The film Rosemead, which opens in theaters across the country on January 9, draws from the tragic real-life case of Lai Hang, a 49-year-old mother with terminal cancer. Fearing her 17-year-old son George was planning a mass shooting, she shot and killed him while he slept.
Adapted from a 2017 Los Angeles Times article by Frank Shyong, the movie stars as Irene, a mother who conceals her son Joe’s (Lawrence Shou) schizophrenia diagnosis from other parents in her Asian American community due to the stigma associated with mental health. She is doubtful of his therapist’s request for her to be more involved in sessions and is anxious about who will care for Joe after her death.
Below are key details about the real events that inspired the 2025 film.
The real family that inspired Rosemead
Lai Hang attended primary school in Laos and her teenage years in Hong Kong. She studied graphic design at a college in Tokyo before relocating to the United States in 1992. There, she married her husband, Peter, and they established a printing business in Alhambra, California. The shop’s prosperity enabled them to purchase a home in a gated Rosemead neighborhood. Their son, George, was born in 1998.
Peter received a cancer diagnosis in 2012 and passed away during George’s first year of high school. Following his father’s death, George’s behavior began to shift, and he became increasingly isolated from his friends. The Los Angeles Times states that George was later diagnosed with .
Hang felt she had no one to confide in regarding her son’s condition because of her upbringing. As Shyong explains in the Los Angeles Times, many Asian Americans encounter a stigma when seeking mental health support, having “been raised to believe the proper way to respect another family’s pain was to give them privacy and spare them the embarrassment of public suffering.”
The mental health crisis in Rosemead
In the movie, Irene hears other Asian American mothers gossiping that they have seen her son visiting the local family services center, concluding he must be on medication—and therefore possessed by a malevolent spirit.
Joe is tormented by apparitions of his deceased father during therapy and hears whispering voices when with friends. He exhibits paranoia, at one point running away from home and bolting from his classroom during a drill, then pacing the school corridors. The school administration informs Irene that he has been entering the school building after hours.
The film reflects the real-life fact that Hang’s son became “fixated” on mass shooters, such as , who killed nine people at an in in . In reality, Hang began purchasing a handgun just weeks after that shooting, on the very day she discovered she had only months left to live.
In the film, Irene visits a gun store to see if the salesperson recognizes her son. She had discovered open browser tabs on his computer about school shootings and gun details, a hand-drawn school map covered in skulls and words like “hell,” and drawings of corpses with phrases such as “nobody likes you.” The gun salesman reports that Joe was only looking at gas masks.
George’s final days
Shyong used Los Angeles County Sheriff’s records to reconstruct Hang’s last days with her son. On July 27, 2015, she collected her new handgun and checked into a motel with George. In the film, the motel is one where Joe, during therapy, recalls happy childhood memories of dancing on the beds with both parents.
As Shyong reported: “When George fell asleep, Hang shot him twice in the chest, then crawled into bed beside him. For several hours, she stroked his hair as his blood soaked into the mattress. She wanted to say goodbye, she told the officers who responded to the scene.”
In the movie, a stay at the motel of Joe’s happy memories is part of his 18th birthday celebration, where Irene gives him a pair of sneakers he wanted. She then points the gun at him, assuring him they will never be separated before firing. Irene falls to the floor screaming, loses consciousness, and upon waking, calls . The film concludes after Irene’s death, showing a friend attempting to burn photos of Irene and her son as a final request, but she is unable to go through with it.
Hang informed an LA County Sheriff’s detective that she killed her son due to his obsession with violent video games and her fear he would become a mass shooter. She stressed that her motive was to save other people’s lives. “She didn’t shoot herself, she told authorities, because she wanted to punish herself for what she had done,” Shyong reported.
Hang was incarcerated, where her illness caused her to lose sight in her left eye and become partially paralyzed. While awaiting trial, a judge granted her a compassionate release to a nearby hospital due to her cancer, and she died there in December 2015.
The most tragic aspect may be that, although killing her son appeared to be a final option, Hang actually had alternatives. As Shyong notes in the Los Angeles Times: “George was about to turn 18, at which point he would be beyond Hang’s legal control. But she could have asked a court to find him incapable of handling his own affairs and appoint a conservator. She could have convinced police or mental health professionals that he was an immediate threat to himself or others and had him taken into protective custody. That might have led to long-term psychiatric care.”