The Google engineer facing murder charges has admitted to beating his wife to death with his fist in their $2 million Santa Clara home. When police first found him after the murder, the suspect, Liren Chen’s right hand, was “extremely swollen and purple.”
They also noticed that he had blood on his clothing, legs, arms, and hands. When fire department personnel asked Chen how he hurt his hand, he said, “I punched my wife,” and told them it happened the day before.
A friend of Chen told police he was with Chen and his wife Xuanyi Yu that prior night. He joined them for dinner at their house. According to him, Chen was oddly “quiet and staring blankly for much of the evening.”
The friend informed police that he was concerned about the “noticeable change in Chen’s demeanor.” So he returned to the house the next day, January 16, to check on him.
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Walking back, he saw Chen through a rear window, motionless on his knees with his hands in the air. Again, staring blankly, according to the “statement of facts” filed by police.
After trying and failing to get Chen to respond, the friend called 911. Arriving, officers saw Chen through the window with blood on his jacket and socks. However, he was still unresponsive, so they forced their way in.
They took Chen into custody and found his wife, a fellow Google engineer, lying on the floor in a bedroom directly behind him. Police say she had “severe blunt force injuries” to her head. There was also blood spatter on the ground and the back of the door.
Aside from the serious bruising and blood on his right hand and body, police also found Chen’s sandals in the hallway, splattered with blood. Asked how he hurt his hand, the 27-year-old replied, “I punched my wife,” and said it happened “yesterday.”
No weapon has made an appearance. The detective who wrote the report says that Chen apparently used his bare hands to kill her, “striking her in the head repeatedly.”
Chen remained in custody until his arraignment on Wednesday. He and Yu purchased their home at 714 Valley Way in April last spring for $2.05 million. It is a two-story house, freshly painted with a well-groomed lawn and bushes.
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Neighbors of the couple are in disbelief. Especially because they never saw it coming. “That’s my bedroom window right there,” next-door neighbor Jenny Powell, 43, told DailyMail.com. “I’m shocked. All this was happening, and I had no idea.”
According to Powell, Chen and his wife had lived there just since last April with a cat named Cooper. They reportedly seemed friendly, but the couple mostly kept to themselves.
Another neighbor, Sylvia Atondo, told DailyMail.com that she’d seen the couple just a few times walking down the block. “They seemed friendly when we saw them, nothing out of the ordinary,” she said.
According to Atondo, theirs is a “gossipy” community, so if the couple were often in an argument, they would know. However, there was nothing like that, which is why the neighbors were stunned.
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Google spokesperson Bailey Tomson has commented on the tragedy: ‘We are shocked and deeply saddened by what has happened to Xuanyi. Our thoughts are with her family at this time, and we will work to provide support to them and to co-workers who are processing this tragic news.”
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