West
Google engineer accused in wife's murder sat ‘quiet and staring blankly’ before brutal beating: court docs
The California Google engineer accused of pummeling his wife to death last week hosted guests for dinner the night before, including one who told police the host was staring blankly into space at the dinner table, according to court documents.
Liren Chen, 27, faces a murder charge after police found him “spattered with blood” near the body of Xuanyi Yu on Jan. 16. Both were Google employees at the time of the incident.
“The [reporting party] had eaten dinner with Chen and [the victim] the previous evening at their home, and he was concerned about a noticeable change in Chen’s demeanor,” detectives wrote in a statement of facts related to the case. “Chen was quiet and staring blankly for much of the evening.”
The friend who observed Chen’s bizarre behavior at dinner tried calling in the morning but no one picked up. He returned to the house to check on the couple, peeked in a window and saw Chen kneeling with his hands up, still “staring blankly,” before police had even been called, prosecutors allege.
GOOGLE ENGINEER FOUND ‘SPATTERED IN BLOOD’ FOLLOWING ALLEGED MURDER OF WIFE IN UPSCALE CALIFORNIA HOME: POLICE
Liren Chen was found Jan. 16 inside his home spattered with blood and near his wife’s body, the District Attorney’s Office said. (LinkedIn)
Police arrived and Chen allegedly remained motionless. A responding officer pronounced Yu dead at the scene.
Yu had blunt-force injuries to her head, and Chen’s right hand was “extremely swollen and purple,” according to the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office.
His clothes were covered in blood and so were his hands, legs and arms, prosecutors said. He had minor scratches on his left arm, according to investigators.
Xuanyi Yu stands in front of a mountain range at sunset in her LinkedIn profile picture. (Xuanyi Yu/LinkedIn)
“However, he did not appear to have any lacerations on his body that would have produced this blood,” the detective noted.
A bloody pair of sandals nearby led the investigator to conclude, “I believe Chen was wearing the sandals as he stood or crouched next to [the victim] and struck her repeatedly in the head with his hand.”
Read the detective’s statement
Police asked Chen how he injured his hand, according to the filing.
“I punched my wife,” he allegedly replied. “Yesterday.”
General view of the home in Santa Clara, California owned by Liren Chen, Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. Google engineer, Liren Chen is charged with the beating death of his wife. (Jim Gensheimer Photography)
“We are shocked and deeply saddened by what has happened to Xuanyi,” Google spokesperson Bailey Tomson said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “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.”
Both Yu and Chen studied in China at Tsinghua University and at the University of California San Diego, their LinkedIn pages said.
Google headquarters on Dec. 19, 2023, in Mountain View, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Chen was taken to the hospital after his arrest. He is due in court Wednesday morning for his arraignment.
Fox News’ Sarah Rumpf-Whitten contributed to this report.
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KALISPELL, Mont. — Two app development teams from Code Girls United won the Congressional App Challenge in both Montana districts.
A team with Lily Kirkaldie, Charlie Kotthoff, and Danica Sabo from Great Falls won with their app ‘Cursive Create’.
The app helps teach cursive writing, which the team said is important since cursive is no longer taught in schools.
Three senior students from Browning High School, Aiyahna Green, Kalani Sun Rhodes, and Keesha Guerrero-Gobert, won with their app ‘Sspomo’.
This app provides awareness and resources for people facing mental health challenges, and was inspired by the Blackfeet tribe.
“They were really thoughtful about their community and what was affecting the people that they knew on the reservation, and what they could actually do to help them,” said Code Girls United CEO Marianne Smith.
“What they were seeing in the community was depression and other mental health issues, so they specifically wanted to create an app that would be able to help people that were in that same situation,” said Smith.
Both teams will travel to Washington D.C. for the National Science Fair’s ‘House of Code’, where they will showcase their apps in the U.S. Capitol.
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The event is scheduled for April 21 and 22.
Nevada’s population growth slowed dramatically last year, according to new statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.
New figures from the government agency showed Nevada grew 0.9 percent, which put it in the top 10 states for percentage growth (9th) from July 2024 to July 2025. However, this is down from July 2023 to July 2024 when the state grew by 1.7 percent.
In July 2024, Nevada had 3,253,543 residents, and in July of last year it had 3,282,188. From July 2023 to July 2024, Nevada was the sixth fastest-growing state in the country, which meant it dropped three spots for the time period of July 2024 to July 2025.
Nevada expanded from 3,214,363 residents in July 2023 to 3,267,467 in July 2024, which turned out to be the fastest year-over-year growth rate, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, since before the pandemic in 2019. However, all of these growth rates are below the time frame of 2015 to 2018 when the state saw unprecedented population growth.
Overall, U.S. population growth slowed “significantly” from July 2024 to July of last year with an increase of only 1.8 million people, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. This was the lowest population growth for the country since the early days of the pandemic when the population grew only 0.2 percent in 2021 year-over-year.
This population slowdown across the country follows a “sizeable” uptick in the growth rate in 2024 when the U.S. added 3.2 million people and grew 1 percent, the fastest annual population growth rate since all the way back in 2006.
“The slowdown in U.S. population growth is largely due to a historic decline in net international migration, which dropped from 2.7 million to 1.3 million in the period from July 2024 through June 2025,” said Christine Hartley, the assistant division chief for Estimates and Projections at the U.S. Census Bureau. “With births and deaths remaining relatively stable compared to the prior year, the sharp decline in net international migration is the main reason for the slower growth rate we see today.”
The population growth drop was felt across the country as all four census regions (West, Midwest, Northeast and the South) and every state except Montana and West Virginia saw growth slow or a decline in acceleration.
Five U.S. states experienced population decline from July 2024 to July 2025: California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont and West Virginia.
Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at pblennerhassett@reviewjournal.com.
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