It was the medical examination of a two-month-old infant that led investigators to the twenty-one children of Guojun Xuan, 66 years old, and Silvia Zhang, 39 years old, the vast majority born to surrogate mothers. In May 2025, Silvia Zhang took the baby to the hospital for a head injury that she attributed to falling out of bed; caregivers are not convinced. Seventeen months later, Tuesday October 6, the couple was arrested at their home in Arcadia, near Los Angeles. The prosecution accuses him of having organized and encouraged violence against at least fifteen of their children, including fourteen born through surrogacy (GPA).
Both parents have pleaded not guilty. The prosecution accuses them in particular of having colluded to mistreat children, of having tried to dissuade witnesses from reporting the facts and of having tried to help a nanny escape arrest. Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman calls the case âunprecedentedâ in terms of the number of children involved.
In this house, education was carefully organized. According to court documents, three rooms served as âlearning centersâ where very young children sat at desks for several hours a day, under the supervision of nannies. A table listed the schedules of the twenty-one children. Thirty-two cameras allowed the couple to follow, from their office, what was happening in the house.
It is these images that support the accusations today. According to the prosecution, they show nannies slapping and hitting the children. The father allegedly asked one of them to hit harder, before delivering the blows himself. The mother reportedly laughed as she watched a child being beaten with a shoe. However, one room escaped video surveillance; according to the prosecution, the cameras showed nannies taking children there, whose cries were then audible on the recordings.
The prosecution also maintains that the parents asked the nannies not to leave visible marks. Before the police arrived, some children were reportedly instructed to deny the beatings; Zhang allegedly asked to hide the sticks used to beat them. The infant's injury would also be linked to this violence: a nanny, Chunmei Li, allegedly hit him in the head two days before his hospitalization. This 58-year-old nanny, prosecuted for the alleged violence against the baby, has still not been arrested.
It remains to be understood how so many children ended up under the couple's responsibility. As of 2021, Xuan and Zhang operated an agency, Mark Surrogacy Investment, from their home that recruited surrogates across the United States. Some were reportedly paid up to $135,000. According to court documents, the couple provided at least two of them with false information to convince them to carry a child. In one, Silvia Zhang was presented as a single mother struggling to conceive; at another, the couple claimed to have only one daughter, even though they already had more than a dozen children. Investigators also believe that the surrogate mothers were unaware that others were simultaneously carrying a pregnancy for the same parents.
