Death ruled homicide by cyanide

It looked like a heart attack — but a 55-year-old Brooklyn woman’s death four years ago was homicide by acute cyanide poisoning, the city medical examiner says.

The ME’s determination, completed in recent weeks, comes after a years-long investigation of the death of Mei Xiang Li, who was taken off a ventilator at Maimonides Hospital on Jan. 20, 2017, authorities said.

She had been rushed there six days earlier after collapsing at the Sunset Park storefront where she rented space and sold international phone calling cards.

“The doctors told me cardiac,” her son, Peter Zheng, told the Daily News at the time.

But her blood contained abnormally high levels of cyanide, according to test results that came back 10 days after she died. That sparked the lengthy probe to determine if she had been intentionally poisoned by somebody or if she somehow came into contact with the poison some other way.

Li was buried in New Jersey before the initial test results showing cyanide came back — but the NYPD eventually got a warrant to exhume the body for further testing and examination.

Zheng said his mother had loaned close friends several thousand dollars a few years earlier, but he downplayed the possibility that was linked to her death.

But Wendy Weng, who sold insurance from the storefront where Li had her business, said in 2017 that Li was constantly calling her debtors to get her money back.

“She was always upset,” Weng said. “Many people owed her money. She called them every day.”

Cyanide was the murder weapon of choice for Richard Kuklinski, better known as the Iceman, a former mob killer who was convicted in New Jersey in the late 1980s of murdering several people to further his crimes of stealing.

Kuklinski — who died in prison in 2006 — told an undercover federal agent that he had killed people in a bar by spritzing them in the nose with cyanide in bottle of nasal decongestant or pretending to accidentally spill a cyanide-laced drink on them. Kuklinski also discussed with the agent putting cyanide in food.

Cyanide was also used in the 1982 Tylenol murders, in which someone put potassium cyanide in random bottles of Tylenol in the Chicago area, killing seven people.

The murders remain unsolved and led the drug industry to introduce more tamper-proof packaging.