Parents from Arcadia surrogacy mansion arrested on child abuse conspiracy charges

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An Arcadia couple responsible for more than 20 children who were born through surrogates and kept under constant surveillance at a sprawling mansion were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit child abuse early Tuesday morning, authorities said.

Guojon Xuan, 65, and his wife, 38-year-old Sylvia Zhang, were both arrested Tuesday morning, according to Nicole Nishida, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Members of the agency’s Special Victims Bureau, which investigates child abuse, could be seen outside the gated nine-bedroom multi-million dollar mansion where the children were kept early Tuesday.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman is expected to hold a press conference discussing the arrests later on Tuesday.

An attorney for Xuan declined to comment. It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether Zhang was represented by a lawyer.

The arrests marked the end of a yearlong probe that started after Arcadia police officers searched the couple’s West Camino Real Avenue residence as part of a child abuse investigation and found 15 children living there, almost all between the ages of 1 and 3.

The father of some 22 children discovered by Arcadia police in May also owns a property in El Monte where authorities found evidence of illegal gambling and drug activity, court records show.

Zhang said she was the biological mother of 22 children with Xuan, who she married in 2021, according to an affidavit written by an Arcadia investigator and other court records. All but two of those children were delivered through surrogates, some of who have since claimed they felt duped after learning they were part of a mass delivery of newborns for the couple.

Xuan, described by some as a wealthy investor who runs a real estate company, had been on law enforcement’s radar since at least 2021 after an El Monte property he owned was found to be operating as an illicit casino, then a marijuana stash house, then a grow site for psychedelic mushrooms.

Police zeroed in on the Arcadia mansion after Zhang brought their two-month-old son to Children’s Hospital in East Hollywood with a head injury. Doctors determined the baby was suffered from bleeding in his brain and retina and called police.

A nanny who worked for the family, Chunmei Li, was charged with assault likely to cause death in connection with the boy’s injuries earlier this year, but she fled to China before she could be arrested, according to court records and a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of an ongoing case. The official said Li smashed the child’s head against a desk multiple times.

Police described the mansion as a “home school type atmosphere,” with many of the rooms used for classes. Six live-in nannies cared for the children, each of whom had an identical buzz cut, according to an Arcadia police search warrant. In Xuan and Zhang’s bedroom was a large monitor that showed footage from about 25 cameras posted throughout the home, according to the affidavit.

Prosecutors believed the nannies carried out the physical abuse of the children, but Xuan and Zhang were aware of it and failed to intercede, according to the law enforcement official. Li and the other five caregivers fled the country before they could be arrested, the official said.

In a search warrant affidavit made public last year, detectives said the video footage showed multiple instances of physical and emotional abuse, including a nanny physically striking a child then forcing them to hold a squatting position. Another showed a nanny striking a child in the face, the document said.

Zhang previously told the Wall Street Journal she wanted to have a large number of children in the U.S. due to China’s one-child policy, a population limiting government measure that was enforced until 2015 limiting each household in the country to one birth. Xuan’s attorney recently told ABC News that his client believed it was righteous to have a large number of children so he could raise several significant contributors to society.

“He is not a man who is self-indulgent. Some who are wealthy might spend on jewelry or cars, but he is actually spending his resources to help his children become educated so that they can be the philosophers, the physicians, the researchers and the inventors that help society,” attorney Mitchell Krems said of Xuan.

Staff Writer Matthew Ormseth contributed to this report.

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James Queally writes about crime and policing in Southern California, where he currently covers Los Angeles County’s criminal courts, the district attorney’s office and juvenile justice issues for the Los Angeles Times.

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