Police obtained a search warrant—and what they found was horrifying.
Not only did authorities discover the staggering number of young children, they also unearthed indoor surveillance footage of nannies physically and verbally abusing them, according to Arcadia Police.
Xuan and Zhang were swiftly arrested and charged with child endangerment. A third person, nanny Chunmei Li, 56, is now wanted by authorities.
Shocked neighbors say they had no idea dozens of children lived there. No crying, no toys, no strollers. Just silence behind those mansion walls.
“It’s pretty suspicious,” one resident said. “I walk by this house every day. I’ve never seen a single child. Not one.”
So where did these babies come from?
Surrogate mothers from Texas to Pennsylvania say they were led to believe they were helping build families for loving couples. They had no idea other women across the U.S. were being recruited at the same time, and that their children were all going to the same mysterious couple.
One of them, 27-year-old Kayla Elliot, shared her story. In a TikTok interview, she recalled Zhang showing little emotion during her child’s birth — just handing out $2,000 in cash, including $200 to her boyfriend and kids.
“You’d think a woman desperate for a baby would be overjoyed, but she wouldn’t even hold the child,” Elliot said. “It felt transactional.”
Even more shocking, Elliot is now fighting to regain custody of that very child, learning only recently that the couple she trusted owned the very surrogacy agency she thought was legitimate.
“It’s emotionally devastating,” she told ABC7. “We trusted the agency. Now we learn it was a scam—and the parents were the ones running it.”
Another surrogate in Pennsylvania is still pregnant with a baby intended for Zhang and Xuan.
Investigators now believe the couple may have misled dozens of surrogates, posing as hopeful parents through an unregulated agency they ran themselves.
All 21 children — aged between 2 months and 13 years — have been removed from the home and placed under the care of the Department of Children and Family Services.
Why did they do it?
Zhang denies everything. Speaking to KTLA, she called the authorities “misguided and wrong,” and insisted she would fight the allegations.
But experts fear this case may be just the tip of a darker reality.
“It smells like trafficking,” said Kallie Fell, director of the nonprofit Center for Bioethics and Culture. “This surrogacy industry is unregulated, and that makes it ripe for abuse. What’s the motive for having this many babies in one house? What were they going to do with them?”
Neighbors are left stunned and unsettled.
“Twenty-one children?” one man asked. “What were they planning? Why didn’t anyone notice sooner?”
What began as whispers about a strange mansion has exploded into a national scandal — one that could reveal just how little oversight exists in the billion-dollar world of surrogacy, and how easily women—and children—can be used as pawns in the name of family, profit, or something even darker.
