Professor honored year after he was shot, killed on UNC campus: 'He had a wonderful spirit'

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- One year ago on August 28, 2023, shots were fired inside a lab building on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. A beloved professor was killed and the news shocked that community and made worldwide headlines.

The university honored the memory of associate professor Dr. Zijie Yan on Wednesday.

Chimes were heard inside the bell tower as "Hark the Sound" was played Wednesday afternoon in honor of Dr. Zijie Yan.

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

"I just talked with my freshman students a week ago in class and recounted Zijie to them," Superfine said.

Fresh flowers were at the sign of Caudill Labs where the shooting happened on Aug. 28.

Abby Messick said she was starting the first week of school as a freshman when the gunfire prompted a traumatic lockdown and she ran into a nearby building to lock herself in a room along with several other students.

"I was texting my mom and my dad and all of my friends making sure they got somewhere safe," Messick said. "I was just very unsure and scared because I don't know exactly what was going on."

Some students say the university's alert system failed to keep them up to date during the shooting. The university said they've made several improvements since then, including changes to Alert Carolina and adding emergency preparedness training for faculty.

"There's always going to be room for improvement," UNC student Rufus King said. "I think student engagement is probably going to be that number one thing."

A UNC graduate student is charged with killing Yan, his academic group leader, inside a laboratory on campus.

Yan earned multiple degrees at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China before coming to the United States, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2011 at Rensselaer Polytechnic University in New York.

In a Facebook post shared with the university's Material Sciences and Engineering Community, Department Head Professor Pawel Keblinski wrote in part: "He is remembered fondly by many of us that met him in the classroom, lab, or in the hallway of MRC. Among other things, he distinguished himself with publishing 17 journal articles in the course of his Ph.D. study."

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

Yan headed the Yan Research Group at UNC, with a stated major goal of transcending the "boundary between photonics and materials science by developing new techniques to study light-matter interactions at the nanometer scale."

Jeremy Fine, another doctoral student who is pursuing PhD in psychiatry, spoke with ABC11 on the eve of the grim anniversary.

"I was in the health sciences library on campus. I was on the third floor at the time when we got the notification. And then after we got the notification, me, my partner and a friend who I was studying with all hustled down into the basement of the Health Sciences Library and barricaded ourselves in the men's bathroom," he said.

"I don't think you could have done a better job than (the university) did of conveying information because it's really complicated, and you don't want to give away details of an active situation. But at the same time, we were in the dark, both literally and figuratively, when the automatic lights shut off. And we wanted to know if we were going to be OK or not. Just texting my parents and want them to be super worried because I thought it was going to be OK. But I also wanted them to be informed. So, it was challenging to figure out how much to communicate to my loved ones. So they didn't feel the terror that I was going through.

"Less than two weeks after, there was another shooting scare on campus, which just compounded everything. I mean, the first month of the first semester, so many things were just canceled. Transitioned to virtual. It just didn't feel like school had really ever started. And so, a lot of people felt that trauma just kind of dragged on. And so, I would think this (anniversary) isn't going to be a happy day, unfortunately. And when we are remembering it, I think it's really important that we focus on what we have learned from this. If anything, it's a really complicated situation."

"What do we as a society do? How long do we let someone sit and suffer and remain at risk before we act? And when we act, how do we act I think that's a really important discussion to start in this community, in our country and if any good can come out of this, I hope it's that we can talk about this in a way that's rooted in the truth of the situation," he told ABC11.

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