A Lower East Side man wanted for the fatal bludgeoning of his 76-year-old mother a week ago was arrested upstate Wednesday night by the U.S. Marshals Service, according to a law enforcement source.
Wei Hou, 41, a convicted felon who got out of state prison in October, was busted on Christmas Eve in a motel in Schodack, N.Y., just south of Albany, ABC reported.
Zhu Hou was found dead from apparent blunt-force injuries after an explosive family argument inside her apartment in Knickerbocker Village, at Monroe and Market Sts., just before 8 p.m. Dec. 19, police officials and sources previously said.
The woman suffered multiple injuries to her head and body. A bloody skateboard was found next to her body, a police source previously said.
Cops immediately zeroed in on Wei Hou after his older brother discovered the mom’s body.
Wei Hou is facing second-degree murder charges, authorities said. He 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 marshals said in a press release that was later taken down that he had an extensive criminal record in more than one state.
According to a law enforcement source, Wei Hou was injured during the arrest and is currently hospitalized. It was not immediately clear when he would be arraigned on his charges.
A neighbor at the mother’s apartment building said she wasn’t exactly shocked to hear her son had been accused of killing her.
“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.”
After Wei Hou’s 54-year-old brother entered their parents’ seventh-floor apartment around 7:55 p.m. on Dec. 19, he bolted back out the door, leaving their mother’s lifeless body on the floor in a pool of blood.
The older sibling called 911, and medics pronounced Zhu Hou, who had trauma to her head and body, dead at the scene.
One of the items recovered from the home included a bloodied skateboard, a police source said.
Detectives are investigating the possibility that the younger son beat his mom with the skateboard.
The neighbor said she watched detectives interview the older son, his wife and their teenage son in the hallway later that night.
“They did not shed a tear,” she recalled. “(The older son and his wife) were telling (the detective) that (the suspect) was in jail and that their mother took out a restraining order against him. Why would you let him in? If you go to court and get a restraining order against him, why would you let him in?”
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 suspect outside his mother’s door, 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. And that was the beginning of the end,” the neighbor said.
Less than a week later, the neighbor said she went to take her garbage to the incinerator, but immediately slammed her door shut after she locked eyes with Wei Hou, who was standing in the hall and appeared to be pointing his smartphone camera at her door.
“When I opened it up, it was like he didn’t expect me to open the door. He looked at me, and he was just staring at me, and something inside me said, ‘Close the door,’” she recounted. “I didn’t like his eyes. I didn’t like the way he looked. Crazy. He didn’t look like he was in this world.”
“It was creepy,” she said.
The neighbor said police came to the building later that day — roughly a week before the murder — after the suspect began roughly banging on other neighbors’ doors. But nothing came of the cops’ visit.
“They went through the whole building looking for him, and they said, ‘We don’t see anybody,” she said. “At one point (after the mom’s murder), I got really annoyed. I told the detective, ‘If you guys would’ve did your job last week, this woman would still be alive.’”
The victim had lived in the apartment for about a decade with her husband. Around a month before the mom was killed, the neighbor said she had watched medics rush the victim’s husband out of the building on a stretcher, and that he had not been seen since.
“The mother was not sociable. She would not even get in the elevator with me, and we were both getting off on the same floor. And she knows me. I’m her neighbor,” she said. “She would not acknowledge you. … The family was very odd, so we didn’t bother with them.”
Several times, the neighbor heard yelling coming from inside the family’s apartment.
“I would hear the mother screaming. I don’t know who she was screaming at,” she said. “The family had problems.”
“She had to be a good mother because she loved him enough to take (her son) back in and then he did this to her, and that breaks my heart,” the neighbor continued. “And what a time to do it, right before Christmas… That’s a terrible thing. If you can kill your mother, you’ve got no soul. It’s a sin.”
