Can you even imagine sipping from your own water bottle at your desk and feeling like you’re dying? That was daily life for Rong Yuan, a former engineer at Berkeley Engineering and Research, and this week she decided the world needed to see what she saw.
Yuan released hidden-camera footage of her ex-coworker David Xu, who was convicted of poisoning her, just as he went before an Alameda County judge asking to have his felony conviction wiped from the books.
So here’s how it all went down: Prosecutors say Xu, a senior materials engineer at the firm, poisoned Yuan’s food and water with cadmium, a toxic heavy metal, over more than a year, from 2017 into 2019. Yuan started at the company in January 2017 and says her first run-in with Xu was tense. He told her she couldn’t use the material characterization lab. She decided to keep her distance, do her job, and let him do whatever he wanted. That plan didn’t hold up.
Within weeks, she says, she was dry heaving and losing hair. In July 2017 she took a few sips from her water bottle one morning and felt like she was dying. By late 2018 she was in and out of the hospital, and on November 27 she emailed the office saying she was throwing up and couldn’t come in. Xu’s reply sounds almost like concern.
He told her to work from home until she felt better and suggested the building might be moldy.
Then came a moment that cracked it open. After another bad reaction in January 2019, Yuan’s mother tasted the water and noticed a sour flavor. Yuan ordered a spy camera off Amazon and set it on her desk. On February 11, 2019, it caught Xu reaching toward her water bottle around 11:04 a.m. On March 4, the footage shows him pouring something into it. “My blood was frozen,” she said after watching it. She handed everything to Berkeley police.
Now the part that has people side-eyeing the system. Xu was originally facing premeditated attempted murder and two felony poisoning counts, and by one account he could have been looking at life. Instead he took a deal, pleading no contest to a single poisoning count with probation.
At his 2024 sentencing, the judge set that probation at two years and called the deal “extremely generous, considering everything in this case,” according to the San Francisco Standard. Xu finished probation in March.
That’s where the expungement request comes in. The district attorney’s office objected, but California law says judges must grant it as long as the person met the terms of probation. Even if it’s granted, the conviction would still remain on his record. Reports didn’t include a ruling at the time of publication, and Fox News Digital says it reached out to Xu’s attorney for comment.
However, Yuan told the Standard that putting the video out was her last resort, a move from someone who feels the legal system left her hanging.
You can debate the plea deal, the law, and the optics all day. But the footage is out now, and it lets the public judge what happened with their own eyes. For a woman who says she came close to death more times than she can count, that might be the only accountability she can still control. Whew!