Berkeley: Engineer Gets Probation for Premeditated Attempted Murder

Berkeley, California really is a different world. Some of the things that happen in Berkeley will never make sense to me. For instance, last month a Berkeley educated engineer (he received three degrees from the school) was sentenced to probation for an attempted murder scheme that nearly worked. Despite being caught red-handed, David Xu spent a total of 10 days in jail while his victim has suffered years of health consequences.

Xu worked as the chief metallurgist for a company called Berkeley Engineering and Research (BEAR). Some form of professional jealousy apparently drove him to attempt to poison one of his colleagues, a woman named Rong Yuan. Xu was arrested back in 2019.

An engineer in California has been arrested on suspicion of trying to kill a co-worker by poisoning her for more than a year.

Berkeley police arrested David Xu, 34, last week on charges of premeditated attempted murder resulting in great bodily injury and two counts of felony poisoning, according to jail records.

Yuan became seriously ill with symptoms which led her to believe she might have cancer. During this time, her co-worker David Xu expressed concern for her health and suggested maybe it was something in the air making her sick.

What finally gave Yuan a hint about what was making her sick is that she gave her water bottler to her parents one night in 2018. They used the water to cook rice porridge. Yuan’s parents then got sick and she began to suspect someone had been tampering with the bottle. She set up a spy camera at work to see who might be responsible. On two different occasions her camera caught David Xu tampering with the water bottle.

The first time, in February 2019, Xu was “apparently manipulating something on her desk” in the area of her water bottle, but the camera angle was limited, Dolge wrote.

In March 2019, “the camera captured [the] defendant entering the victim’s office, unscrewing her water bottle, and pouring what appears to be a liquid into her water. Defendant leaves but returns soon to adjust the bottle so it is left in the same position as it was before.”

The woman gave the water samples to Berkeley homicide investigators and told police she was afraid of Xu because “he was highly intelligent and would know how to poison someone,” according to court records.

Subsequent testing of the water samples found “extraordinarily high levels of cadmium, a poisonous heavy metal,” [prosecutor] Dolge wrote.

Tests of Yuan and her parents found that all three of them had elevated levels of cadmium in their system. As mentioned above, Xu was arrested in 2019 and originally charged with three felonies including premeditated attempted murder. He spent about 10 days in jail and then has been on home release ever since.

Last month, Xu made a plea agreement in which he was found guilty of one count of poisoning and the other count of poisoning and the attempted murder charge were dropped. His sentence was two years probation and a fine which will not exceed $10,000. 

Meanwhile, his victim is only working part time because of ongoing health problems. She estimates she has lost out on $460,000 of salary and last January she suffered a heart attack.

This doesn’t sound like justice to me. It sounds like a would-be murderer got a slap on the wrist despite serious consequences for his victim. Xu was facing up to life in prison for premeditated attempted murder. He was caught on camera twice and he’s a metallurgist accusing of poisoning his victim with cadmium. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about his guilt. How he wound up with two years of probation instead of a long stretch in a state prison is truly a mystery. I guess it’s just one of those things that happens in Berkeley.

This local news report is from April 2019: