Man faces life in prison in Chinese scholar’s death

PEORIA, Ill. — A former University of Illinois doctoral student is facing life in prison for the rape and murder of a 26-year-old scholar from China whom he abducted from a bus stop near campus in 2017, after a federal jury said Thursday that it failed to agree on sentencing him to death.

The jurors returned their decision against Brendt Christensen, 30, on their second day of deliberations. The same jurors took less than 90 minutes to convict Christensen last month in the killing of Yingying Zhang. Prosecutors and Zhang’s family had pushed for the death penalty, but a jury decision on that had to be unanimous.

Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011, but Christensen was prosecuted under federal law. If he had been sentenced to death, he would have been executed in neighboring Indiana.

Prosecutors said Christensen raped, choked and stabbed Zhang before beating her to death with a bat and decapitating her. Christensen has never revealed what he did with Zhang’s remains.

Her family, who traveled from China to Peoria, Illinois, for the trial, had hoped he might explain in court where he left her, but Christensen’s lawyers didn’t call him to testify.

Among the most poignant testimony during the penalty phase was from Zhang’s mother, Lifeng Ye.

She told jurors how the family was devastated by the loss of her beloved daughter, who had aspired to become a professor and to help her working class family financially.

She said Christensen dashed Zhang’s dreams and those of her family. Yingying was killed only months before she had planned to get married.