Eddy Zheng - Early Life

Early Life

Zheng grew up in Guangzhou in southern China. There, his father was an officer in the People's Liberation Army for the Guangzhou Military Region, while his mother worked as an accountant for the government. He was the youngest of three siblings, with an older sister and an older brother. Zheng immigrated to the United States with his family in 1982. They moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland's Chinatown. His father worked at Burger King, while his mother was a live-in babysitter for another family. He rarely saw his parents, and suffered difficulties in school due to his poor English skills. He befriended other Chinese immigrant youths in his school, who began to push him towards crime such as petty shoplifting; Zheng was arrested for stealing a jacket from a Macy's store, and placed under probation.

On the evening of January 6, 1986, Zheng and two friends broke into the house of a family who owned several shops in San Francisco's Chinatown, by ambushing them with guns as they came home from work. They locked their two children into the bathroom and tied up the husband and wife; they also tore off the wife's clothes and pretended to take pictures of her using a camera with no film in it, in an effort to intimidate her and get her to reveal the house's hiding places for valuables. After several hours spent ransacking the house in unsuccessful attempts to find a safe they believed held cash, they forced the wife to drive them to one of the family's stores and unlock it for them so they could also steal goods from there, including expensive Chinese herbal medicines. One accomplice remained at home to watch the husband and the two children. In total, they robbed $34,000 in cash, jewelry, and merchandise. They were caught and arrested almost immediately after the commission of their crime, pulled over by a police officer for driving without headlights on the way back to their victims' house to drop the wife off.

Zheng's family had no money to hire a lawyer in his defense; they urged him to plead guilty because they were under the impression that it would bring him a more lenient sentence. Just aged 16 at the time, Zheng was tried as an adult and convicted of 16 felony counts including kidnap-robbery, and sentenced to seven years to life in prison. He had an interpreter and a public defender during his trial, but reportedly did not understand most of the legal language used, and did not even realise he had been sentenced to life in prison until some time after the trial when he arrived at the California Youth Authority where he would begin to serve his sentence. His lawyer had been supposed to ask the judge for a judicial recommendation against deportation but failed to do so, an omission which would bring later legal difficulties for Zheng.