A former graduate student at MIT has pleaded guilty to killing a Yale graduate student in January 2021 in a horrific shooting that shocked people on both campuses.
The accused, Qinxuan Pan, 32, escaped arrest minutes after the murder. He spent the next three months hiding from law enforcement and the next two years maintaining his innocence. That changed Thursday when Mr. Pan pleaded guilty, potentially ending a case that had caused some Connecticut residents to question the competence of local police.
Mr. Pan faces a single charge of murder, according to a statement from John P. Doyle Jr., the state’s attorney in New Haven. As part of his plea deal, Mr. Pan could face up to 35 years in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for April 25.
The prosecution made no mention of Mr. Pan’s possible motives for the attack. In a 96-page warrant filed in state court in February 2021, a New Haven police detective described Mr. Pan’s actions as follows:
In 2019, when he was a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mr. Pan met Zion Perry, an undergraduate student at MIT, and they became friends. The two stayed in touch through Facebook, where Ms. Perry posted an announcement celebrating her engagement on Jan. 30, 2021, to Kevin Jiang, a 26-year-old graduate student in environmental science at Yale.
A week later, on February 6, 2021, Mr. Pan allegedly stole a dark blue SUV from a dealership in Massachusetts, according to a criminal complaint filed by the police department in Mansfield, outside Boston. He drove to Ms. Perry’s neighborhood in New Haven, near the Yale campus, where she was a doctoral student in biochemistry and biophysics.
Mr. Jiang and Ms. Perry had spent much of the day together. They went ice fishing and cooked dinner at her apartment. He left a few minutes after 8 p.m., and got into his Toyota Prius. He had driven only a few blocks before Mr. Pan rammed him in the stolen SUV, according to the warrant. Mr. Jiang got out of his car and Mr. Pan fired eight bullets at him, including multiple shots to his face.
A surveillance camera captured the crash. A neighbor saw the shooting and several people saw the shooter get back into his SUV and drive away, police said.
About 30 minutes after the shooting, police in the nearby town of North Haven received a call from a local scrap yard that a driver had stuck his SUV on some railroad tracks. Officers responded to find Mr. Pan behind the wheel of the dark blue GMC. He was wearing a gray knit hat with the “MetroPCS” logo on it, the detective noted.
Mr. Pan told officers he had gotten lost while searching for the highway back to Massachusetts. Officers discovered the vehicle’s license plate was missing or stolen. In a statement to the New Haven Independent, a local news website, North Haven Police Chief Kevin Glenn said officers did not know at the time that the vehicle had been stolen.
Officers did not take Mr Pan into custody. Instead, they arranged for a tow truck, which took the SUV off the tracks and brought Mr. Pan to a nearby motel.
Ninety minutes later, the New Haven Police Department issued an alert for a dark-colored SUV. In the alert, a dispatcher incorrectly said the vehicle may have been driven by two people, possibly including a black man. None of the witnesses to the shooting had reported a second assailant and no one had described the assailant as Black, according to the warrant.
The next morning, the same officer who had discovered Mr. Pan trapped in the junkyard was called to an Arby’s restaurant next door to the motel, according to the warrant. A worker had called because a bag had been found near the restaurant’s trash can. It contained items including a Ruger semi-automatic handgun, seven firearms magazines and several boxes of ammunition.
The bag also contained a gray knit hat with the “MetroPCS” logo. Police requested an arrest warrant for Mr. Pan on February 26, 2021.
A multi-state manhunt ensued. Eventually, Mr. Pan was located in Alabama, where he had rented an apartment under an assumed name. After a three-month investigation, he was arrested in Alabama and extradited to Connecticut, Mr. Doyle said Thursday.
During Mr. Pan’s extended flight, some residents in the New Haven area accused the police of paralyzing the case, according to The New Haven Independent. The fact that Mr. Pan was discovered stuck to the railroad tracks should have prompted officers to ask more questions, some residents said.
In a statement to the Independent, Chief Glenn said: “The officers involved in this investigation did their job properly.”
