Graduate student charged in UNC prof ’s shooting

A University of North Carolina graduate student charged with killing his faculty adviser walked into a classroom building, shot the victim and then left, authorities said Tuesday, shedding light on an attack that led to a campuswide lockdown as police searched for the gunman.

Tailei Qi, 34, was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder and having a gun on educational property in Monday’s killing of Zijie Yan inside of a science building at the state’s flagship public university. He was ordered jailed without bond. His next court date is Sept. 18.

Chapel Hill city police arrested Qi in a residential neighborhood near the campus within two hours of the attack and didn’t need to use force to take him into custody, UNC Police Chief Brian Jones said at a news conference. He said investigators were still trying to determine a motive and were still searching for the gun used to kill Yan.

Yan, a father to two young children, was an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences who had worked for the university since 2019, UNC said in a statement Tuesday. He led the Yan Research Group, which Qi joined last year, according to the group’s UNC webpage.

Qi is a graduate student in the department of applied physical sciences who studies nanopartical synthesis and light-matter interaction. In a page that has been taken down 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 adviser. He previously studied at Wuhan University in China before moving to the U.S. and earning a masters in mechanical engineering at Louisiana State University in 2021.

The attack led to a roughly three-hour lockdown on the UNC campus and struck fear into students and faculty who had returned last week for the start of the fall semester. No one else was hurt in the attack.

Qi