Shooting on UNC campus | Dr. Zijie Yan shot at Caudill Labs

RALEIGH, NC (WTVD) – One year ago, on August 28, 2023, shots were fired in a laboratory building on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. A popular professor was killed and the news shocked the community and made headlines around the world.

The university honored the memory of Associate Professor Dr. Zijie Yan on Wednesday.

Chimes could be heard inside the bell tower as “Hark the Sound” was played in honor of Dr. Zijie Yan on Wednesday afternoon.

“He was a quiet person, but he had a wonderful, generous spirit and a generous smile that he gave to everyone,” said Richard Superfine. Superfine, who hired Yan in 2019, is still processing his grief over the loss of his beloved colleague. He was in the bell tower along with several other faculty members from the School of Applied Physical Sciences.

“I was just talking to my freshmen in class a week ago and telling them about Zijie,” Superfine said.

Fresh flowers were placed on the sign at Caudill Labs, where the shooting occurred on August 28.

Abby Messick said she had just started the first week of school her freshman year when the shooting triggered a traumatic curfew and she ran into a nearby building to lock herself in a room with several other students.

“I was texting my mom, dad and all my friends to make sure they got to a safe place,” Messick said. “I was just very unsure and scared because I didn’t know exactly what was going on.”

Some students say the university’s alert system did not keep them informed during the shooting. The university said it has made several improvements since then, including changes to Alert Carolina and adding emergency preparedness training for faculty.

“There’s always room for improvement,” said UNC student Rufus King. “I think student engagement will probably be the most important thing.”

A UNC graduate student is accused of killing Yan, the leader of his academic group, in a campus laboratory.

Yan earned several degrees from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China before coming to the United States, where he received his doctorate from Rensselaer Polytechnic University in New York in 2011.

In a Facebook post shared with the university’s materials science and engineering community, the head of the department, Professor Pawel Keblinski, wrote, in part: “He is remembered fondly by many of us who met him in the lecture theatre, the laboratory or the corridors of the MRC. Among other things, he distinguished himself by publishing 17 journal articles during the course of his PhD studies.”

After Rensselaer, he went to the University of Chicago, where he quickly earned the respect of his colleagues.

Yan led the Yan Research Group at UNC with the stated primary goal of “crossing the boundary between photonics and materials science by developing new techniques to study the interactions between light and matter at the nanometer scale.”

Jeremy Fine, another graduate student pursuing a PhD in psychiatry, spoke to ABC11 on the eve of the grim anniversary.

“I was in the Health Sciences Library on campus. When we got the notification, I was on the third floor. And after we got the notification, my partner, a friend I was studying with, and I rushed to the basement of the Health Sciences Library and barricaded ourselves in the men’s restroom,” he said.

“I don’t think they could have done a better job of communicating the information than (the university) did, because it’s really complicated and you don’t want to give away details of a current situation. But at the same time, we were sitting in the dark, both literally and figuratively, when the automatic lights went off. And we wanted to know if everything was going to be OK or not. I just texted my parents and wanted them to be really worried because I thought everything was going to be OK. But I also wanted them to be informed. So it was a challenge to figure out how much to share with my loved ones. So they wouldn’t feel the terror that I was going through.

“Not two weeks later, there was another shooting on campus, which made everything even worse. I mean, the first month of the first semester, so many things were just canceled. Switched to virtual. It just didn’t feel like school ever really started. And so a lot of people felt like this trauma was just dragging on. And so I think this (anniversary) is not going to be a happy day, unfortunately. And as we remember that, I think it’s really important that we focus on what we learned from it. If anything, it’s a really complicated situation.”

“What do we do as a society? How long do we let someone sit and suffer and be exposed to danger before we act? And if we act, how do we act? I think that’s a really important discussion that we need to have in this community, in our country, and if anything good can come out of this, I hope it’s that we can talk about it in a way that’s rooted in the truth of the situation,” he told ABC11.

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