Residents in San Marino were stunned when a well-respected doctor and mother of twins was found dead in the scorched den of her sprawling estate.
Irene Gaw-Lai and her husband, Yoon “Kevin” Lai, had raised their sons in the affluent, quiet community, driving them to private school and baseball tournaments.
But when a fire burned in the rear of the family’s home, family and neighbors wondered: How could a healthy 56-year-old be killed in a fire that never spread beyond a single room?
But her 16-year-old sons feared they knew the answer.
Reeling from the news of their mother’s death, the boys spent that night with their aunt, saying they didn’t want to be around their father, according to family court documents.
“They were afraid,” said Randolph Gaw, the dead woman’s cousin and the attorney now representing Gaw-Lai’s family.
Irene Gaw-Lai and her husband, Yoon “Kevin” Lai, had raised their sons in this San Marino home.
(KTLA)
Publicly, investigators initially said little about Gaw-Lai’s death. Investigators had not yet disclosed that she appeared to have been beaten, but her children were already harboring suspicions of their own.
In a court filing, family members said the two brothers “suspect that Yoon had some involvement in the recent and untimely demise of their mother.”
Now, nearly six months after Gaw-Lai was found dead in her home in the 2600 block of Lorain Road, the Los Angeles County District Attorney has charged their father with one count each of murder and arson in an inhabited building.
Lai has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has been released on $2.25 million bail.
“We look forward to defending these false allegations in Court,” said Lai’s attorney, James Robert Tedford, in an email. Tedford declined to comment on the accusations.
Family and neighbors said the family appeared to live a quiet life. Yet hundreds of court records reviewed by The Times, including sworn declarations, surveillance footage images and an autopsy report describe a strained marital relationship and contentious divorce.
A surveillance camera inside their San Marino home shows Yoon “Kevin” Lai arriving to take their teenage sons to baseball practice.
(Superior Court of California)
When firefighters found her corpse, Gaw-Lai had burns on about 60% of her body, according to a death investigation summary filed in court. Further investigation found that the mother had also suffered a broken nose, a fractured eye socket, a lost tooth, bruising to her knees and other parts of her body as well as multiple cuts and bruises. A frying pan and metal baseball bat with traces of blood on them were also found in the home, investigators wrote in the summary.
After the fire, the twins’ aunt was named temporary guardian. Lai has contested that order in court.
“She has refused to return the children to me,” the father wrote in a court filing.
In family court documents, Gaw-Lai’s siblings described the couple’s 22-year marriage as troubled and said that when the wife filed for divorce in August, she asked a judge to revoke the couple’s premarital agreement. The divorce proceeding, according to court filings, meant the couple’s real estate properties, believed to be worth millions of dollars by relatives, were suddenly at stake.
An endocrinologist, Gaw-Lai practiced in Arcadia. Lai, according to public records, owns his own civil engineering and land surveying business but also bought and sold real estate.
The two were married in 2002, but court records indicate their marriage quickly met challenges. Just months after they were married, Gaw-Lai filed for divorce, although they seemed to have reconciled by the time their twins were born in 2008.
At family gatherings, Lai would keep to himself unless the conversation turned toward business, Gaw said.
“Almost every time he talked to me, it was almost always about money,” Gaw said. “Either how much people were making, how much he was paying in taxes or how much he didn’t want to pay.”
In August 2024, Gaw-Lai filed for divorce again, citing irreconcilable differences. In court declarations, the couple’s sons said they learned their father was having an affair after they looked at his phone.
When asking for a divorce, Gaw-Lai also asked that their premarital agreement be nullified. According to Jocelyn Gaw’s declaration, the request came because her sister had discovered that several properties the couple owned were solely in her husband’s name and, according to the 2002 premarital agreement, would remain in his possession.
Relatives said the couple talked about reconciliation, but Gaw-Lai had a few conditions before she reconsidered. According to text messages reviewed by The Times and filed in court, Gaw-Lai told her brother that Lai was “begging me to come back.”
Some of those conditions included voiding the premarital agreement, putting her name on all properties that had been purchased and requiring Lai to go to therapy.
“That seems a lot, do you think he’ll agree?” her brother, Enrico Gaw Gonzalo, texted her.
“it depends on what’s more important to him…” she responded.
Surveillance footage footage from Irene Gaw-Lai’s San Marino home shows her sons being picked up for baseball practice by her husband, Yoon Lai. The couple were in the midst of a contentious divorce.
(Superior Court of California)
The premarital agreement was revoked on Sept. 7, 2024, and Gaw-Lai’s name was also added as co-owner of the San Marino home, court records say.
Relatives also told The Times that, despite her husband’s acquiescence to her requests, Gaw-Lai still planned to go forward with the divorce. And as time went by, she told relatives she was increasingly concerned about her husband.
“Irene disclosed to others around this time that she was fearful for her safety if she was left alone with Kevin,” one court filing reads.
Lai had moved out of the San Marino home but would stop by often to drive the twins to practice and events. Gaw-Lai would make sure the twins were around if her husband was stopping by, said Randolph Gaw.
On the morning of Jan. 6, Lai arrived at the Lorain Road home at 7:06 a.m. to take the twins to baseball practice, according to court documents. About six minutes later, Ring camera data submitted in court indicated sensors for the home’s “dining” and “garden” cameras — which pointed to where Gaw-Lai’s body was found — were “manually disabled.”
And although Lai told his sons that he would be going to work after he dropped them off and would be picking them up late, Ring camera footage shows a car similar to Lai’s returning to the neighborhood at 8:19 a.m., according to documents filed in court.
At 9:46 a.m., the couple’s next-door neighbor, Connie Morris, called 911 when she saw smoking coming from the house, according to court documents.
Irene Gaw-Lai’s body was found after a fire was sparked in a room in the rear part of her San Marino home.
(Superior Court of California)
According to a declaration signed by Morris and submitted in court, she also spotted Lai inside the house. At one point, he opened the kitchen door to speak to her, acting “bewildered” when she mentioned the smoke.
According to Morris’ declaration, Lai said his wife was picking up the twins from baseball practice, but Morris noticed that her car was still at the house.
Gaw, the family’s attorney, said cameras in the home didn’t appear to capture video of what happened to Gaw-Lai.
According to a death investigation summary of Gaw-Lai, the 56-year-old mother had suffered blunt force trauma to her head.
Investigators found the fire appeared to have started in the den, according to the report. One ignition point was near Gaw-Lai’s body, and a second was about six feet away.
Morris declined to talk about details of what she saw that day with a reporter but said she had lived next to the family for years.
The family led a quiet life, she said, and she can’t remember ever hearing loud arguments or police being called to the house.
“That’s why it was so alarming,” she said. “It’s just shocking.”