NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — A former Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher was sentenced Tuesday to 35 years in prison for the murder of a Yale University graduate student found shot to death outside his car on a Connecticut street.
Qinxuan Pan, 33, who pleaded guilty to murder in February, apologized during a hearing in a New Haven courtroom filled with family and friends of the victim, Kevin Jiang.
“I am sorry for what my actions caused and for everyone affected,” Pan said. “I fully accept my sanctions.”
Jiang, 26, a U.S. Army veteran who grew up in Chicago and a graduate student at Yale’s School of the Environment, had just left his fiancée’s apartment in New Haven on the evening of February 6, 2021, when he was shot multiple times by Pan, according to police and prosecutors. The couple had just gotten engaged a few days earlier.
Several of Jiang’s relatives and friends spoke in court before the judge handed down the sentence, which Pan agreed to as part of his plea deal.
“My son was a remarkable young man who cherished life and had a deep (belief) in God. He had a bright future ahead of him – a future that promised to spread God’s love everywhere,” said Jiang’s father, Mingchen Jiang.
The motive for the murder has never been clearly established. Investigators said they discovered that Pan and Jiang’s fiancée were connected on social media and had met while at MIT, where both were graduates and Pan was working as a researcher at the time of the shooting.
According to the documents, Jiang’s fiancée told authorities that she and Pan “never had a romantic or sexual relationship, they were just friends, but she had the feeling that he was interested in her during this time.” period “.
After the shooting, Pan fled the scene and eluded police for three months before being apprehended in Alabama, where authorities said he was caught living under a false name with $19,000 in cash, a passport and several cell phones.
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