By Betsy Scheinbart
Six months after Jin Sheng Liu was brutally murdered making a food delivery, his wife and teenage children remain hopeful that they will find suitable housing before they are evicted from the back room of what used to be Liu’s St. Albans Chinese restaurant.
Bao Zhu Chen Liu, the wife of the slain Golden Wok restaurant owner, met with the city Department of Housing Friday and agreed to change her housing request from Manhattan’s Chinatown to Staten Island.
Millie Molina, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing, said Liu also agreed Friday to apply for rent-subsidized housing in private apartments in addition to her previously filed request for public housing.
“We are hoping that she will find housing before her eviction date,” which has been set for the end of March, Molina said.
It is hard to say when housing will be available, but the wait for an apartment in Staten Island is much shorter than in Manhattan, Molina said.
But Luther Mook, the director of Homecrest Community Services, a Brooklyn senior center that has been assisting Liu since shortly after her husband’s death, was in contact with Liu earlier this week and said she probably would not move to Staten Island.
“We explained the location of Staten Island to her,” Mook said, “and she said it is too remote. She would be isolated with no social contact.”
Liu, who in 1998 left the Chinese province of Fuzhou to join her husband in Queens, has only minimal knowledge of English, said Mook.
She originally requested housing in Chinatown because she has friends there who speak her language.
The language barrier has made it difficult for Liu to find a job, but she is taking English classes in hopes of finding work in the future, Mook said.
On Sept. 1, 2000, Jin Sheng Liu made a late-night food delivery to a secluded Springfield Gardens cul-de-sac, where five teenagers allegedly attacked him, hit him over the head with a brick, and killed him, according to the Queens district attorney.
Four days later, one girl and four teenage boys, one only 14 years old, were arrested and charged with second-degree murder and first- degree robbery in the death of the deliveryman.
The teens are from Springfield Gardens and Rosedale. Preliminary proceedings in their trials were recently moved to April 5 from February.
The restaurant has been closed since the shooting, but Liu and her two teenage children have continued to live there illegally because the property is commercial. It is the only home they have known in the United States, but it contains more bad memories for Liu than happy ones.
“I just want to get out of this apartment,” Liu said in an earlier interview with the Times-Ledger. “It has so many painful memories.”
The attack that killed Jin-Sheng Liu last year was not the first nor the last on a Chinese food delivery man in New York.
Liu was assaulted with a chain while making a delivery on a bicycle in 1992, and again in 1998 he was robbed while delivering a take-out order.
And just last Sunday, a Chinese food deliveryman was attacked in the South Bronx, said Office Cheryl Cox, a spokeswoman for the Police Department.
Reach reporter Betsy Scheinbart by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300 Ext. 138.
