An ex-con nabbed in upstate New York who cops say beat his 76-year-old mother to death in their Lower East Side apartment has been brought back to Manhattan to face murder charges, police said Wednesday.
Wei Hou was brought by cops to Manhattan on Monday and charged with murder for the Dec. 19 slaying inside the family’s apartment in the Knickerbocker Village complex near Monroe and Market Sts., cops said.
Hou, 41, is a convicted felon who was released on parole from state prison on Oct. 14 after serving four months of a two-year sentence for cocaine possession in upstate Oneida County, records show.
His mother, Zhu Hou, was found dead from apparent blunt-force injuries after an explosive family argument in the apartment they shared, cops said.
Wei Hou was hospitalized after he was brought back to New York City, with his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court pending. Hou was previously hospitalized after he was caught upstate.
A 76-year-old woman was found dead with multiple injuries inside her apartment at Monroe and Market Sts., a block from the Manhattan Bridge on Dec. 19. (Rebecca White / New York Daily News)
A bloody skateboard was found next to Zhu Hou’s body when her other son, who is 54, discovered her dead about 8 p.m. on Dec. 19, a police source said.
NYPD cops and the U.S. Marshals Service immediately zeroed in on Wei Hou, who lived with his mother, and quickly tracked him down to upstate Schodack, just south of Albany, officials said.
Investigators found him in a motel in the town on Christmas Eve and took him into custody.
A neighbor at the mother’s apartment building told the Daily News shortly after the slaying she wasn’t shocked to hear her son was the suspect.
A 76-year-old woman was found dead with multiple injuries inside her apartment at Monroe and Market Sts., a block from the Manhattan Bridge on Dec. 19. (Rebecca White / New York Daily News)
“I can’t say it was unexpected. I knew he was out to hurt someone and, unfortunately, it was his mother,” said the 74-year-old woman who lives on the victim’s floor. “He had a mental problem. I think he finally snapped.”
A 76-year-old woman was found dead with multiple injuries inside her apartment at Monroe and Market Sts., a block from the Manhattan Bridge on Dec. 19. (Rebecca White / New York Daily News)
The neighbor said she had two encounters with the suspect in the weeks leading up to his mother’s grisly bludgeoning, including once where she spotted him sitting on the hallway floor, gibbering nonsensically and laughing hysterically while striking himself in the forehead.
Two guards who work for the apartment complex stood with the son outside his mother’s door that day, apparently waiting for her to return home.
“I’m waiting for the elevator and who comes out? The mother. So I said, ‘Here she is.’ She went and she took him inside and the guards went away,” the neighbor said. “And that was the beginning of the end.”