UNC campus shooting today: Suspect Tailei Qi faces court as online posts before Chapel Hill attack revealed

Police were searching for both the weapon and the motive in a shooting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that left one faculty member dead and prompted an hours-long lockdown amid a search for the suspect.

The assailant in Monday afternoon’s shooting at a science building in the heart of the flagship university’s campus was taken into custody about an hour and a half after the gunfire was first reported, officials said at a news conference. Neither the suspect nor the victim were immediately identified and it wasn’t clear whether they knew each other. Formal charges were pending.

“To actually have the suspect in custody gives us an opportunity to figure out the why and even the how, and also helps us to uncover a motive and really just why this happened today. Why today, why at all?” UNC Police Chief Brian James said. “And we want to learn from this incident and we will certainly work to do our best to ensure that this never happens again on the UNC campus.”

The well-educated graduate student – who previously studied at both Wuhan University and Louisiana State University – complained about bullies, aired his grievances with some “girls and tattletales” and grumbled about his head of lab.

“Bully in america seems to be a problem. It often comes with people not stopping them at the first time,” he wrote in one post in August 2022.

But – despite the complaints – the messages could not prepare anyone for the horror of what happened next.

The Independent’s Rachel Sharp reports:

UNC police had issued an alert about an active shooting situation at the campus shortly after 1pm on Monday, following reports of shots being fired in the science building.

Students were ordered to shelter in place and barricade themselves inside lecture halls amid the active situation.

Footage shared online shows desperate students and faculty members jumping from windows or hunkering down in classrooms as the UNC Police, FBI, ATF and SWAT teams canvassed the campus for the shooter.

Nearly an hour and a half into the ordeal, UNC police released a photo of a person of interest and asked the public to call 911 and proceed with caution if they spotted the individual. A name was not released but the photo released by authorities matched the one on Mr Qi’s UNC profile page.

Mr Qi was then arrested near a residential area two miles from campus on Williams Circle and the shelter-in-place order was lifted at around 4.30pm.

At a press conference later that evening, UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and UNC Police Chief Brian James confirmed one faculty member had been killed.

UNC PhD student Tailei Qi, 34, has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the killing of Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences and a researcher. Mr Yan was listed as his alleged killer’s academic advisor on Mr Qi’s UNC profile, which has since been removed from the university’s website.

Yan joined UNC in 2019. Before that, he was an assistant professor at Clarkson University in New York and received postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago.

According to his LinkedIn page, Mr Qi graduated from Wuhan University in 2015 and also received a master’s in material science from Lousiana State University in 2021.

Mr Qi then joined UNC at Chapel Hill’s Yan Lab in 2022, with his profile page on the university’s website taken down by Tuesday morning.

The suspect worked as a researcher in China before pursuing a doctoral career in America.

UNC graduate student Aiden Scott, a former classmate of Mr Qi, described him as “very quiet” but “nice.”

“I would have never guessed that he would be the kind of person who could possibly be capable of this kind of thing,” Mr Scott told WRAL. “Every single time he would talk to me, he seemed very nice… when I saw his face in the reports online, I was beyond shocked,”

A graduate student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has been charged with first-degree murder over the on-campus shooting that left one faculty member dead.

Tailei Qi, a second-year PhD student majoring in applied physical sciences, has been charged with the fatal shooting of his academic advisor, Zijie Yan. Mr Qi is facing charges of first-degree murder and carrying a weapon while on campus.

Mr Qi appeared in court on Tuesday and was officially charged with the first-degree murder of his academic advisor Dr Zijie Yan.

The alleged shooter was ordered held without bail and had an interpreter explain the proceedings to him in Mandarin.

Mr Qi, a PhD student at UNC at Chapel Hill, is scheduled to appear in court again on 18 September.