Graduate student charged with murder in shooting at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(CNN) — The suspect in the shooting that took place Monday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a graduate student, police said Tuesday in a news release. The shots claimed the life of a professor from the institution.
Tailei Qi, a graduate student, was charged in court with murder and carrying a weapon inside an educational institution. He pleaded not guilty and was ordered held without bail.
The victim was identified as Zijie Yan, a tenured professor in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences, who had worked for the University of North Carolina (UNC) since 2019.
The two knew each other, UNC Police Chief Brian James said Tuesday.
Qi was a graduate student in the same department and Yan was his tenured professor, according to Qi’s UNC biographical page, which has since been removed but is available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Qi entered the college in 2022 and had previously studied at institutions including Louisiana State University and Wuhan University, according to the page.
Qi entered the courtroom on Tuesday wearing an orange prison uniform with his hands in handcuffs in front of him. He used an interpreter and was assigned a public defender for his first appearance. He is a citizen of China and is in the United States on a visa, District Attorney Jeff Nieman said.
Nieman said the weapons charge was related to a 9mm handgun. The firearm used in the shooting has not yet been recovered, James said.
If convicted, Qi faces a minimum sentence of life without parole on the murder charge and up to two years on the weapons charge. The maximum sentence for first-degree murder in North Carolina is the death penalty, but Nieman said that’s not part of his office’s policy.
UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz expressed his condolences to Yan’s family and said the campus will ring bells in his honor on Wednesday.
“He was a beloved colleague, mentor and friend to many on our campus, and the father of two young children,” he said.
The shooting happened shortly after 1:00 p.m.
The early afternoon shooting at the school’s Caudill Laboratories, a chemistry studies building, shut down the university for hours.
The suspect was located on foot about a mile away and was taken into custody about 90 minutes after the episode, James said. His car was found on campus, he said.
“We want to make sure that we gather all the evidence to determine exactly what happened here today and why,” James said at a Monday night news conference. “It is too early in the investigation to determine the motive for the shooting.”
Classes and campus activities were canceled Monday and Tuesday and will remain so through Wednesday, authorities said. This is the second week of classes of the fall semester at the flagship university of the 17-member UNC system.
“This loss is devastating, and the shooting damages the trust and safety that we so often take for granted in our university community. We will work to rebuild that sense of trust and safety within our community,” Chancellor Guskiewicz said Monday.
Following calls to 911 about the shooting, university police issued an alert warning students to immediately enter the premises, close windows and doors and wait until further notice, according to an email. A witness on campus told CNN that while they were holed up in their building, they saw armed officers searching the campus.
Video from CNN affiliate WRAL showed a large number of police vehicles on campus with their emergency lights on. Meanwhile, some people were leaving the nearby buildings in single file with their arms raised.
Police detained one person before the suspect’s arrest, but determined “very quickly” that he was not the shooter, James said.
The suspect was taken into custody shortly after 2:30 p.m., Guskiewicz said. The university remained closed for a couple of hours after the suspect was taken into custody because authorities were working to confirm they had the correct person and were trying to find the firearm used, James told reporters.
The university has a student body of approximately 32,000 people, more than 4,000 faculty, and 9,000 staff members.
The FBI is assisting in the collection of evidence, the officials said.
This year there were 49 shootings at schools across the United States, including at UNC (34 were reported on K-12 campuses and 15 on college and university campuses), according to a CNN tally.
Reported by Steve Almasy and Sara Smart, CNN