California prosecutors alleged Friday that a man who appears to be a Google engineer went on a rampage against his wife this week, punching her repeatedly in the head until she died and he was “spattered with blood.”
The grisly murder allegedly occurred in Santa Clara, the ritzy Silicon Valley city that sits just miles south of Google’s global headquarters.
The Santa Clara District Attorney identified 27-year-old Liren Chen as the assailant, writing in a news release that officers found him at the scene of the murder with an “extremely swollen and purple” right hand, not far from his wife’s dead body.
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“He had blood on his clothing, legs, arms, and hands and scratches on his arm,” the release said of Chen.
Authorities did not identify Chen’s wife, but said she suffered “severe blunt force injuries to her head.”
Cops were called to the couple’s home to conduct a welfare check after an acquaintance said Chen wasn’t answering his phone and front door, and that Chen could be seen from a window being “motionless on his knees” with “his hands in the air.”
Prosecutors said Chen’s arraignment was delayed Friday because he’s been hospitalized, but didn’t specify what injuries he has.
A LinkedIn profile under Chen’s name showed that he’s a software engineer who worked on a YouTube Shorts recommendation algorithm for Google.
While authorities didn’t name Chen’s slain wife, The San Francisco Standard, citing property records, reported that Chen was married to Xuanyi Yu, a fellow Google engineer. The murder became national news in China on Friday, with photos of the couple appearing on the front page of some of the country’s largest newspapers.
A LinkedIn profile under Yu’s name said she was a software engineer at Google who previously worked at Amazon. Both Yu and Chen studied in China at Tsinghua University and at the University of California San Diego, their LinkedIn pages said.
Google did not respond to an email seeking to confirm Yu and Chen’s employment with the tech giant. Chen faces a murder charge, records show, and he did not have a lawyer as of Friday afternoon.
