Grad Student Found Unfit for Trial in Murder of His Adviser

UPDATE Nov 27, 2023 2:25 PM CST

The University of North Carolina graduate student charged with fatally shooting his faculty adviser has been found unfit for trial after two mental evaluations, a judge ruled Monday. Tailei Qi, 34, is accused of killing associate professor Zijie Yan in a science building at the university on Aug. 28. He is being held without bond on charges including first-degree murder. Orange County Superior Court Judge Alyson Grine said Monday that two separate mental evaluations found Qi likely suffers from untreated schizophrenia, the AP reports. Severe mental illness has rendered him unable to comprehend his situation, assist in his legal defense, and understand court proceedings, even with a Mandarin interpreter present, Grine said. She ruled that Qi will be committed to Central Regional Hospital in Butner for psychological treatment.

Aug 29, 2023 2:20 PM CDT

Authorities charged a University of North Carolina graduate student Tuesday with first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of his faculty adviser, in an attack that caused a campus lockdown while police searched for the gunman. Tailei Qi, 34, was due in court later Tuesday for an initial hearing in the Monday killing of Zijie Yan inside of a science building on the Chapel Hill campus. In addition to the murder count, he is charged with having a 9mm handgun on educational property, according to a warrant for his arrest. Yan 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.

The AP reports that 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. NBC News reports that links on Qi's LinkedIn page to papers he helped author includes on published in July in Advanced Optical Materials that listed Yan as a co-author. Qi, who lives in Chapel Hill, was arrested during a roughly three-hour lockdown that followed the shooting. CNN reports police have yet to find the gun used in the shooting and say they don't yet know a motive.

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Yan led the Yan Research Group, which Qi joined last year, according to the group's UNC webpage. He earned his PhD in materials engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and previously worked as an assistant professor at Clarkson University. Qi is a graduate student in the department of applied physical sciences who studies nanopartical synthesis and light-matter interaction. He moved to the US from China after earning a bachelor's degree in physics at Wuhan University, according to the UNC webpage for the Yan Research Group.

(More campus shooting stories.)