A Google engineer accused of beating his wife to death inside their California home was “quiet and staring blankly” during dinner the night before the murder, according to a friend who dined with the couple.
According to court documents, the anonymous friend had dinner with Liren Chen, who also worked at a tech company, and his wife, Xuanyi Yu, at the couple's $2 million home in Santa Clara on January 17. It is said that Obtained by Daily Mail.
The friend told police she was concerned about a “noticeable change in Mr. Chen's demeanor,” the documents said.
The next morning, neither Chen nor Yu answered the phone, and a friend stopped by their home but still did not answer the door, the Santa Clara District Attorney said.
However, they found 27-year-old Chen “on his knees, motionless, staring blankly with his hands up” inside the room, and called police for a welfare check at around 11am.
So police burst into the house and found Mr. Yu's body with severe blunt force trauma to the head behind the floor of the couple's bedroom, where Mr. Chen was kneeling, officials said.
According to documents cited by the Daily Mail, police said Chen was “splattered with blood” on his clothes, legs, arms and hands, and when questioned by first responders, he admitted that he had “beaten his wife.” “Yes,” he replied. .
The technician's arm was covered in bruises, and his right arm was “extremely swollen and purplish,” prosecutors previously said.
He was charged with murder and remains in custody.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Chen was a software engineer who worked on Google's YouTube Shorts recommendation algorithm. According to her profile, Ms. Yu is also a software engineer at the tech giant, and she previously worked at Amazon.
“We are shocked and deeply saddened by what happened to Ms. Xuanyi,” Google spokeswoman Bailey Thomson told the Post in a statement Saturday night.
“Our thoughts are with her family at this time and we remain committed to providing support to them and our colleagues as they process this tragic news.”
According to their LinkedIn pages, Yu and Chen both studied at Tsinghua University in China and the University of California, San Diego.
According to the outlet, the couple had lived in the Santa Clara home for less than a year after purchasing it for $2.05 million last spring. Neighbors told the magazine they moved into the house in April and it had been mostly quiet.
