A Google software engineer, Liren Chen, 27, is facing murder charges after his wife was found brutally beaten to death in their Santa Clara, California home, according to local prosecutors. Chen was discovered in a state of shock, his hand swollen and bruised, near his wife’s battered body.
The gruesome incident took place in Santa Clara, an affluent city located in the heart of Silicon Valley, not far from Google’s main campus. Authorities were alerted to the situation around 11 a.m. by a worried friend who had been unable to reach Chen or his wife by phone or at their residence, as per the Santa Clara District Attorney’s office.
The friend reported seeing Chen inside the house, appearing motionless on his knees with his hands raised, staring blankly. Upon entering the home, police found his wife’s lifeless body on the bedroom floor, directly behind where Chen had been kneeling. She had sustained severe blunt force trauma to her head.
Chen was found covered in blood, with scratches on his arms and a severely swollen and discolored right arm. He has been charged with murder, but his arraignment has been delayed due to his hospitalization.
Both Chen and his wife, identified as Xuanyi Yu by various sources, were employed by the tech giant. “We are shocked and deeply saddened by what has happened to Xuanyi,” Google spokesperson Bailey Tomson said in a statement. “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.”
According to Chen’s LinkedIn profile, he was a software engineer working on a YouTube Shorts recommendation algorithm for Google. Both he and Yu were alumni of Tsinghua University in China and the University of California San Diego.
The brutal murder has made headlines in China and was featured on the front page of The World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the US. The paper speculated on unverified rumors linking the murder to Google’s recent wave of significant layoffs.
“Domestic violence deaths have been falling in our county but that does not measure the depth and destructiveness of the violence,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement.