Tailei Qi, the individual who has been charged with first-degree murder and possession of a firearm on educational property in the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill case, was discovered to have posted rants about his classmates to social media platform X.
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“Bully in america seems to be a problem,” Tailei complained. “Explanation is not a solution.” He wrote that his “PI” (presumably Principal Investigator, or the person put in charge of a research grant or project at a university) made a promise to him that he would “handle with these girls and tattletales” that were bothering him.
Two months later he returned to write, “Both the group of people to say I am lazy and that to prove me working hard instead of telling me that are trying to consume my privacy. I judge their motivation is only to tell my PI then control me by taletelling.”
The first posts were written in August 2022, in the first semester of his PhD program at the school. He was charged with killing associate professor Zijie Yan, a member of the applied physical sciences department, in a campus laboratory.
(RELATED: “Armed and Dangerous” School Shooter Captured by Police at UNC Chapel Hill)
Yan, described by UNC chancellor as a “beloved colleague,” was from the Hubei Province in central China and graduate with BA and MA degrees from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. His research interests included “optical trapping and manipulation, holography, microfluidics and nanomaterials.” Qi wrote science papers on nanoparticles with Yan according to ACS Publications and Wiley Online Library.
Qi had an interesting past as well, going from the child of poor farming peasants in the rural Henan Province of central China to a professional graduate researcher in the United States. Tailei and his younger brother were actually profiled by a local news outlet because they both received identical high scores on a college entrance exam. The article explained that their parents’ six-acre farm was their only source of income, and the two sons regularly performed heavy labor because their parents were too sickly.
Tailei went on to attend Wuhan University, receiving a BS in Physics in 2015, and then traveled to America to get his Master’s degree in Material Science from Louisiana State University (LSU) from 2019 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn page. He worked as a research assistant at Suzhou Advanced Materials Research Institute in Suzhou, China and Southern University of Science & Technology in Shenzhen, China before joining the research staff at Chapel Hill. His research topics included “Optical tweezer, optical binding, femtosecond laser, nonlinear effect, Raman and fluorescence Spectra,” and “Machine learning.”
A biomedical engineering student at UNC started collecting signatures on a petition to reform the school’s active shooter response protocol. Gun control advocates seized the story to push their issue including March For Our Lives co-founder David Hogg.
According to one student, their professor kept teaching for 30 minutes after receiving alerts about an active shooter on campus. Many students echoed this in complaints about how the school faculty and staff responded to the event. An Associated Press reporter said “hundreds of confused students” were told to evacuate buildings before they received an “all clear” follow-up message to the previous alert warning the shooter was still at large.
Qi made an appearance in court on Tuesday, Aug. 29 and was ordered to be held without bond until his next court appearance on Sept. 18. He did not enter a plea and is being represented by a public defender.
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