A 52-year-old man will spend the rest of his life in prison for beating to death two teenage nephews in their Arcadia home and for attacking his estranged wife with a wood-cutting tool at the couple’s La Cañada Flintridge residence.
Pasadena Superior Court Judge Jared Moses sentenced Deyun Shi on Thursday, May 2, to life in prison without the chance for parole for killing Anthony Lin, 15, and William Lin, 16.
Besides two life sentences, Shi also received four years for the attack on his now-former wife, Amy Lin.
“The only time I can see my sons now is in my dreams,” David Lin told the court. “I desperately miss my sons.”
The teens’ father spoke at the sentencing and at one point stopped and cried. A photo of his sons was displayed on the court projector.
The dad talked about spending time with his sons: sharing jokes, eating at restaurants and exercising with them.
He called Shi “a cold-blooded, heartless evil animal.”
“We demand justice today,” David Lin said.
A jury on March 13 convicted Shi of the first-degree murders of the boys and of injuring Amy Lin. He used a bolt cutter on the boys, and a maul, which looks like a mallet, on the woman.
The judge found Shi was sane at the time of the Jan. 22, 2016, murders.
On Thursday in court, Deputy District Attorney MacKenzie Teymouri read a statement from Vicki Huang, the boys’ mom.
William had a plan to be an orthopedic surgeon. In high school, he was on the Science Olympiad team.
Anthony, her younger son, had a warm heart for different kinds of people.
Huang called Shi an evil man.
“Why did you do this to them?” Huang asked in her statement.
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After the tragedy, Huang said in her statement, she spent seven months in a near-vegetative state. She was depressed, relied on medication, saw psychiatrists and psychologists.
Judge Moses said as a lawyer and a judge there are cases that stay with you — and this is one of them for him.
Shi’s acts were those of “savagery, brutality and cruelty,” he said.
During his sentencing, Shi didn’t say anything.
In the trial, Amy Lin testified that Shi had hit her for years and he didn’t like her parents, her brother and sister-in-law. She filed for a temporary restraining order, and his mother-in-law also asked for one, for suspicion of elder abuse.
On Jan. 8, 2016, Shi was served with a restraining order and had to leave his home. While in court over the restraining order, Shi learned his estranged wife had filed for divorce.
The night of Jan. 21, 2016, Shi broke into the family home on Vista Miguel Drive in La Cañada Flintridge and attacked his estranged wife.
Their son testified he heard his mother screaming, saw Shi hitting her on the head with a metal object and pulled him off of her.
In the early morning hours of Jan. 22, 2016, Shi turned up at his in-laws’ townhouse on the 400 block of Fairview Avenue in Arcadia. He bludgeoned to death a sleeping Anthony Lin with the bolt cutter then used the tool and a pipe to kill William Lin, the prosecutor said.
Shi headed to LAX and bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, where authorities detained him.
The defense had argued that Shi was acting under an active mental illness on Jan. 21-22 in 2016. He has schizoaffective traumatic disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, said Vicki Podberesky, one of Shi’s lawyers. Shi was first hospitalized in China in 1986.
