To reflect on the year, Chapelboro.com is re-publishing some of the top stories that impacted and defined our community’s experience in 2023. These stories and topics affected Chapel Hill, Carrboro and the rest of our region.
One week into the new academic year for many students, a shooting and subsequent lockdown on UNC’s campus changed the tenor of the rest of the fall semester. A faculty member died after being shot in a laboratory building, with police arresting a graduate student on murder charges an hour later. The campus community was locked down for hours — and locked down again a couple weeks later after an armed and dangerous person was reported, sparking another wave of concern. Since then, more details have emerged in the murder suspect’s court case while UNC examined its emergency safety protocols and some campus community members advocated for gun reform.
For most UNC students, faculty, and staff, an Alert Carolina message sent out at 1:03 p.m. on August 28 was the first sign. The university’s emergency services team described an armed and dangerous person as being reported on or near campus, urging everyone to shelter in place while avoiding windows and exit doors. As time passed, rumors, concerns, and uncertainty grew of what would come next. By the time an “all clear” message was shared after 4 p.m., a heavy police presence on South Road and two miles north in a Chapel Hill neighborhood indicated something had happened near Caudill Laboratories and officers had arrested a suspect.
The 911 call that alerted law enforcement to shots fired at Caudill Labs came two minutes before police arrived to the building. Once they arrived and searched the building, they found one faculty member — 38-year-old Zijie Yan of the applied physical sciences department — dead via gunshot wounds. The initial 911 caller identified suspect 34-year-old Tailei Qi, who UNC Police shared a photo of during lockdown, saying they were searching for a “person of interest” in the case. Qi was not found by law enforcement on campus, instead being tracked down to Williams Circle in Chapel Hill and being arrested at 2:31 p.m.
Over the next week, the UNC community gave its students, faculty, and staff time off from classes and offered mental health resources to those in need. Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and UNC Police Chief Brian James formally identified Yan, who was Qi’s instructor in his research lab, as the deceased on August 29. The next day, the university honored Yan through tolls of the bell tower, a moment of silence, and informal memorials of flowers and notes left at Caudill Laboratories. Community members gathered in the Dean Smith Center that night for a candlelight vigil in Yan’s memory and to help people come together in the wake of the tragedy.
Zijie Yan. (Photo via UNC Department of Applied Physical Sciences.)
Flowers left by the UNC community sit at the base of the Caudill Laboratories sign, while students, faculty, and staff stand around the nearby bell tower for a moment of silence in Zijie Yan’s memory on August 30, 2023. Many people also left flowers, notes, and tokens in honor of Yan at the bell tower.
A bouquet of flowers with a note lie outside of Caudill Laboratories on August 30, two days after UNC faculty member Zijie Yan was fatally shot inside the building.
UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz delivers remarks at the university’s candlelight vigil honoring Zijie Yan and encouraging the campus community to stay strong in the wake of his death.
UNC students hold up their candles and look on as their peers performed the alma mater in honor of Zijie Yan.
Some students and UNC community members turned their emotions around Yan’s death into advocacy. The campus community held a student gathering to air their concerns and grief the night of August 29, with another focused specifically on gun reform and action held on August 30. Students called for more efforts to be made in North Carolina to install permitting processes, background checks, and other safeguards when legally purchasing firearms. Others bemoaned federal gun laws, pointing to how UNC students now joined the hundreds of thousands of Americans affected by a school shooting since 1999. Later in the fall, students gathered at a day session of the North Carolina General Assembly and protested for gun reform until being removed from the visitors’ gallery.
UNC senior Ezster Rimanyi – who spoke at a demonstration organized by the UNC chapter of March For Our Lives – described how the UNC shooting and lockdown was the second she experienced, since there was a shooting in her high school community.
“People are going to pick up our story on a national scale and try to divide us,” Rimanyi said at the time about how the event would be politicized and discussed on a national level. “They’re going to politicize our conversation [in] a way that makes us turn against each other, but we cannot allow it in those moments. I want you to remember the solidarity we felt coming out of this traumatic event, and I want you to refrain from this division.”
Luke Diasio, vice president of the UNC-Chapel Hill chapter of March For Our Lives speaks at a gun safety rally Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023, in Chapel Hill, N.C. (AP Photo/Hannah Schoenbaum)
Just 16 days after Yan’s death and the prolonged lockdown, UNC Police issued another campus-wide lockdown due to an armed and dangerous person on campus. The university said it received reports at the Carolina Student Union about a person brandishing a weapon at 12:45 p.m., which prompted the lockdown. After the person left campus, UNC Police said operations could return to normal. Local law enforcement later arrested 27-year-old Mickel Deonte Harris, who is a Durham resident, on outstanding warrants related to a road rage incident — but police added he was sought in connection to the incident on UNC’s campus. He was later charged with having a gun on educational property.
“I want to be clear,” Guskiewicz said during a media availability afterward, “that guns are prohibited on this campus and every campus across the state of North Carolina. Today’s events further underscore the importance of everyone working collectively to know our safety protocols, follow our emergency action plan, and support one another… because incidents such as this are far too common.
“Thankfully, no one was injured,” the UNC Chancellor continued. “But imagine the stress, the trauma, and the anxiety that a second lockdown in 16 days has caused for our students, our faculty, and our staff. This pains me as a member of this community now for over 28 years, and I’m committed to doing everything possible to maintaining the safety of all those who work, learn, and live here at Carolina.”
Following the incidents, some UNC community members criticized the university’s response to the potentially active shooter situation. After Yan’s death, a student-led petition gathered hundreds of signatures requesting faculty be trained or re-trained in safety protocols and each classroom have working locks. Faculty asked questions and gave feedback directly to the chancellor and his administration during meetings. James said UNC Police and the university’s emergency services department would review its protocols and assess the campus’ safety infrastructure — which included eventually installing cameras in some buildings and considering the purchase of license plate readers to monitor vehicles.
In immediate response to the August 28 shooting, UNC opened a hotline for “concerned parents, loved ones and community members who have questions” about the incident and the school’s emergency protocols. It also launched an online portal to gather feedback and share a report of what those on campus wished to see in emergency responses. The results of that survey, which were publicly shared on December 4, suggested tweaks to the Alert Carolina system and its language, as well as confirming both safety and instruction protocols with faculty and improving the school’s safety infrastructure.
Tailei Qi, the graduate student suspected in the fatal shooting of a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty member, center, makes his first appearance at the Orange County Courthouse in Hillsborough, N.C., Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Hannah Schoenbaum)
Meanwhile, Qi made a brief first appearance in court on August 29. It was his appearance on September 17, though, when defense lawyers submitted to the court a mental health evaluation suggesting the Chinese national was not mentally fit to proceed. At the time, Qi spoke directly to the judge and requested a change of representation, arguing the completed evaluation by a psychiatrist was “too simple” and critical because of his request for a different attorney. The result was the prosecution calling for its own third-party mental evaluation of Qi, which was granted.
In November, Qi was back in superior court due to the results of the second evaluation, which similarly found he was mentally unfit to stand on trial. Judge Alyson Grine said the assessment determined Qi suffered from untreated schizophrenia and demonstrated behaviors of delusional thinking, hallucinations and self-harm. She ruled for Qi to be committed at Central Regional Hospital in Butner, N.C., which halted court proceedings for the foreseeable future as he receives treatment.
If Qi recovers enough to eventually be deemed mentally well, the district attorney’s office prosecuting the case has already committed to not seeking the death penalty. Orange County D.A. Jeff Nieman has said despite the maximum penalty available for first-degree murder being capital punishment, he does not plan on seeking it — sticking with a promise he made while campaigning for the elected role in 2022.
“I made a promise to voters that I would behave a certain way when I was running for office,” Nieman told Chapelboro in September. “I would say just about anybody would agree a fundamental thing they would like out of their leaders is that when [the officials] say they’re going to do something when they get a job, they do it when they get it.”
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