Roughly 37 months after a campus shooting left a UNC professor dead and the university community shaken, the lone suspect in the case is acquitted from his murder charges.
Tailei Qi, the former UNC graduate student and researcher in the Zijie Yan lab, was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” on Friday during a pretrial hearing at the Orange County Courthouse. Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour presided over the hearing and made the ruling after hearing from a pair of mental health experts: forensic psychiatrists Dr. George Corvin and Dr. Nicole Wolfe, the latter of whom was brought in by the defense.
Qi shot and killed Yan — a nanotechnology researcher and Qi’s faculty advisor — on the afternoon August 28, 2023 in Caudill Laboratory, where Yan’s office and lab is located. After evading campus law enforcement, he was arrested off campus two miles north of the laboratory a couple hours later. Before his acquittal on Friday, Qi was charged with first-degree murder and possession of a weapon on educational property.
Tailei Qi, a graduate student and research assistant accused of killing his advisor Zijie Yan, sits in the Orange County Courthouse during his first appearance on the murder charge on August 29, 2023. (Photo via Robert Willet/News & Observer.)
In September 2023, Baddour determined that Qi was not mentally fit to stand trial — as the Chinese national struggled to grasp the mental health evaluation he underwent and was requesting in the courtroom to get different representation from the public defender. After roughly 30 months of commitment and treatment in Butner’s Central Regional Hospital, Qi returned to the Orange County courthouse in an improved enough state to answer questions from the judge through an interpreter, leading Baddour to deem him competent for trial.
The hearing on Friday, according to District 15B District Attorney Jeff Nieman, stemmed from both the state and defense psychiatrists reaching the same conclusion: Qi understood the nature of killing Yan, but was not mentally capable of understanding the consequences. The pair of mental health experts testified for hours on Friday, with their statements and the defense’s argument of not guilty by reason of insanity driving Baddour’s decision.
“Because of his mental illness, he did not understand the inherent wrongfulness of that action,” Nieman told Chapelboro. “And both psychiatrists spoke in detail about the fact that [Qi] essentially believed what he was doing was an act of self-defense for himself and someone else that may or may not even exist.”
Following the ruling, Qi was returned to involuntary commitment at Central Regional Hospital, where he will remain indefinitely. Nieman said that a different judge, separate from Orange County’s justice system, will review Qi’s mental state annually to determine whether he remains a danger to himself or others. According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, there is no state law for the maximum length of commitment for people acquitted on insanity pleas.
Yan had worked at the university since 2019 and was a celebrated researcher on using light to manipulate atoms, with the goal of researching the effectiveness of nanotechnology and its potential for innovation in the health and energy industries. UNC leadership recognized the two-year anniversary of Yan’s death in 2025 by dedicated a memorial bench and plaque outside his office window.
Programs for the 2025 memorial event and bench dedication honoring slain UNC associate professor Zijie Yan. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Nieman said he believes the outcome is an example of how the district attorney’s office’s responsibility is to the community.
“Our job is not necessarily to convict,” he said. “Often times, justice requires a conviction and a punishment. But our job is equally to know and follow our responsibility…that if we know a person is factually or legally not guilty, it is just as strongly our duty to go into court and say that. I am proud of our office, I am proud of ADA Anna Orr for following our true mandate, which is to seek justice — not always convictions. That is a core tenant of being a prosecutor.”
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