Originally published August 29, 2023 7:00 pm PDT
Fox News described the Asian shooter as “mostly white.”
QUICK FACTS:
- Tailei Qi, a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been charged with first-degree murder and having a gun on campus after opening fire on campus.
- An associate professor in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences was killed in a laboratory during the shooting.
- “This loss is devastating, and this shooting damages the trust and safety that we so often take for granted in our campus community,” UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said during a press conference. “We will work to rebuild that sense of trust and safety.”
- It is unknown whether Qi targeted Yan.
- Qi was connected to the Wuhan University in China before attending Louisiana State University and later the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Wuhan is where the COVID virus is said to have originated via gain-of-function research approved by former National Institutes of Allergies and Infection Diseases (NIAID) head Dr. Anthony Fauci.
- In 2015, Qi acted as a researcher for an institution in Jiangsu, China.
- A former classmate of Qi’s told WRAL News that he “would have never guessed that [Qi] would be the kind of person who could possibly be capable of this kind of thing.”
- An anonymous student explained to Fox News Digital that they saw “cops engage their slides on their AR-15s. I heard one large bang but nothing other than that.”
QI’S CONFUSING TWEETS ABOUT WORK:
- Qi tweeted in July that he wanted to “make some new friends” and described himself as “a second-year PhD student, interested in nanoparticle synthesis, optical trapping, self-assembly, spectra analysis, and ML. [A] bit stupid in daily trifles, very enthusiastic talking about research.”
- In another post, Qi stated, “For a Phd student, pay much attention to working time every day is really childish…I know many people want to me to show them working and working, but no…that’s not human at all.”
- “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,” Qi tweeted in October 2022.
BACKGROUND:
- Chao Shao from the Wuhan Institute of Virology revealed to the International Press Association that COVID-19 was engineered as a “bioweapon.”
- Shan Chao, a colleague of Shao, was directed to “find out which one had the best ability to infect as many species as possible,” and to “find out how easy it was to infect other species,” according to Shao’s interview.
- Shao explained in the interview that researchers were given tasks and missions unrelated to their expertise, likely to distribute the virus to communities.
- The missions were under the guise of checking on “health or hygiene conditions” at various locations.
