the bosses provide no meaningful protection. The women are at the mercy of the street, where they have been robbed, beaten, raped, thrown down stairs. The surveillance cameras nearly always present are intended less for security, perhaps, than to provide the boss with a way to count the clients who walk through the door.

Over several months, the women along 40th Road shared in Mandarin the stories of how they came to be standing here, offering sex to strangers. They use names like masks. Some have chosen Americanized names — Jenny, for example — while others have been rechristened by bosses with nicknames that sound like Lala, or Kiki, or Yoyo.

They came from all over China, and from myriad backgrounds. One woman said she used to clean houses. Another said she was a former reporter who covered Chinese real estate. Several described the circumstances that left them in economic straits: a failed bus company, a bankrupt jade dealership, a gambling-addicted husband.

One woman often positions herself near a standpipe at the corner of Main Street, so as to be the first to approach any man venturing west. She is in her 60s, small-framed and usually dressed in layers, with long hair dyed black. She said in a raspy voice that she was from the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi, and that she was trying to pay off a debt incurred by her adult son in a business deal gone wrong.

She had visited two job agencies on 40th Road, looking for work as a nanny, but nothing panned out. And now she was here, on the corner, where her half-joking refrain — “I’m too old” — did not seem to deter clients.

Another woman, who gave her name as Xiao Li — or Little Li — said she was from the city of Dexing, in Jiangxi Province, home to a well-known copper mine, where she once was a welder. Thin and often wearing a simple black dress, she said she had briefly left the street to study legitimate massage — “So my heart could have a little bit of peace” — but had concluded that the classes were a waste of money. Back she came to 40th Road.

“My body can’t take it,” Ms. Li, 50, said. “My body can’t take so many men.”

Others were even more expansive, including a stocky, 40-ish woman with cropped black hair and a lazy eye who called herself Rachel. Eating a sweet baked potato at a dumpling stall on Main Street, she recalled that while working at a job she loathed — waitressing at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle — she began hunting through WeChat forums for leads on other work, and came across an offer that she recalled saying:

Massage Woman to Stand on Street. $20,000 a month. Flushing, N.Y.

Rachel called the number to ask what the job entailed. The boss replied: Everything.

After her first day, Rachel said, “I got home and took a shower, and cried.”

She paused at the memory, and added, “But then I just thought to myself, ‘I have to keep thinking positively.’”

Michael Chu, the longtime neighborhood advocate, has befriended some of the women who stand outside his building on 40th Road, and occasionally offers them assistance with police matters. His office, where an old dog named Scout is usually napping on some cardboard, is furnished with desks left behind by an accountant who moved rather than work beside a massage parlor.

A bespectacled man of 65, Mr. Chu has listened to the travails of these women, whom he calls “sisters.” The beatings, the robberies, the harassment from teenagers in the playground, the pressure to attract enough clients to cover their “rent” to the boss. The hopes they harbor for permanent residence, for having enough money, for finally not doing this.

“They also have an American dream,” Mr. Chu said. “The sisters have an American dream.”

The man spotted her on the street one night after stopping at a 40th Road restaurant known for its cheap and plentiful food. She was pretty, younger than the other women and conversant in English, so he paid for a session. She said her name was SiSi.

His was Paul Hayes. Single, in his early 40s and living in Queens, he carried himself with a seen-it-all air — but she beguiled him. They gradually became lovers, then good friends with vague plans to rekindle their romance someday. But she lived with her husband in an apartment a block away. It was complicated.

She had a good sense of humor, and often solicited his advice — although she ignored him when he recommended bolstering the building’s security system. She also confided about the dangers and vagaries of her work life.

“She really hated doing it,” Mr. Hayes said.

Even so, Song Yang established herself as a fierce competitor in the circumscribed world of 40th Road. Fueled by coffee and Red Bull, she toiled nearly nonstop, as if facing some self-imposed deadline. Word was that she was trying to save up to open her own Vietnamese restaurant, or to buy a house in New York for her aging parents, or to just move on.

Her sharp elbows and inexhaustible style irked some of the other women, leading to arguments, shoves and occasional hair pulling. One competitor recalled that if a man chose another masseuse, Song Yang would tease the client about preferring older women.

But another woman remembered a gentler, more generous Song Yang. She said that when she arrived at 40th Road, Song Yang insisted that she accept several pairs of pants to ward against winter.

Song Yang’s domain was a fourth-floor apartment at 135-32 40th Road, directly above another massage operation. The apartment door faced a boiler room and a makeshift gate that was intended to keep vagrants from sleeping on the roof, but also to protect the hot pepper plants nurtured there by the aged custodian.

As were most things on 40th Road, her rental arrangement was convoluted.

The building was constructed in 1992 by Jentai Tsai, 85, a prominent, even revered, banker in Flushing, and is owned by a real estate company overseen by his son, Eugene Morimoto Tsai. In a brief conversation last month, the younger Tsai, 42, said that he did not know that a woman had fallen from his building last year, or that his building had long been a hub of illicit massage activity.

They both said, and city records confirm, that the building’s managing agent — responsible for collecting rent — was another man of local distinction: Peter Tu, 62, the longtime director of the Flushing Chinese Business Association, a member of Community Board 7 and a district leader for the Democratic Party.

Outside his office around the corner, Mr. Tu at first denied that he was involved with the 40th Road building, but then said that he had merely tried to assist the Tsai family by collecting the $18,500 monthly rent from the main, first-floor tenant, the Shi Li Xiang seafood restaurant. He said he no longer served in this role, had never taken any payment “from the street,” and had no idea what arrangements the restaurant had with the tenants and subtenants upstairs.

“I’m always in the middle,” Mr. Tu said.

A man identifying himself as the boss of the first-floor restaurant began to shout when asked about the tenants upstairs. “How am I supposed to know the names of the people to whom I rent?” he asked in Mandarin. “You want me to go up and ask everyone who they are?”

Above the restaurant, in this building owned and managed by Flushing men of stature, Song Yang paid a flat fee for her apartment — as much as $400 a night, competitors say — to a square-headed, elusive “boss” who goes by Lao Li, or Old Li, a kind of avuncular nickname conveying familiarity with the women who work for him. But the particulars of his subleasing arrangements are as difficult to pin down as he is.

One spring midnight, Lao Li made a rare appearance on 40th Road to mediate a dispute over clients that had erupted among the women. When a reporter approached and called him by name, Lao Li looked up — and bolted. He dashed east down the center of 40th Road, dodging cars, before vanishing into the dark Flushing night.

Although Song Yang and other women often quarreled, they occasionally gathered with Lao Li at the restaurant downstairs, or at a nearby karaoke bar. They’d watch him blow out a candle on his birthday cake, or sing along to a song popular in his native northeast China. At the Chinese New Year, he would hand out red envelopes containing small cash gifts.

In cellphone videos and photographs of these get-togethers, the participants could easily be mistaken for co-workers at an accounting firm, making a night of it. They seemed untroubled by their profession’s many perils, including robbery, bodily harm — and, especially, arrest.

Arrest attracted unwelcome attention. It jeopardized applications for permanent residency. It magnified the humiliation. And it usually meant an appearance at the Human Trafficking Intervention Court, held on Fridays in the basement of the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens, where Mandarin sometimes seems as common as English.

Established nearly 15 years ago, the court set out to treat women in the commercial sex trade less as accused criminals than as victims of trafficking and exploitation. They are told that charges will be dismissed and records sealed if they complete several individualized counseling sessions — focused, say, on job training, or education — with Garden of Hope, Restore NYC, Womankind or another outreach organization. A group called Sanctuary for Families is also on hand to provide immigration services.

Song Yang went through this process more than once. In addition to expunging the arrests from her record, these court appearances provided pause, forcing her to confront the consequences of her work life.

In the summer of 2016, Song Yang began frequent WeChat dialogues with a Flushing lawyer, Chen Mingli, that at first focused on acquiring permanent residency — a process that he repeatedly told her could take months and months. Still, she fretted that her arrest history would thwart her application for a green card.

I am having a lot of anxiety, she wrote in Chinese.

Gradually, though, their conversations came to reflect the darker realities of her 40th Road realm, with sobbing emoticons peppering her messages.

Good morning, Lawyer Chen, she wrote in mid-October 2016. A police officer put a gun to my head today and forced me to perform oral sex.

At the insistence of a friend, she had filed a complaint with the 109th Precinct. Investigators spent the day in her “shop,” looking for evidence and checking the building’s surveillance video, which had captured a heavyset bald man in a suit ascending the stairs.

Mr. Chen assured her that the matter would not affect the status of her immigration case, and implored her to cooperate with the police. But her intense desire to avoid attention, coupled with fear of retaliation from her attacker, overshadowed everything.

The police said that this won’t affect me in any way, but I’m afraid that it will … Lawyer Chen, what am I going to do now? … (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

The police circulated a wanted poster based on a hazy photograph of the man lifted from the surveillance video. A retired United States Marshal, who surrendered after someone mentioned him as a possible suspect, participated in a lineup.

But Song Yang identified another man, wrongly, as her attacker. In addition, a DNA sample from the retired marshal did not match samples taken from Song Yang’s clothing. The case was eventually closed.

Several months later, in late September 2017, she was arrested a third time on a prostitution charge. Handcuffed, led away from 40th Road, held overnight.

A few days later, Mr. Chen asked, You’ve been arrested again?

Song Yang answered:

Yeah. (Sob)(Sob)(Sob)

She explained that she had been forced to make hard decisions and that it had been difficult to suppress her feelings while married to a much older man who seemed increasingly removed from her day-to-day life. She felt “morally depraved,” and sometimes thought about giving it all up and going home — or worse.

I’ve been having thoughts of jumping from a building, but what should I do? she wrote early one morning.

Mr. Chen was never formally hired by Song Yang, but now his central role seemed to be to buoy her spirits.

Don’t be scared, he wrote hours later. Don’t think that way.

Song Yang only sank deeper.

I’ve fallen so low I can’t be saved.

She continued:

Without purpose, without direction, what meaning is there to keep on living?

I used to be a woman who was very strong in her life. I strove for perfection in everything I did. I never thought that my life would turn out this way. I’ve truly failed.

At the end of October, Song Yang made one last visit to Mr. Chen’s office. She confided that another client had badly beaten her a couple of weeks earlier — an assault she had not reported to the police — and showed him photographs of her bruised and swollen face.

“Why am I so unlucky?” he remembers her asking.

The case began with an anonymous complaint: Several women were said to be “selling intimacy” at the building at 135-32 40th Road.

The tip hardly came as a revelation, since shady activities at this address had generated scores of 911 calls over the years. To some, the building even had the aura of being cursed, following a horrific crime in 2010, in which a deranged stalker stabbed a woman in the second-floor hallway and removed her heart and lungs.

Forty-three arrests had taken place in the building over the last decade, more than a few sex-related, the most recent that of Song Yang. Ensnared in an undercover sting in late September, she had tried but failed to hide in the cramped boiler room across from her apartment, and was charged with offering sex for $70.

Her case, which had prompted those despairing messages to the lawyer Mr. Chen, was one of 91 massage-parlor-related arrests in the 109th Precinct in 2017, and one of six along 40th Road. According to court records, none of those arrests were for pimping, solicitation or operating an unlicensed massage parlor.

A few nights after the anonymous complaint, a sergeant and a detective ended a brief surveillance by venturing into the notorious building. The only thing they found suspicious was a handwritten sign in Chinese on the second floor, which they believed to say, in effect, There are no girls on this floor; please go to the third floor.

The police later determined that the sign actually said, “Attention, the driving school is on the third floor next door.”

An undercover officer then telephoned a woman associated with the building who was known as SiSi. They arranged an appointment for the next evening, Saturday, Nov. 25. Her price: $120.

On the appointed day, members of the Queens North Vice Enforcement Squad met at their base in College Point to discuss the seven locations they planned to hit that night. The closest target became the first: the bleak building at 135-32 40th Road.

The vice officers went over their safety plan. They chose their identifying color of the day. They agreed upon the mission’s assorted distress signals and code words, including what the primary undercover officer would say to indicate that sex had been offered for money. Now they were ready.

The 10-member team headed out into the evening, unseasonably mild for late November. They parked along Prince Street, across from the White Bear dumpling place and just short of where the one-way street bends east to become 40th Road. The team leader and two arresting officers sat in the first car, with two more arresting officers in the second car. The third vehicle was for prisoner transport.

The team tested its recording device, which used Bluetooth to transmit one-way audio. No problem. The green light was given: Go.

Minutes later, the undercover officer approached his target, Song Yang, just inside her building’s entrance. He wore an olive-green jacket, jeans and a cap. She wore a short winter coat, a red-and-black scarf, leggings and one of her signature headbands — with a small bow that resembled a butterfly.

The officer could not have known that this woman had just attempted a video chat with her younger brother, who was still asleep in China. That she had plans to fly home in December. That she had kept her court-mandated appointments with Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization that helps foreign-born victims of sex trafficking. That her fifth and last session with Restore was four days away.

About all he knew was her police nickname for the night: “JD Ponytail.”

Jane Doe Ponytail.

She led him up the worn stairs. She gave him a peck of a kiss in the hall, and opened her apartment door. Another woman, brand-new to Flushing and known as Momo, was already occupied with a man in the second bedroom.

Song Yang walked her client to her bedroom, where, according to the police, she offered sexual intercourse for the reduced price of $80. He consented to the arrangement and, heading to the bathroom, managed to utter the code word into his transmitter that a positive — that is, illegal — agreement had been reached. He also hoped to signal to colleagues that it was time to move in, but a wary Song Yang prevented him from having privacy, telling him to keep the bathroom door open.

“This is bad service,” the officer said.

Once in the bedroom, Song Yang became even more suspicious. Why aren’t you taking off your clothes? she asked. Are you a cop?

No, he answered. But he complained again about the service and grabbed his hat, prepared to leave. She pushed him out and closed the door.

Responding to the undercover officer’s signal, the three idling police vehicles turned onto 40th Road, smack into its everlasting gridlock. Four officers got out and hustled to the building. Climbing the dreary stairs, they passed their undercover colleague, who pointed to Song Yang’s door as he descended — and as she watched on the monitor in her apartment.

With the police demanding that she open the door, and preparing to break it down, a panicked Song Yang hurried to the apartment’s north balcony. The other woman, Momo, emerged naked from her bedroom to investigate the noise, but hustled back to hide when she realized it was the police.

The balcony was not equipped with surveillance cameras, leaving what happened next to the imagination. It is possible that Song Yang was hoping to escape, perhaps by reaching for a wire that ran vertically past her balcony. It is possible that she was trying to land on the protruding metal sign of the restaurant below. It is also possible that she intended to kill herself.

It is fact that she hit the pavement directly in front of the undercover officer she had pecked on the cheek just five minutes earlier. His supervisors say that the officer remains shaken to this day.

Later that night, while Song Yang was lying in a hospital bed with multiple fractures to her face, head and body, the police placed her under arrest. She died in the morning — and the arrest was, in the parlance of the police, “voided.”

In the dark of an early December morning, two weary travelers shuffled through the multicultural scrum of Kennedy Airport. One was a tall, reedy man named Song Hai; the other, a slight, older woman named Shi Yumei, whose protracted weeping on the long flight from Beijing had concerned an attendant.

Song Yang’s mother and brother had traveled 7,000 miles to better understand the how and the why of her death.

A telephone call from her husband several nights earlier had disrupted everything. Song Yang is dead, he had said. Police say she jumped from a building.

Her distraught parents had telephoned their other child, Song Hai, to deliver words so heavy that he dropped his smartphone, cracking its glass. Not accepting what he heard, he sent a WeChat message to his sister that depicted a pair of clinking coffee mugs, along with a gentle request to please call home.

The lack of an answer was the answer.

The mother and brother spent their first two weeks in Flushing tending to the affairs of death. Then, on a dismal day of late December rain, they made their way to the Chun Fook funeral home, a few blocks from 40th Road. Though some had recommended a modest ceremony, the family had insisted on a more elaborate service, in a spacious room with a chandelier.

The dark wood coffin sat at the front before rows of chairs that would remain empty. No women from 40th Road. No Lao Li. A pair of vertical scrolls with parallel aphorisms written in Chinese calligraphy — “Put Down Your Burdens and Return to the Lord” and “Take Up Tranquillity and Celebrate Everlasting Life” — hung on either side.

One minister delivered prayers in English, while another repeated those prayers in Mandarin. The few mourners included Song Yang’s close friend Paul Hayes; the community advocate Michael Chu; Chen Mingli, the lawyer who had tried to help her seek permanent residency; her husband, Chau Chuong, now 78, who had come from California, where he had been living for his health; and her mother and brother, their heads bowed and hands folded.

The ceremony ended with the reading from the Book of Common Prayer that we are all from dust, and to dust we shall return. Alleluia, the mourners mumbled. Alleluia.

Then it was a short drive along the Grand Central Parkway to the All Souls Chapel and Crematory at St. Michael’s Cemetery. This is where Song Yang’s battered body was returned to dust, and where, in his frustration and grief, her brother vowed justice and punched a wall.

The official explanation for his only sibling’s death made no sense to Mr. Song. After all, she had already paid for her flight home to celebrate their mother’s upcoming birthday and to meet, for the first time, his 5-year-old son. Suicide was not possible, he reasoned. Darker forces might be at play. He had already begun his own investigation.

One snowy night soon after arriving from China, Mr. Song appeared at his sister’s 40th Road building with Mr. Hayes. Their plan was to break into her apartment, collect her belongings — and, if possible, retrieve any surveillance video.

Mr. Song, a learning specialist by trade, and Mr. Hayes, a computer consultant, crept up the 50 tiled steps to the fourth-floor door, which was secured with a locked chain. Fearing the noise of the hammer and small acetylene torch they had planned to use, Mr. Hayes hustled to a Home Depot a mile away and returned with a hacksaw.

After a few minutes of sawing, the chain gave way, and the two men pushed open the dull-gray door to enter the setting of a life interrupted. The police had taken the surveillance equipment, but everything else made it seem as if Song Yang might return at any minute.

In the two bedrooms, rumpled sheets. In the kitchen, a Pepsi and a half-empty bottle of Bacardi, sliced carrots and apples, and the black chair that Mr. Song recognized as the one his sister sat in while video-chatting with her family. In the living room, a raised table with a red curtained skirt, on which sat a CD player, a pair of sunglasses and a lucky cat figurine. Placed neatly on the floor, a pair of pink shoes.

On the snow-dusted front balcony, a broom, an upside-down bucket, a stool, a few plastic bags containing fruit and eggs. And, just beyond, the beckoning lights and shadows of the street below.

Song Hai returned often to 40th Road, a spectral presence in his dark hooded coat and black cap, a cigarette cupped in his hand. He cajoled and confronted the sidewalk’s denizens, asking questions, taking photographs, recording conversations. He saw himself as a lone-wolf investigator, working to prove that corrupt officers of this strange city had thrown Song Yang over the railing.

His ever-evolving theory:

That his sister had been sexually assaulted by a police officer. That she had filed a complaint. That the subsequent police lineup was fixed to protect the assailant. Then it was payback, which explained why, of all the women along 40th Road, only Song Yang was arrested in September, and was about to be arrested again in late November.

As is standard when a death occurs during a police action, the Queens district attorney and the police department’s Force Investigation Division were investigating. But Mr. Song was already beginning to believe that nearly every corner of the American criminal justice system — from the police to the medical examiner — was colluding to hide the truth.

He patrolled downtown Flushing. He interrogated women and shopkeepers. He plastered the streets with leaflets featuring photographs of his sister and promising a “Big Reward!” The plea appeared in Chinese and in fractured English:

Hello! When you saw the photo, SiSi (Song Yang) was no longer alive. She fell from and died on 11/25/2017 at 135-32 4FL in Flushing. Families as well as the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau are eager to find out the truth of her death. If you have ANY CLUES, please contact me ASAP. Absolutely Confidential … (Her brother Song Hai)

The dozens of responses yielded little. One man called to say that Song Hai’s sister was a whore — a word he did not quite understand, and so he continued the conversation: Yes, yes. And do you have information?

His sleuthing occasionally paid off. One evening, amid the Main Street crush, Mr. Song spotted a man he recognized from his sister’s WeChat photographs: short, solidly built, and with a distinctive, block-shaped head.

Excited, Mr. Song crossed the street and, right at the Roosevelt Avenue intersection, near the subway entrance, grabbed the man by the arm. Mr. Song recalled what happened next:

Are you Li? he asked.

You’re mistaken, replied the startled Lao Li, the boss who controlled Song Yang’s apartment. My name is not Li.

Mr. Song waved down a passing police car, as a crowd gathered and the agitated man in his grip implored him not to involve the authorities. Let’s resolve this ourselves.

The two officers understood Mr. Song’s intentions, he later recalled, but they explained that this was America, not China, and that he was unlawfully detaining a man who wasn’t present when his sister’s fall took place. They separated the men, and Lao Li floated away in the rush-hour stream.

Later that evening, an angry Lao Li telephoned Mr. Song. In the conversation that Mr. Song duly recorded on his phone, Lao Li vented about the audacity of summoning the police — “If you don’t have evidence, how could you say I’m the boss?” — before giving his version of the realities on 40th Road.

He said that he rented the apartment to Song Yang for $3,100 a month — hardly the $12,000 that was rumored on the street. “She and I really didn’t have any employment relationship,” he said. “Just that at the start of the month, I would take the rent.”

Lao Li said she called him her “boss” so that others wouldn’t bully her, but he insisted that she was her own boss: prone to arrest, sure, but also smart, tenacious and tough.

Throughout the conversation, Lao Li characteristically remained at a distance — even when describing that fateful night. He rushed to 40th Road after receiving a call that “SiSi had jumped from the building,” he said, but by the time he got there, “your sister had already been taken away.”

As Mr. Song conducted his frustrating investigation, his mother spent her days in the numbing cocoon of grief. Once so proud of her entrepreneurial children, Shi Yumei was now a sorrowful woman in a foreign world, gingerly navigating a small cart down crowded Main Street, her pale gray knit cap pulled low, her mind occupied with worry. How, for example, would she and her son, here on temporary visas, survive on the little money they had brought with them?

An encounter with a bellowing street evangelist eventually led her to St. George’s, the old Episcopal church on Main Street whose steeple has long been a Flushing landmark. Its congregation embraced her, smothering her with food, clothing and compassion. Locking hands and forming a prayer circle one day, strangers asked God to grant peace to this new person among them, who felt so blessed that she began to volunteer at the church’s food pantry as a way of giving back.

One cool April morning, she donned an orange apron and joined 40 other volunteers, nearly all of them immigrants, as they prepared for the ritual that unfolds every Wednesday along the old church’s north side, opposite a Lucille Roberts fitness center. They unloaded the crates from trucks, bagged the fruit and vegetables, and established an assembly line of food down the sidewalk: turnips and fennel, lettuce and apples, onions and melons.

The decade-old operation had gradually adapted to the ways of Flushing, with organizers taking note of the tensions caused by different understandings of personal space among ethnic groups. The solution: two alternating lines — one that was entirely Asian, and the other a mix of black, white and Latino.

On this morning, the Asian line ran alongside the church’s cemetery wall, and the other line stretched down to a firehouse. But things moved apace, thanks in large part to the high-spirited efficiency of the volunteers — including Shi Yumei, who smiled at her sense of belonging as she proffered bags of onions.

Each evening, after long days of volunteering and investigating, mother and son returned to a worn apartment catering to transients, not far from 40th Road. Some lodgers paid $20 a night for a narrow bed in the living room. But with some financial help from the church and a few nonprofit organizations, Mr. Song and Ms. Shi managed to pay $1,000 a month for a cramped bedroom and first dibs on a shared kitchen.

They slept beside a closet packed with clothes and accessories that Song Yang left behind. Tears were shed over a single strand of black hair found on a coat. They lived in the presence of her absence.

To find sleep, the mother would hold a small audio device close to her ear and listen to lively recorded stories about historical Chinese triumphs, cuddled beside one of her daughter’s plush teddy bears. This way, Ms. Shi said in Mandarin, “I know my daughter is here with me.”

Two feet away, her son would lie in his twin bed near the window, cigarettes on the nightstand, spent beer cans under the bed, another Long Island Rail Road train clattering in the distance. Here he would try to piece together the stray bits of his investigation.

He had found a grainy photograph from his sister’s WeChat feed of the stocky, bald man who had supposedly sexually assaulted her, and convinced himself that a bald police detective, appearing in cellphone videos taken on the sidewalk after his sister’s fall, was the same man.

He had also obtained photographs and forensic notes from the autopsy. Poring over the graphic images, he decided that the discoloration around his sister’s face came from a beating, and that her broken fingernails suggested some kind of struggle — and, therefore, a cover-up.

This was America. Not China. Exactly.

On a sunny spring day, those invested in the proceedings of the human trafficking court filed into the basement courtroom in Kew Gardens. Among them were Song Hai, in a black blazer and brown work boots, and Shi Yumei, her blue-and-orange scarf recalling the colors seen on the Staten Island Ferry, on Knicks uniforms, on Mets baseball caps — the colors of New York.

They took their seats among the defendants, including a woman in glasses often seen calling out to men on 40th Road. Mr. Song sat with his hands clasped and back erect; his mother was bent forward, as if in prayer. They waited.

An air of empathy defines the court, which is intended to encourage women engaged in the commercial sex trade to avail themselves of counseling and other diversionary programs. On most Fridays, the judge, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are women, and the lanky head court officer is determined to make the defendants feel safe and respected. He does his best to dissuade any pimps or bosses from taking a seat.

Prominent in the dozen pews are Chinese women facing the usual massage-parlor-related charges of prostitution or unlicensed massage. Court-appointed lawyers from the Legal Aid Society or Queens Law Associates usually guide them through the process, along with a Mandarin-speaking interpreter and advocates from one of the nonprofit groups specializing in sex-trafficking outreach and immigration services.

Defenders of the program maintain that until a better approach is developed, arrests — followed by appearances in trafficking court — provide the best chance for intervention. Even if a woman returns to 40th Road, they say, she will at least have the names of people to contact if she needs help.

Others, though, counter that for many women caught in the commercial sex trade, an arrest only exacerbates their trauma. Besides, they say, one doesn’t need to be arrested in order to receive helpful contact information.

Judge Toko Serita, who has presided over the trafficking court for a decade, summons the defendants, one by one, to stand before her, as a court officer calls out, “Mandarin interpreter required, and present.” The judge has short black hair, glasses and a welcoming, even reassuring demeanor, whether it’s the defendant’s first appearance or her last.

How are you today? … Are you studying English? … This is a really good streak … I want to congratulate you for completing all your sessions with Garden of Hope … Stay out of trouble, lead a law-abiding life for the next six months, and the record will be expunged … Good luck to you.

On this morning, several cases were heard before a court officer finally called out: “03585 dash 17. Yang Song!”

Even though she was five months dead, Song Yang still had an open criminal case: the arrest on a prostitution charge two months before her fatal fall. The sprawling New York City judicial system may seem overwhelmed, even chaotic, but in the end its books must be balanced. This meant that a formality known as an “abatement by death” — a dismissal, in effect — was required to close the short chapter on Song Yang, or Yang Song, as the system sometimes rendered her name.

Judge Serita was informed that the deceased defendant’s mother and son were present and would like to thank the court. The request stilled the courtroom. The judge sighed in sympathy.

“Thank you,” she said. “Um. All right. This case is now going to be abated by death.”

She went on to tell Song Yang’s mother and brother that everyone involved in the trafficking court was deeply saddened by their loved one’s “tragic and untimely death.” She expressed hope that they “somehow find peace with these unfortunate circumstances.”

Mr. Song and Ms. Shi acknowledged her words with nods. They walked out of the courtroom, past an “Exit Only — No Re-Entry” sign, and into the late-morning brightness. He lit a cigarette. She adjusted her backpack. They continued on in silence.

Two weeks later, the mother and brother returned to Kew Gardens for a long-awaited meeting with investigators from the Homicide Investigations Bureau of the Queens district attorney’s office. With everyone seated around a dark-wood conference table in a windowless room, the investigators shared the results of their monthslong inquiry, including 22 minutes of video culled from cameras positioned both inside and outside the building at 135-32 40th Road.

In these images, their beloved daughter and sister appears in the fullness of life. Here is Song Yang, leading the undercover officer up the stairs. Here she is, kicking him out of the apartment, watching the officers ascend the stairs — rushing in alarm toward the balcony.

Here, from street level, something falling, and then a beloved daughter and sister, crumpled on the pavement. Watching the video again a few days later, Ms. Shi noticed the headband that flies off her daughter’s head.

“She especially loved butterflies,” the mother said.

The video over, the investigators laid out their sober findings: The police involved in a bust-and-buy sting on 40th Road the night of Nov. 25, 2017, did not cause the death of Song Yang. To begin with, no officer was even in the fourth-floor apartment when she jumped or fell.

Her brother scoffed at this conclusion. He said something rude in Mandarin. Meeting over.

Night comes to 40th Road.

The fruit and vegetable peddlers have boxed up and boarded up, and the last patrons of air-conditioned restaurants have stepped out to evaporate in the late June warmth. But the women are here, as always, calling out an invitation that sounds almost like a plea.

Massage?

They stand outside the same doorways, including the one for 135-32, where Song Yang once lingered. Very soon after she died, her fourth-floor apartment became the address for a new massage business. Its name: Heaven on Fourth.

A few steps away, at the entrance to another of the gloomy buildings owned and operated by prominent Flushing businessmen, a thin woman in a brown dress sits in a metal chair with a square of Styrofoam for padding, studying her cellphone through the smoke of her cigarette. Then she pulls out a bag of overripe cherries from the building’s broken mailbox and, between the repeated offerings of her services, spits out the pits and tosses them into the street, not far from a lamppost adorned with a poster bearing the face of Song Yang (“Big Reward!”).

To the woman’s right, roasted duck carcasses hang in the window of the Corner 28 restaurant, where a man is mop-swabbing the sticky floor. To her left, sorrowful creatures loll in a seafood restaurant’s murky tank. Above her head, scaffolding provides protection from the stucco that city officials say has been coming loose from the buildings. Rain begins to fall.

A nearby tanker truck groans as it sucks away a restaurant’s used cooking oil through a large hose that snakes across the sidewalk and into the bowels of a building. The women adapt: They step over the hose, ignore the smell, raise their voices.

One of the women leads a potential client to a building’s threshold, but he keeps walking; she mutters an epithet in Mandarin. Then a buzz-cut junkie, who just hours before was asleep on the pavement, begins to harass the women, disrupting their business by hovering, touching, dropping his sweatpants and simulating sex acts. He enters one of their buildings and urinates in the hall.

The rain hardens. The whoosh of a shuttered metal gate resounds. A kitchen worker emerges at the end of his shift and wishes the women a good night. They wish him the same.

It is all ephemeral, of course, a realization reinforced daily by the laborers trudging down this street to the subway, bone-weary from working another of the construction projects that are redefining Flushing. Few today remember the Old Roma restaurant that once thrived on 40th Road, just as few tomorrow will remember a Chinese immigrant who once died on 40th Road.

For now, at least, if you linger on the street, you will encounter those who remember her — including, occasionally, clients still looking for SiSi.

You might see Lala, and Kiki, and Yoyo, along with other women who competed with Song Yang. You might see her lanky brother, Song Hai, who still struggles to understand why no one will be brought to justice for all that his sister went through in her adopted country. His grief smolders, as does his distrust of America.

Lastly, you might see Song Yang’s mother, Shi Yumei.

One evening, Ms. Shi paused outside a building where some women were offering massages to passing men. Raising the drooping bags held in her hands, she explained that she had just left the food pantry at the Episcopal church on Main Street, where she had recently been baptized. She said the pastor had emphasized the importance of sharing what you have.

The mother placed a bag of sweet potatoes in the doorway that had once been Song Yang’s domain. It was an offering of sorts, a gift to women like her daughter. Then she was gone, assumed into the Flushing blur.

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Nature The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail, in 2018-10-12 12:47:26