An ex-con nabbed in upstate New York who cops say beat his 76-year-old mother to death inside 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 Monday and charged with murder for the Dec. 19 slaying inside the family’s aparmtment 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 inside 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. How was previously hospitalized after he was caught upstate.
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. 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 quicky tracked him down to Schodack, N.Y., just south of Albany, officials said.
Investigators found him in a motel in the town on Dec. 24 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.
“I can’t say it was unexpected. I knew he was out to hurt someone and, unfortunately, it was his mother,” said a 74-year-old woman who lives on the victim’s floor. “He had a mental problem. I think he finally snapped.”
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.”