#419 Jason Flom with Matt Huang

**Jason Flom** (0:02)
In 2012, an American civil engineer named Matt Huang was offered an intriguing opportunity to evaluate the wastewater and reuse systems in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar as they prepared to host the 2022 World Cup. So Matt, his wife, and their three adopted children embarked on what seemed like an exciting new adventure. But on January 15, 2013, tragedy struck. Their middle child, Gloria, had become mysteriously ill. She was rushed to the hospital where CPR was performed, but she passed away. It was reported that her death was caused by starvation and dehydration, and the Qatari police knew exactly who to blame. But this is Wrongful Conviction.
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today's episode is like a crazy mixture of locked up abroad meets the Twilight Zone meets No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, the Extreme Edition, okay? And you'll understand as we go along what I mean by all those references. We're gonna be telling the story of Matt Huang, who is on the air with us right now. Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you. And like I always say, I'm happier here. Well, I'm happier here because you're not there. But I'm sorry for what you had to go through to be here on the show today. But with us, we have somebody who everybody who listens to the show will recognize. One of my personal heroes, the founder of the California Innocence Project, Professor Justin Brooks. So, Justin, welcome back.

**Justin Brooks** (1:48)
Thank you so much.

**Jason Flom** (1:49)
Now, most of the cases we've covered, they happened right here in the US. But Matt, yours happened halfway across the world in the Middle East, in the nation of Qatar, to be exact. But before we get to all of that, let's hear a little bit about your life before all of this tragedy and insanity took place.

**Matt Huang** (2:09)
I grew up in Southern California in the LA area. I'm a Chinese American. My parents are immigrants, but I'm born and raised in the US. I have a bachelor's degree from University of California of Irvine, and I have a master's degree in environmental engineering from Stanford University. I met and married my wife, Grace, and we adopted three children from Africa. My older son and my daughter, Gloria, are from Ghana. My younger son is from Uganda. Being Chinese ethnically, everyone asked us, especially at that time, why not adopt from China? At that point, China had the one child policy, and I just didn't feel like we wanted to support what they were doing there, because most of their kids were available for adoption because the government forced them to be, and not because they didn't have parents that love them. We picked an adoption agency, and I'm an only child. At some point in the process, we realized, oh, having siblings might be nice. There were a bunch of siblings in the orphanage in Ghana that our adoption agency was working with. That was one of the reasons we ended up going to Ghana for our first adoption.

**Jason Flom** (3:19)
That's when you adopted the two older siblings, one of whom was your daughter, Gloria. Now, at some point after you and your wife adopted your third child, you got what may have, must have sound like a really exciting opportunity halfway across the world in Qatar.

**Matt Huang** (3:33)
At that point in time, Qatar had been awarded the 2022 FIFA World Cup for soccer. They had tons of people who were there to do construction, to do projects, to get ready for that World Cup. My company that I was working for at the time transferred us there. I was working on a project, looking at planning on their wastewater systems and their reuse.

**Jason Flom** (3:58)
You and your family were living in the capital city of Doha. Can you give us a bit of your first impression?

**Matt Huang** (4:05)
There's basically one city for all intents and purposes. It's a pretty small country. It's probably a two-hour drive on a freeway in one direction, and about an hour drive in the other way. It's a monarchy. They're only neighboring countries, Saudi Arabia. It's one of the richest countries in the world because of oil and natural gas. The citizens actually get paid, at least when we were there, it was something like about $2,600 US a month, a person, including children from the government. And that's actually how the monarchy keeps power because they share the oil and natural gas revenues with the citizens. It's got about 2 million people in the country, but 85% of the people are foreigners, which means there are foreign workers that have been brought in. The majority of the people who get brought in to work are in construction and those types of industries. And a lot of these workers are paid $300 a month or less.