Man sentenced to 25 years to life in 2016 killing of Chinese national

A 39-year-old Baldwin Park man was sentenced Tuesday to 25 years to life in prison after he was convicted of murder in the death of a man whose body was found in the trunk of a car two years ago, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

A jury on March 23 found Andy Yalau Chen guilty of one count of first-degree murder and one count of cultivating marijuana, prosecutors said.

On March 21, 2016, Min Gu, 30, was found in the trunk of his black sedan parked in a residential neighborhood of Monterey Park, authorities previously told The Times.

Gu, a Chinese national, had been shot twice. He was reported missing almost a month earlier.

Investigators discovered that Chen was one of the last people to be in contact with Gu before he disappeared. According to witness testimony during the trial, Chen was maintaining a marijuana grow operation and Gu had threatened to expose Chen’s operation if Chen didn’t return money that he had borrowed.

After the killing, authorities obtained a warrant to search one of Chen’s homes in Temple City and found Gu’s blood under the floorboards of the house in addition to two bullet casings, prosecutors said. 

Authorities also found a large number of marijuana plants.

“Most of the whole second floor was a marijuana grow,” sheriff’s Lt. Dave Coleman told The Times in 2016. “We found more than 1,000 marijuana plants and several pounds of package marijuana.”

Contact the Homicide Report. Follow @nicolesantacruz and @latimeshomicide on Twitter.