Tailei Qi, a 34-year-old doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was taken into custody on Monday afternoon in connection with the fatal shooting of a UNC faculty member.
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Qi, a second-year doctoral student in applied physical sciences, was apprehended on Williams Circle about two miles north of campus at 2:40 p.m. Police surrounded Qi. He sat on a road in front of a driveway in handcuffs before being escorted to a waiting patrol car.
On Tuesday, Qi made his first court appearance and was charged with first-degree murder.
Judge Sherri Murrell read Qi the charges he was facing, including possession of a weapon on educational property and first-degree murder. A public defender will represent Qi. He has no bond and his next hearing was set for Sept. 18, but the date is subject to change depending on the status of the grand jury.
Orange County District Attorney Jeff Nieman said the gun used in the shooting, a 9 mm pistol, has yet to be found. Nieman said he won't pursue the death penalty in the case, making the maximum possible punishment a sentence of life in prison.
"To actually have the suspect in custody, it gives us an opportunity to either figure out the why and even the how and also helps us to uncover a motive and really just why this happened today," said UNC-CH Chief of Police Brian James.
"We are looking for a firearm. It is too early to determine if the firearm was legally obtained, and we’re not prepared at this time to what kind of weapon it was."
The professor killed in the shooting was Qi's academic advisor. He had recently reached out to a colleague to express concern over a student who had told him about struggling with severe mental illness and delusions, but he did not specify that student was Qi.
Qi joined the Yan Research Group in January of 2022, and he studied topics such as machine learning, light matter interaction and spectra analysis.
Qi holds a master's degree from Louisiana State University and a degree from Wuhan University in China.
Carter Scott, a UNC grad student and former classmate of Qi's, spoke with WRAL News about working on a project together with Qi.
"I would have never guessed that he would be the kind of person who could possibly be capable of this kind of thing," Scott said. "He was always very quiet."
Scott added that Qi didn't seem rude in his interactions with him, but he struggled to communicate and speak clear English.
"In hindsight, I would guess he probably didn’t have a very good network here. I get the impression he went to another university out of the country. So he was very new. Very out of his element. Very quiet. So I can see a situation where he didn’t have that many people close to him," said Scott.
Despite his hindsight perspective, Scott said when he saw Qi's face in reports online, he was "beyond shocked."
"Every single time he would talk to me, he seemed very nice," he said.
Qi's Twitter account, which was still up on Monday evening, mentioned bullying in America and loneliness, with one tweet insisting he'd like to "make some new friends."