The Orange County jail system, home to about 6,000 detainees, is dominated by low-income, poorly educated and violence-prone individuals. That?s not Chen. Born in Fountain Valley to strict Chinese immigrants, he grew up shy in an upper-middle-class Irvine neighborhood bordering a scenic lake. He earned a 4.0 GPA at one of that city?s highly competitive schools. Even now, his penmanship is neat, his crisp sentences contain error-free grammar, and his expressions of lofty ideas as well as agonizing personal critiques are startlingly coherent for someone often lost in substance abuse since the age of 13.
When he sat at the defense table next to veteran attorney Lloyd Freeberg Jr., Chen faced a potential 23 years in prison. After all, he?d run a bizarre, intense crime spree. Police arrested him four times during an eight-month period in 2016. In January of that year, he collected six criminal counts. A month later, after being released on bail, he added 12 more charges. In April, after release on bail again, he piled on two more. The pattern continued in August, as Chen boosted the tally by five to land at a total of 25 felony charges. He?d possessed heroin, cocaine, oxycodone, ecstasy, Xanax and methamphetamine for personal use and sales while carrying a concealed weapon.
