A doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was accused of fatally shooting a professor on Tuesday, the latest incident in a string of shootings across the country that left the academic community in shock and left investigators scrambling for a possible motivation.
Chinese student Tailei Qi, a major in applied physical sciences, made his initial appearance in court and was charged with first-degree murder & ordered held without release.
Qi, 34, who was chained up and wearing an orange jumpsuit, resorted to a Chinese interpreter. He was also accused of having a gun on school grounds; this accusation is likely to be escalated from a misdemeanor to a felony.
After the hearing, his public defender didn’t make any public remarks. On September 18, there was going to be a probable cause hearing.
The penalty for the murder charge is a life sentence without the possibility of parole. After the hearing on Tuesday, Jeff Nieman, the district attorney for the counties of Chatham and Orange, declared he would not seek the death penalty.
Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the Department of Applied Sciences since 2019, was targeted by Qi in 2019. Police had not yet revealed why.
In our machine learning class, I had helped the gunman with his homework two semesters prior, according to Scott.
According to Scott, Qi found it difficult to keep up with the readings.
He never seemed to understand what was going on in the class, but he always appeared to have good intentions and tried his best to keep on task, the student added.
Qi was named as a member of Yan’s lab team on a university department website that has since been taken down.
The attack started after students were informed of an armed and dangerous person after 1 p.m. It took place in the second week of the autumn semester at UNC. At 2:24 p.m., the university again issued a warning that the suspect was still evading capture. The unidentified person’s picture was made public, and the suspect was eventually found in a residential area close to the university.
Social media users posted videos of terrified pupils sheltering in classrooms and some scaling the windows of a campus structure. At around 4:15 p.m., the lockdown was lifted.
The lockdown, which also affected nearby public schools, continued, according to UNC Police Chief Brian James, as authorities confirmed the suspect’s identification and looked into rumors of possible further victims.
He added on Monday, “We had to make sure that the entire school was safe.
There were no other recorded injuries.
On Tuesday, James chose not to comment on the possibility that there were additional people in the room at the time of the incident. He claimed Qi must have left the building fast because responding officers did not run into him.
In January 2022, Qi enrolled at UNC’s main campus as a graduate student as well as a research assistant, according to his LinkedIn page, which also included links to papers describing his work on metal nanoparticles. Yan and I co-authored an article that was recently published in the journal Advanced Optical Materials.
According to Qi’s LinkedIn profile, he attended Wuhan University in China as well as Louisiana State University before moving to North Carolina.
In the incident on Monday, the gun, a 9 mm handgun, was not found right away, but investigators said they would question the suspect to find out why.
Investigators are still attempting to ascertain the nature of the link between the suspect and the victim, according to James, who added that they will be checking any social media accounts that Qi could have used.
Investigators have been “looking at what his objectives were and why he ended up doing it,” James told reporters on Tuesday.
Qi has interacted with law enforcement in the past. He was allegedly stopped for speeding in Orange County in February, and two days before the shooting, a state trooper cited him for exceeding the posted speed limit on an expressway by about 20 mph, according to the Alamance County court.
Chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill Kevin Guskiewicz announced on Tuesday that classes would be canceled once more on Wednesday and that the renowned Bell Tower on campus would ring at 1:02 p.m. in Yan’s honor.
Guskiewicz added, “We will keep looking for answers and ways to improve our safety procedures.” “We are aware that this tragedy’s wounds won’t mend easily.”