Lower East Side Murder Suspect Caught! It Was Matricide

New facts have emerged about the dreadful Dec. 19, 2025, murder of 76-year-old Zhu Hou in her Knickerbocker Village apartment on the deep Lower East Side. As feared, the slaying was matricide, and her suspected killer was her son, 41-year-old Wei Hou.

Initial reports suggested the murder weapon was a skateboard, but this remains unconfirmed.

Cops tracked Wei Hou to the Castle Inn motel in Schodack, NY, in Renssellaer County, where he was arrested on Friday, Dec. 26.

The Hou family is Chinese, reflecting the fact that these blocks can be considered part of Greater Chinatown. Indeed, a large percentage of today’s Knickerbocker Village residents are Chinese, likewise many people living on Monroe and Market streets, whose intersection marks the northwest edge of the federally subsidized middle-income housing complex.

Opened in 1933, Knickberbocker Village includes 1,590 apartments, and for much of the 20th century, its residents were largely Jewish and Italian. Among the latter were a colorful but dangerous contingent of budget-minded mafiosi, including sharp-tongued Bonanno family soldier and hit man Benjamin “Lefty” “Two Guns” Ruggiero of real-life “Donnie Brasco” renown. Ruggiero’s manner of speaking was eerily mimicked by Al Pacino in the movie Donnie Brasco.

Veteran newshounds will also recall Knickerbocker Village as a former home of Robert Perrino, a key figure in the notorious New York Post “Circulation Crew,” which turned the old Post printing plant at 210 South St. into a virtual ward of the Bonanno family.

As the plant’s superintendent of deliveries, Perrino oversaw the large-scale organized theft of—and falsified accounting for—newspapers that Bonanno family associates then sold throughout the city. Perrino vanished in May 1992 and though declared dead in 1997, his body wasn’t found until 2003, when it was discovered buried in the floor of a Staten Island construction company. Perrino’s three Bonanno-family slayers were convicted in federal court in October 2006.

If the murder of Zhu Hou appears less sensational, its criminal entanglements are still sobering.

Indeed, Wei Hou had only recently gotten out of state prison on drug charges. According to State Department of Correction records, Hou was received at the medium-security Lakeview Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility in Brocton, NY, in Chautauqua County, on June 11, 2025.

Facing a maximum two-year sentence, Hou was paroled on Oct. 14, 2025, presumably having completed the drug-treatment programs that Lakeview specializes in.

“I can’t say it was unexpected. I knew he was out to hurt someone and, unfortunately, it was his mother,” a 74-year-old woman who lived on Zhu Hou’s floor told the Daily News. “He had a mental problem. I think he finally snapped.”

This same neighbor continued, noting she’d had two recent encounters with the son, “including once where she spotted him sitting on the hallway floor, gibbering nonsensically and laughing hysterically while striking himself in the forehead.”

Citing police sources, a recent New York Post report suggests that Wei Hou’s history of mental illness, including a prior Bellevue stay, should have precluded his incarceration at Lakeview Shock.

Though he is presently hospitalized, it’s expected Wou will be arraigned this week.