Google Engineer Allegedly Punches Wife to Death…Then Never Speaks Again

TL;DR

Google engineer Tony allegedly beat his wife Ivy to death in their Bay Area home, then went catatonic — captured on their own cat feeder camera.

Key Points

• 1.A pet feeder camera recorded the entire night. At 4:43 a.m., Tony appeared on the cat feeder camera covered in red, holding a circular saw to his neck before walking away — Ivy had not been seen since midnight.
• 2.Police found Tony in a near-catatonic state. Officers broke down the door to find Tony on his knees staring at the wall, unresponsive to commands, with Ivy's bloodied, unrecognizable body on the bedroom floor.
• 3.Tony bit and smashed a photo of Ivy on his way out. As officers escorted him out, he leaned down and used his mouth to hurl a framed photo of Ivy onto the floor, shattering it.
• 4.Tony and Ivy were both Google software engineers living in a $2M Bay Area home. The Chinese couple, married in 2022, put $500K down on a 4-bed house 20 minutes from Google's campus and had two cats with their own Instagram.
• 5.The house number, 714, means 'wife will die' in Chinese. In Chinese, number sequences carry phonetic meanings — 714 sounds like 'wife will die,' though the couple bought it anyway in the competitive Bay Area market.
• 6.Tony was emotionally haunted by his college ex-girlfriend Jang. He repeatedly compared Ivy to Jang in appearance, education, income, and personality, even implying his life would be better had he married Jang instead.
• 7.Jang initiated contact via a nearly 20,000-word Google Doc. After her fiancé was arrested at a massage parlor for soliciting sex workers in September 2023, Jang reached out to Tony, and the two exchanged messages in the shared document like a private chat.
• 8.The Google Doc revealed Tony had tried to leave Ivy for Jang before the marriage. Tony had asked Jang to transfer from Waymo in Seattle to Google in the Bay Area so they could buy a house together — she declined, and only then did he propose to Ivy.
• 9.Ivy discovered the Google Doc and commented on it directly. She logged in with her own account and wrote 'I hate you, I hate all of you' — and she would be dead by the end of that same week.
• 10.Friends Wong and her husband visited the night Ivy was killed. Tony's parents called Wong from China via WeChat alarmed by Tony's silence; Wong arrived for an unannounced dinner visit where Tony was mute and Ivy appeared to have been crying all day.
• 11.Ivy told her friend she planned to divorce Tony hours before her death. Pulling Wong aside as she left, Ivy said Tony told her 'my life would have been so much better if it weren't for you' — Wong drove home with a deep sense of dread.
• 12.Both Tony and Ivy were elite academic achievers from China's top schools. Ivy scored 702/750 on the Gaokao and was her city's top science scholar; Tony attended Chengdu No. 7 High School and came from a wealthy, government-connected family.