Google Engineer Brutally Beaten To Death, Husband Found 'Spattered With Blood': Police

Police officers performing a welfare check last weekat the home of married Google software engineers found a man “spattered with blood” near the brutally beaten body of his wife, authorities said.

Liren Chen, 27, has been charged with the murder of his 27-year-old wife, the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office said in a statement . Authorities did not identify the victim, but public records and her employer have confirmed that she is Xuanyi Yu.

When officers arrived at the couple’s home at around 11 a.m. on Jan. 16, a friend told authorities Chen was refusing to answer his phone or his door, but he could see him “motionless on his knees” with his “hands in the air” and “staring blankly.”

Officers said they found Yu’s body on the bedroom floor directly behind where Chen was standing when they arrested him. She had suffered “severe blunt force injuries to her head,” authorities said.

“Chen’s right hand was extremely swollen and purple,” the district attorney’s office said. “He had blood on his clothing, legs, arms, and hands and scratches on his arm,” and was hospitalized after his arrest.

The couple purchased their Santa Clara house for just over $2 million in April 2023, according to property records. Both had worked for several years as software engineers at Google, according to their LinkedIn profiles, with Chen joining in 2020 and Yu a year later.

Both Chen and Yu attended Tsinghua University in Beijing and received their master’s degrees in computer science from the University of California before joining Google, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

“We are shocked and deeply saddened by what has happened to Xuanyi,” Google spokesperson Bailey Tomson said in a statement shared with HuffPost. “Our thoughts are