Before a Tourist’s Body Was Found, Rebuffed Efforts to Report Her Missing

Li Junyun

Li Junyun, 46, arrived in New York last month with a tourist visa and a single suitcase, “hoping to see what America was like,” a friend said.

Within three weeks, she was dead.

Last Friday night, after eating dinner and having several drinks, Ms. Li and four friends went to Monster Karaoke on Main Street in Flushing, Queens. Twenty minutes into an hourlong singing session, Ms. Li, a Korean citizen born in China, walked out into the cold without her coat, said her friend Lin Dongmei, 51.

“There was no really reason for her to just leave â€" she was just a little drunk,” Ms. Lin said.

She also left her belongings behind â€" wallet, iPhone, passport. “She has nothing. Knows no one. And she doesn’t speak nglish,” said Song Liyan, 45, another friend.

Efforts to enlist official help finding Ms. Li proved agonizingly difficult, her friends said.

An hour after Ms. Li left the karaoke bar, her friends went to the 109th Precinct station house in Flushing to report her missing but were told they had to wait 24 hours, Ms. Lin said. They tried again Saturday night and were told by officers to call 911 and report her missing by phone, Ms. Lin added.

On Sunday, after Ms. Lin called 911, police officers came to her home, where Ms. Li had been staying, and told her that because she was a healthy adult and had not gotten into an argument, there was nothing they could do, Ms. Lin said.

On Monday, after Ms. Lin went to the Korean consulate in Manhattan to seek help, she returned to the 109th Precinct station house, where officers told her that they could not file a missing-person report without explicit permission from Ms. Li’s family, she said. She said off! icers told her and a friend that they were lying and shooed them away. Language problems compounded the difficulty, she said.

On Tuesday, an anonymous caller to 911 reported an unconscious person behind a U-Haul franchise on an industrial stretch of College Point Boulevard along the Flushing River, half a dozen blocks from the karaoke bar, the police said.

Ms. Li’s body was found along a rocky embankment of the river, said the police. There were no visible signs of trauma, the police said, and the medical examiner’s office said it was investigating the cause of her death. The low temperature the night she disappeared was about 35 degrees.

According to the city’s Web site, there are no hard rules about waiting periods for filing a missing-person report.

“No set amoun of time must elapse before you may report someone missing,” the site says. “Use common sense and specific circumstances. In certain cases - if the missing individual is a child, a senior citizen, senile, mentally or physically impaired - an immediate search will be conducted.”

The Police Department issued a one-sentence statement about Ms. Li’s case Thursday night: “The incident is under investigation by our Internal Affairs Bureau.”

Representative Grace Meng of Queens is helping Ms. Li’s family in China get visas to travel to New York and claim her body, Ms. Meng’s office said.

Ms. Li, who worked as a waitress in Korea, was active on the Chinese social-media site Qzone. On Jan. 4, she wrote: “Life. Walking step by step. Tossing out a little, bit by bit. What we walk on, is the road. What we toss out, are our burdens. The road will get longer and longer. The heart stays evermore the same.”