UNC ‘gunman’ Tailei Qi appears in court as he’s held without bond for ‘shooting dead his college professor in physics laboratory’: Suspect is charged with first-degree murder

The graduate student accused of fatally shooting his professor at the University of North Carolina has been charged with the murder at the school’s flagship Chapel Hill campus.

Tailei Qi, 34, made his first appearance in court on Tuesday and is charged with first-degree murder and possession of weapons on campus in the murder of physics professor Zijie Yan.

During a brief hearing, Judge Sherri Murrell of the Orange County Superior Court ordered Qi to be held without bail while an interpreter relayed the judge’s comments to him in Mandarin.

When the hearing ended, Qi bowed to his interpreter, his lawyer, and the guards before handcuffing him away. Dana Graves, a public defender who represented Qi at the hearing, left the courtroom without speaking to reporters.

Orange County District Attorney Jeff Nieman will not seek the death penalty for Qi, after vowing two years ago not to seek execution of defendants when he ran for office.

Qi’s next hearing date is set for September 18.

Authorities have not publicly discussed a possible motive for the attack, which took place Monday afternoon at a campus lab.

The victim Yan was an associate professor in the Department of Applied Natural Sciences and had worked at the school since 2019. He was shot dead at Caudill Labs.

The attack led to a roughly three-hour lockdown on campus, just a week after students returned for the start of the fall semester.

UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said in a message to the UNC community that his team met with Yan’s colleagues and family to express their condolences on behalf of the campus.

“He was a beloved colleague, mentor, and friend to many on our campus,” Guskiewicz said.

On Wednesday, the school’s iconic bell tower will ring in honor of Yan’s memory and students are encouraged to take a moment of silence, he wrote. The school also canceled classes through Wednesday.

On a page that has been deleted since the attack, Qi was listed on the school’s website as a graduate student in Yan’s research group and Yan was listed as his advisor.

He previously studied at Wuhan University in China before moving to the US and earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University in 2021.

Qi, who lives in Chapel Hill, was arrested shortly after the shooting, with local news footage appearing to show him surrendering to police without incident.

“Actually taking the suspect into custody gives us a chance to figure out the why and even the how, and it also helps us figure out a motive and why exactly this happened today. Why today, why at all?’ So said UNC Police Chief Brian James.

“And we want to learn from this incident and we will certainly do our best to make sure this never happens again on the UNC campus.”

Campus police received a 911 call reporting shots fired at Caudill Labs just after 1 p.m. Monday, James said.

An emergency alert was issued and two minutes later the sirens sounded, starting a lockdown that led frightened students and teachers to barricade themselves in dormitories, classrooms and other school facilities.

Officers arriving at the lab building found a faculty member fatally shot, James said. Based on information from witnesses, the police arrested the suspect just after 2:30 p.m., the commissioner said.

Jones declined to comment further on the arrest, but TV station WRAL reported that it took place in a residential area near campus.

The lockdown was lifted around 4:15 p.m.

Yan led the Yan Research Group, which Qi joined last year, according to the group’s UNC webpage.

He received his PhD in materials science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and previously served as an assistant professor at Clarkson University.

Qi is a graduate student in the Department of Applied Science who studies nanoparticle synthesis and the interaction between light and matter.

The shooting caused fear on campus.

Noel Harris, a senior journalism student, said she spent several confusing and terrifying hours locked in a media management and policy class reading news coverage, listening to police scanners and waiting for updates from the university on whether the campus is still open. was in danger.

When a police officer came by to check her classroom, the people inside asked him to put his badge under the door first as a precaution, Harris said.

The officer told the classroom that the campus was being cleared and they were safe, but still advised them to stand their ground until an all-clear statement was issued.

Soon after, Harris began to see people cautiously climbing out the windows of an adjacent building, a scene she now captured much shared video.

‘Then I saw the students jump out of the building. So it was like, okay, is it really safe? What is happening?’ she said.

She said on Tuesday she was still trying to clarify why the students went out through the windows of Phillips Hall, which houses math and other classes and was not the scene of the shooting.

“When this happened… I felt like I was just scared and shocked, but not shocked at the same time, because it’s like this happens every day,” Harris said.

The university has approximately 20,000 graduate students and 12,000 graduate students.

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