A man who beat his mother to death with an electric skateboard — breaking her spine along with multiple ribs — inside her Manhattan apartment was found by an older brother in the victim’s bed with a meth pipe shortly after carrying out the gruesome attack, officials said.
Prosecutors unveiled disturbing new details in the murder of 76-year-old Zhu Hou at her son Wei Hou’s arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Wednesday, where a judge ordered the defendant held without bail for the Dec. 19 slaying.
Wei Hou, 41, moved into his family’s apartment in Knickerbocker Village, at Monroe and Market Sts. on the Lower East Side, in October. Two months later, his older brother would discover their mother dead there, the defendant’s blood-smeared skateboard lying atop her body, Assistant District Attorney Taylor Holland told the judge on Wednesday.
In addition to her mangled spine, nearly all of the victim’s ribs were broken and she had also been struck multiple times in the head with the skateboard, said Holland.
The older brother had come to the house to check on his mother, who was not answering her phone, according to Holland. He told investigators that Wei Hou was sitting on a bed in the same room as his mother’s body, a meth pipe containing residue resting beside him.
A convicted felon, Wei Hou 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.
The defendant and his mother frequently argued in the weeks between Wei Hou’s release from prison and the victim’s murder, with Zhu Hou believing her son was stealing cash from her to fund his drug habit, Holland said.
Zhu Hou was last seen alive inside her apartment on Dec. 18, when her other son came to fix the door to her bedroom, which the defendant had broken earlier that month, Holland said.
After being discovered with his mother’s body, Wei Hou contacted his wife, who had an order of protection against him, and she purchased a train ticket for him, which he used to flee upstate to Albany.
There, his wife arraigned for him to stay at three separate hotels, including a roadside motel in a small town outside of Albany where U.S. marshals arrested him on Dec. 24.
A neighbor at the mother’s apartment building told the Daily News shortly after the slaying she wasn’t shocked to hear the woman’s 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 the 74-year-old tenant, 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 death, 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,” the neighbor recalled. “So I said, ‘Here she is.’ She went and she took him inside and the guards went away. And that was the beginning of the end.”
Wei Hou is due back in court on March 17.
