A rush of emotion washed over Ronit Freeman on Monday.
A scientist in her lab was fatally shot in the afternoon, allegedly by a graduate student. It was, in her words, a “vicious act of violence,” robbing Freeman, an associate professor of applied physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, of more than a colleague. She also lost a friend.
“Traumatized … horrified … sad,” she wrote early Tuesday morning on the social-media platform X. “Hug your loved ones tonight.”
Zijie Yan, also an associate professor in the department of applied physics, died after he was shot in Caudill Labs, according to police officers. Tailei Qi, a second-year graduate student who worked in Yan’s lab, was arrested shortly thereafter, officials said. Qi, a Chinese citizen studying on a visa, was charged on Tuesday with first-degree murder and criminal possession of a gun on an educational property. He is being held without bail in the Orange County Detention Center.
Jeff Nieman, the district attorney, told reporters after Qi’s arraignment that his office would not pursue the death penalty, according to the campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel.
The incident has plunged the campus of more than 44,000 students, faculty, and staff into a morass of grief and uncertainty in the second week of the fall semester. A brief lockdown sent parents scrambling to check on their children. Classes ground to a halt. A video showed panicked students jumping from windows.
The chain of events at Chapel Hill is all too familiar in American higher education. Even though tracking the number of campus shootings remains a challenge, gun-related deaths in the United States have reached record levels in recent years. The Chapel Hill shooting comes just six months after three students were killed and five others injured by a gunman at Michigan State University.
I am devastated that his life ended needlessly from gun violence.
At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, chancellor of the Chapel Hill campus, called Yan a “beloved colleague and mentor” and said he and other administrators have been in contact with his family. The scientist, who joined the faculty at Chapel Hill in 2019, had two young children.
“They are certainly hurting at this time,” Guskiewicz said.
Tributes poured in on Tuesday from Yan’s former colleagues. “He was a very sweet man, and I am devastated that his life ended needlessly from gun violence,” Doug Chrisey, his former adviser, told The Charlotte Observer.
Brian James, Chapel Hill’s police chief, said the professor and student knew each other, but he would not elaborate further about the nature of the relationship. A since-deleted webpage shows that Yan was Qi’s academic adviser. They published papers together.
“At this time, it is still too early to establish a definitive motive,” James said.
The killing is reminiscent of the fatal shooting of Thomas Meixner, a department head at the University of Arizona who was killed while walking from a classroom to his office nearly a year ago. In that case, a 46-year-old former graduate student was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
A subsequent faculty report revealed that university officials repeatedly failed to respond to warning signs, including alleged harassment by Murad Dervish, the graduate student, of other professors and students on campus. Dervish’s trial has dragged on for almost a year.
In both cases, graduate students stand accused of murdering professors. And in both cases, faculty members and other students struggled to cope with the loss — and the trauma of the lockdowns they endured.
Other incidents in the past decade have involved similarly fatal dynamics between professors and their students. In 2016, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California was stabbed to death; a doctoral student was charged with the crime. The same year, a former Ph.D. student at the University of California at Los Angeles shot and killed his thesis adviser before killing himself.
Guskiewicz said on Tuesday that administrators “learned from other campuses and colleagues around the country that have had these tragic events.”
“We’ll continue to learn from this event as well,” he said.
Classes are scheduled to resume on Thursday.
