Death of Chan Yin-lam

Chan Yin-lam, a 15-year-old student also known as Christy Chan, disappeared on 19 September 2019 after leaving a group of friends at Mei Foo, Hong Kong, and sending a final message saying she was returning home. Surveillance footage from the Youth College attached to the Vocational Training Council, which she had recently begun attending, showed her leaving campus barefoot and walking toward the waterfront near Tseung Kwan O that day. Her phone and stationery were later found near an exit of Tiu Keng Leng MTR station. On 22 September 2019, a fisherman spotted a floating body roughly 100 metres off the coast near Devil's Peak; police recovered the naked corpse of a female initially estimated to be aged 25–30. On 9 October 2019, police confirmed the body was Chan's.

Chan had a documented history of mental illness, including reported psychosis and auditory hallucinations, self-harm, and a prior suicide attempt, according to police and her mother. She had been living in a girls' home prior to her disappearance amid a "complicated" family background and a history of running away. Following a preliminary autopsy, police stated no foul play was suspected and that Chan had died by suicide. This conclusion, and the police's earlier shift in case classification from a requested murder warrant on 27 September to a "dead body found" (not suspicious) designation days later, fuelled public scepticism — compounded by Chan's background as an award-winning competitive swimmer and former diving-team member, which led some to question a drowning-suicide explanation.

Chan's death occurred amid the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests and a broader climate of distrust toward police and government. Some protesters alleged that authorities had killed Chan because of her participation in the protests and had orchestrated a cover-up, claims the Hong Kong police and government denied. Some online commentary questioned whether the woman in campus CCTV footage was actually Chan, or whether her mother, Ho Pui-yee, was genuinely her mother; a DNA test conducted for the coroner's inquest on 9 July 2020 confirmed Ho's identity. Chan's mother stated in an October 2019 TVB interview that, after reviewing the footage, she believed her daughter's death was a suicide, while describing her daughter's mental health struggles and her disillusionment with the protest movement after initially participating. Ho said she had been doxxed and harassed following her daughter's death; on 24 August 2020, two people were arrested for public order offences after Ho was harassed by a crowd leaving a coroner's court hearing.

Chan's body was cremated on 10 October 2019, one day after police confirmed her identity, a timeline that drew criticism from a former forensic pathologist who called the circumstances of the discovery and rapid cremation suspicious and urged further disclosure and a coroner's inquest. Students at the Hong Kong Design Institute campus later staged protests and, in some instances, vandalised school property demanding fuller release of CCTV footage. The coroner's inquest jury unanimously returned an open verdict after the presiding magistrate ruled that evidence was insufficient to establish either homicide or suicide as the cause of death.