Arcadia house of horrors exposes California surrogacy free-for-all

In May 2025, Silvia Zhang brought a two-month-old infant to Children's Hospital Los Angeles with a traumatic head injury and a brain bleed. A search warrant later described what the family's surveillance system captured: the baby "cries for a few seconds until a thud or hit is heard," then "crying suddenly stops," and after an attempt to wake him had "no success," nanny Chunmei Li did "shake him."

Police say the footage shows Li shaking and striking the infant until he lost consciousness. Zhang and Guojun Xuan waited two days before seeking care.

On October 6, 2026, deputies arrested Zhang and Xuan in a raid on their 10,287-square-foot Arcadia mansion. Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman and Sheriff Robert Luna announced child-abuse and conspiracy charges and sought $100 million bail over the gravity of the case and flight risk. Of 21 children ages 2 months to 13 years, 15 were removed from the home and six were located elsewhere. Investigators seized video from 32 motion-activated cameras. They also found more than 200 bank accounts, multiple international passports, stacks of cash used to pay employees, and millions of dollars worth of liquor.

Superior Court Judge Kerry White set bail at $20 million each, rejecting $100 million as tantamount to no bail, and ordered passports surrendered and electronic monitoring if the pair is released. The complaint lists 10 counts and 55 overt acts of conspiracy. Xuan faces up to 17 years and 4 months; Zhang up to 11 years and 8 months. Li, charged with felony child abuse, fled to China and remains at large, facing up to 12 years if convicted.

"This house could only be described as a house of horrors for these incredibly young children," Hochman said. "This case is unprecedented. It is horrific, and the physical abuse, beating, and punishment that these very young children received is despicable." Sheriff Luna called the abuse horrific. Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger called the allegations horrifying.

Prosecutors say the couple ran three rooms they called learning centers, where children sat at desks for hours under nanny supervision while Zhang and Xuan monitored discipline on the cameras. In one incident described in the complaint, Xuan entered a learning center while a nanny was striking a child, ordered her to strike harder, then joined in, striking the child's bare buttocks and head and lifting the child by one arm while continuing to hit him hard enough that the child's body lurched with the blows. Another room had no cameras; children taken there could be heard screaming. After the infant reached the hospital, the couple allegedly held a meeting instructing nannies to avoid leaving visible marks and coaching children to deny that they had been beaten. Zhang is accused of telling a nanny to put away sticks used to strike the children.

The pair moved into the home in April 2021 and operated a surrogacy agency from it, first as Mark Surrogacy and later as Future Spring Surrogacy, hiring women across the country. Surrogates were paid between $75,000 and $135,000. Hochman said the couple lied about their circumstances. "One surrogate in particular … was paid for both a first and second surrogacy," he said. "She was told initially Zhang was a single mother struggling to conceive when she agreed to act as a surrogate. That was a false statement." Another woman was not told the couple already had 16 children. A third was told they were seeking a miracle baby and was paid $135,000. Commercial surrogacy is lawful enterprise; false statements in the contracts that create parentage are a rule-of-law problem for the women who carried the children and for the children who arrived through those contracts.

Defense attorney Mitchell Krems, representing Xuan, rejects the state's case. "My client is innocent. It is the nanny's wrongdoing who went on the run. He is being targeted for exercising his constitutional right to have a large family," Krems said. He has argued the couple faces unfair scrutiny as Chinese immigrants who left a country with birth limits, that Xuan loves the children and wants them to become philosophers, physicians, researchers and inventors, and that staff were fired after Xuan learned of inappropriate discipline. Krems also told the court Xuan has a rare form of leukemia and is recovering from a bone marrow transplant.

The constitutional claim is the defense's strongest frame and deserves to be stated in its own terms. The same record the defense must meet includes the delayed hospital trip, the alleged order to hide marks, the coaching of children to lie, and video prosecutors say shows Xuan joining a beating. A right to raise a large family does not suspend the statutes against child abuse or witness intimidation. Public safety begins with children who cannot hire lawyers.