Man planned to kill mom: Prosecutor

A prosecutor has urged a B.C. Supreme Court jury to reject claims by a man that he only decided to murder his mother on the spur of the moment.

Yuan Xi Tang, 28, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder for hitting Lianjie Guo, 47, repeatedly on the head with a hammer in June 2012 while she was visiting his Richmond rooming house.

His parents, who had forced him to break up with his girlfriend in China and then forced him to come to Canada to study, were in B.C. to visit Tang.

Tang’s lawyer told the jury Friday his client was guilty of murder but argued Tang should be found guilty of second-degree murder because first- degree murder requires planning and deliberation.

Tang testified he only decided to kill his mother after he’d first struck her over the head and she had not been rendered unconscious. He covered her face and then struck her two more times. He claims that only at the moment of the second assault with the hammer did he intend to kill her.

He stuffed her body in a suitcase and disposed of it in the Fraser River. Six weeks later the suitcase washed up on a beach near Powell River.

Crown prosecutor Jeremy Hermanson argued there was strong evidence of planning and deliberation and Tang’s story was unbelievable. Hermanson said Tang’s resentment of his parents, who were verbally and physically abusive to him growing up in China, grew over time.

“He’d grown tired of being told who to date, where to live and how to live,” the prosecutor said. “This is not a murder born in a moment. It was a murder decades in the making. It was a murder motivated by a list of resentments that the accused continued to recite.”

Hermanson said Tang confessed to undercover police officers posing as gangsters, to an undercover police officer posing as a fellow prisoner in Tang’s jail cell and to a police officer interviewing him after his arrest.

“Every time he sits down with somebody new, he takes out his laundry list. Mr. Tang despite himself keeps telling us why he killed his mother.”

B.C. Supreme Court Justice William Ehrcke is expected to charge the jury Monday, after which deliberations will begin.