‘We will never forget.’ UNC comes together to mourn slain professor at candlelight vigil
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UNC Shooting
UNC professor Zijie Yan was fatally shot Aug. 28, 2023, in Chapel Hill, NC,, prompting an hourslong lockdown and questions about campus security. Yan’s graduate student has been charged with his murder. Here is ongoing News & Observer coverage about the killing, the campus response and the aftermath.
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Zijie Yan’s second child was too young to know why she was there.
She bounced on the lap of her mother, who was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a pained expression.
Sitting with her family at a candlelight vigil for her father, the little girl played peek-a-boo with a tissue meant for tears. A toddler still, she was too small to keep the seat from folding, so a relative reached from the row behind to hold the seatback upright.
She, her older sister and their mother attended Wednesday night’s vigil for Yan, a physics professor at UNC who was fatally shot Monday on the Chapel Hill campus.
Thousands gathered at the Dean E. Smith Center to celebrate Yan’s life, and to be there for one another.
“It’s a deeply human impulse to come together in times of tragedy,” Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said. “Yes, our sense of security and safety was pierced, but it is together with one another that we can find healing.”
Police have charged Tailei Qi, one of Yan’s graduate students, with first-degree murder. They have not shared a possible motive for the shooting at Caudill Labs on South Road.
The shooting locked down campus for several hours, rattling students and faculty who feared the worst.
“Monday’s tragedy is something we will never forget. And we wouldn’t want to,” said Jim White, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Even as we seek to restore some normalcy to our routines in the coming days.”
A daughter’s tears
Yan’s mother and several other loved ones sat in the front rows. They asked not to be photographed or interviewed.
Yan’s older daughter looks barely old enough to be in school, but she understood enough to cry. Her shoulders shook with grief as a pair of UNC professors — wiping their own tears — played Bach on strings.
Her younger sister, too young to be listening at all, laughed over the hush of the crowd.
Yan joined the faculty of the Department of Applied Physical Sciences in 2019.
Gusciewicz called him “a man devoted to expanding our knowledge about the world.”
“He was pushing the boundaries of nanoscience,” added Theo Dingemans, who chairs the department.
But more importantly, Dingemans said, Yan was a devoted father and a great colleague, teacher and mentor.
“Zijie was one of the kindest persons that I’ve ever met. He was soft spoken; he was a great listener; and actually, he had a wonderful sense of humor,” Dingemans said.
A candlelight vigil
After the condolences ended, a few lighters started small flames that spread candle by candle, neighbor by neighbor.
No words followed the softly sung alma mater.
Yan’s family was escorted out, his mother’s anguished voice rising in a lament.
Those in the arena filed outside into the warm, sticky night to return home. Half an hour later, the rain began.
The campus was set to resume normal operations at midnight
For many exiting the arena in stunned silence, “normal” would never be the same.
This story was originally published August 30, 2023 at 10:36 PM.
