The prosecution of Alan Wang moved from a domestic-battery charge to a first-degree murder conviction after an autopsy established how his wife died.
WHEATON, Ill. — Six years after emergency crews found Hongyan Yang unresponsive at her Naperville home, the case against her husband has ended in a 38-year prison sentence built on an autopsy, a murder indictment and a judge’s rejection of his account of the fatal encounter.
Judge Ann Celine O’Hallaren Walsh sentenced Alan Wang, 62, for the first-degree murder of Yang, who was 35 when she died in March 2020. The sentence followed a bench-trial conviction announced Oct. 8, 2025. DuPage County prosecutors said Wang attacked Yang after finding text messages from another man on her phone, kicking her multiple times in their bedroom. Wang claimed at trial that he had been attempting to wake her. The judge found him guilty after hearing four days of evidence, and the state’s attorney’s office said he must serve the entire prison term before he may be considered for parole.
The case began as an emergency at about 4:50 p.m. March 8, 2020. Naperville police officers and firefighters responded to the couple’s residence in the 1100 block of North Mill Street after a relative called 911 and reported that a woman was not breathing. The woman was identified as Yang. She was taken to a local hospital, where doctors pronounced her dead at 5:54 p.m. The public record released by prosecutors does not identify the relative or describe the relative’s observations beyond the report that Yang appeared to have stopped breathing.
Investigators soon focused on what had happened the previous evening. Prosecutors said Wang and Yang had been together in their bedroom when Wang found messages on her phone from another man. The state said Wang then kicked her repeatedly. Authorities have not publicly released the messages, and the state’s summaries do not say whether Yang sent them, received them or discussed them with Wang. Prosecutors cited the discovery as the event that preceded the attack, not as a legal excuse for it.
Three days after the emergency response, Wang appeared in bond court on an aggravated domestic battery charge. The court set his bond at $850,000 and allowed him to obtain release by posting 10%, or $85,000. Wang paid that amount and left custody under electronic monitoring. At that stage, the filed charge addressed the alleged beating. The determination that Yang’s death was a homicide had not yet reshaped the prosecution. The coroner’s findings became the turning point. An autopsy concluded that Yang died from blunt force trauma caused by an assault. Earlier reporting on the allegations said the kicks produced deep soft-tissue bleeding in her legs. Prosecutors have described the medical findings in restrained terms and have not released a full autopsy report through their public announcements. The official conclusion nevertheless linked Wang’s actions to Yang’s death and supported a much more serious set of charges.
On June 19, 2020, prosecutors upgraded the case and secured an indictment charging Wang with two counts of first-degree murder. The change meant the state would have to prove more than an act of domestic violence. It would have to establish the elements of murder beyond a reasonable doubt, including the required mental state and a causal connection between Wang’s conduct and Yang’s death. Although the indictment contained two counts, O’Hallaren Walsh later found Wang guilty of one count.
The new charges also changed Wang’s custody situation. On July 8, 2020, his bond was increased to $1.25 million. He remained at the DuPage County Jail from that point through trial and sentencing, according to prosecutors. The state’s public releases do not provide a full procedural history explaining each stage of the more than five-year pretrial period. They do not list every hearing, motion or continuance, and they do not attribute the length of the case to either side.
The trial eventually began before O’Hallaren Walsh without a jury. It lasted four days and concluded Sept. 12, 2025. A bench trial does not lower the state’s burden of proof. Prosecutors must still prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the judge determines the credibility of witnesses, rules on the law and reaches the verdict. Wang’s decision to have the case decided by a judge placed the competing explanations of the bedroom encounter before O’Hallaren Walsh alone.
Wang’s defense centered in part on his claim that he was trying to awaken Yang when he kicked her. That account conflicted with the prosecution’s description of a violent reaction to the phone messages. Publicly available summaries do not identify every witness who testified or describe all physical and medical evidence admitted at trial. They also do not reproduce O’Hallaren Walsh’s detailed findings. Her verdict made clear, however, that she did not accept Wang’s explanation as creating reasonable doubt.
The judge announced the first-degree murder conviction on Oct. 8, 2025, nearly a month after the trial ended. Wang was then 61. Prosecutors said he had been born March 20, 1964, making him 62 by the time he was sentenced in June 2026. Following the verdict, the court scheduled post-trial motions and preparation of a presentence report, the steps that commonly precede sentencing in a felony case. During that period, the murder finding remained the central legal fact. The conviction meant Yang’s death was no longer an allegation awaiting trial. A court had determined beyond a reasonable doubt that Wang committed first-degree murder. That distinction also changed how officials described the case. Before the verdict, the state attributed its account as an accusation. Afterward, the state spoke of Wang as having been found responsible for killing Yang.
On June 23, 2026, O’Hallaren Walsh imposed the 38-year sentence in the Illinois Department of Corrections. Prosecutors did not publish a transcript of the hearing, the defense’s sentencing request or a detailed account of aggravating and mitigating evidence. They also did not disclose whether Wang addressed the court. The announced judgment supplies the result but not the judge’s complete reasoning for selecting 38 years.
State’s Attorney Bob Berlin used the sentencing announcement to place the killing in the wider context of intimate-partner violence. Citing federal violent-death data, he said 1,373 women were killed by a spouse or intimate partner in 2023, the latest year for which those figures were available in the source he referenced. Berlin said Yang’s death showed that domestic violence remained a serious social problem and that prevention efforts were incomplete.
The statistic was not evidence used to determine Wang’s guilt. It served instead as context for the prosecutor’s public response to the sentence. Berlin also offered condolences to Yang’s relatives and friends and said the prison term would prevent Wang from harming another woman. Prosecutors have released little information about Yang’s personal history. She is publicly identified mainly through the events surrounding her death, her age and the family members who survived her. The state’s attorney credited Assistant State’s Attorneys Amanda Meindl, Sara Henley and Jeff O’Boyle with proving the case. The office had previously recognized the Naperville Police Department’s investigation and the coroner’s work in identifying the cause of death. Those two parts of the case developed together: detectives reconstructed the bedroom encounter, while the medical examination supplied the finding that turned the initial battery prosecution into a murder case.
Wang’s required service of 100% of the sentence distinguishes the judgment from prison terms that allow substantial reductions through ordinary good-conduct credit. The state’s announcement did not provide an exact release date or explain how the years Wang has already spent in custody will be credited. Because he remained jailed after July 2020, the final calculation will depend on the sentencing order and correctional records.
The sentencing closes the principal trial-court chronology that began with the March 2020 emergency call. Wang may seek appellate review of the conviction or sentence under Illinois procedure, but the materials announcing the judgment did not identify a filed appeal. Unless a reviewing court changes the outcome, the first-degree murder conviction and 38-year term will govern the case.
Author note: Last updated July 22, 2026.