Police continue search for missing person, We are releasing this video as we continue our search for Yingying Zhang, missing since Friday, June 9. Revisiting Yingyings story at this moment is not only relevant, but also necessary. Would UIUC be a safer place if some of its resources for policing and surveillance went toward mental health services and supporting international students? Co-Author. To lure female victims into his car, Christensen claimed to be a police officer. Yingying Zhang is from a small city in South east China called Nanping (a prefectural city in the Fujian province). its incredibly painful, Bullis said in court, according to CBS Local. When the police questioned Brendt, he denied being involved in Zhangs disappearance. One of them, a law student, noted that the presumption of innocence is a first principle and a literally foundational American value.. Christensen is not a social, charismatic person, and so is unlikely to recruit others to commit violent acts on his behalf. Five jurors agreed with this point. Yingying majored in environmental engineering. The Chinese government closely followed Brendt Christensens trial, and the prosecution was determined to seek the death penalty. She stands by the bus stop beneath a tree. Her life is frozen in time, while mine goes on. Her body has never been found. Im not trying to find excuses for what Christensen did, but to view it as an isolated incident, an example of the dangerous few, would be to miss the underlying context and eschew collective responsibility. The judge has denied bail for Christensen. On the right, a strapped gurney. Christensen was convicted of kidnapping and killing Zhang at trial in June, and later was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release. I saw the film for the first time in the fall of 2020, after a summer of protests for Black lives was met with raging police brutality. Sep 2017 - Dec 20225 years 4 months. Her boyfriend, Xiaolin Hou, testified that the family's only hope was that Zhang's body will be found so they can bury her in China. A source close to the investigation said the landfill has not been searched. In the just-unsealed documents was the story of a woman who claimed Christensen choked and sexually assaulted her sometime in 2012 or 2013. Because a unanimous verdict was not reached, Christensen was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The case is being featured on 20/20 on November 15, 2019. There, a young woman in a black dress and boots is shredding her voice to the beat. In a string of angry messages, I picked apart her arguments and refuted them one by one. Main text. Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) exhibits the characteristics of strong metastatic ability and a high recurrence rate, and M2-type macrophages play an important role in this process. She walks over and leans in the passenger side window. Zhang's family said they believe the best thing to do at this point is allow federal, state, and local authorities to determine the feasibility of recovering her body. That was just hours before Zhang was seen getting into Christensen's black Saturn Astra, the last time she was seen alive. Verified email at umn.edu. We are both mothers. Without a body, prosecutors based their case on DNA evidence found at Christensen's apartment, and the defendant's own boasting of having killed Zhang in a conversation with his girlfriend. The U.S. Attorney's office in the Central District of Illinois said Zhang's remains have not been found. At 2:38 p.m,, the apartment manager sent Zhang a text message and received no response. Of course Yingying's Charley Project casefile has the basics. Now, among the familiar sight and through the familiar sound, I also see Yingying. Since then, they've likely been covered by at least 30 feet of landfill. / CBS Chicago. How Christensen may cause harm, or be harmed, within prison walls did not appear to be of concern. Yet historically, the Middle Kingdom was not any more punitive than its Western counterparts, and recent surveys show a two-thirds support rate for the death penalty in China, roughly the same as those from the U.S. over the same time period. She exited the bus and tried to flag down another one, but it continued past her without stopping. Today, over 140 countries have abolished the death penalty by law or in practiceat times against popular support for retentionincluding every country in Europe with the exception of Belarus and nearly half of the countries in Africa. Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. When Yingying Zhang went missing on June 9, 2017, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was thrown into chaos as people searched frantically for the visiting Chinese scholar. . In my proximity to both the victim and the perpetrator, Ive felt, however presumptuously, a particular responsibility: to bear witness to the case as it unfolded, and to try to wring some sense out of this senseless tragedy. According to the University of Illinois police, Zhang, a graduate student from China, disappeared on June 9, 2017. Federal prosecutors have said Christensen posed as an undercover officer to lure Zhang, 26, into his car on June 9, 2017. The public execution, according to Michel Foucault, was not only a judicial but also a political ritual, through which the state manifested its absolute power. Cops are also more likely to commit domestic abuse than the general population. He was found guilty in the kidnaping, torture and murder of foreign student Zhang. However, Mike refused to divulge any information about the location of Zhangs remains. Among the hundreds of exhibits used in the trial, theres a 90-second clip. Follow Author. On the other hand, the threat of sexual violence is effectively sanctioned as a condition of incarceration, and 60 percent of sexual assaults in prison or jail are committed by staff. What happened to Yingying could never have happened in China, she insisted, echoing the talking points on state media that U.S. authorities were only paying attention to the case because China is strong. Thats because, not only was Christensen convicted in Zhangs death, but his lawyer revealed in court that he admits to murdering her. Western critics point to this as another example of the countrys abysmal human rights record, while Chinese officials and prominent academics claim that the legitimacy of capital punishment is ingrained in Chinese tradition and endorsed by its people. Please let us bring Yingying home," Ronggao Zhang said. One of her favorite songs was The Rose, a hit in 1980 for American singer Bette Midler, reported The Chicago Tribune. My research interests include economic evaluations of complex (public) health interventions and personalized healthcare. CHICAGO (CBS) -- The family of slain Chinese scholar Yingying Zhang said Wednesday they now know where her body might have been dumped, but that it might be impossible to find her remains more than two years after her brutal murder. I pursued physics, the same discipline as her killer. Im surprised, though perhaps I should not be, by how little awareness there is. Its worth cannot, and should not, be measured by the extent of state-sponsored punishment exacted on the man who took it. WGN-TV reported that he raped and beheaded Zhang, and implied he had 12 other victims, but this was never proven. Brendt was also ordered to pay a hefty fine of $250,000 for each conviction. I find a clue in the jury notes. When confirming details about Christensen, I googled his name and clicked on his LinkedIn profile. "There is nothing in the world that we want more than to find our daughter and bring her home. By this time, Zhangs family flew in from China and helped in the search. Yingying Zhang Zhang; Zhonghua Gao (Contributorpp. But as I research this story, she appears so young to me, like a distant reminiscence. With a confession on hand, the FBI arrested Brendt Christensen and charged him with the murder of Yingying Zhang. Beckett said the defense team for her killer, Brendt Christensen, disclosed the location of Zhang's body as part of a failed immunity agreement. Yangyang Cheng is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law Schools Paul Tsai China Center and a particle physicist. The documentary ' Finding Yingying ,' chronicles the disappearance of Zhang and bringing her justice while capturing the devastating impact on her . The backdrop to her stage features a spiraling pattern in green, yellow, and white: a clock turned upside down. The badge was found by a motorist about two-and-a-half miles from Christensen's apartment. China Central Television ran a feature: The Terrifying Right to Remain Silent60 Days after Yingying Zhangs Disappearance. The prison, as Angela Davis and Gina Dent explained, is a border. The memorial garden for Yingying Zhang outside Campbell Hall on the UIUC campus, near where she was last seen. Audio and video recordings were played for a federal jury in the murder-kidnapping trial of Brendt Christensen on Friday --- including a recording of Christensen's chilling account of how he kidnapped and murdered Yingying Zhang, a promising young environmental engineer from China in June 2017. One says that I might have had an allergic reaction, which is the version I swear to because the alternative is unthinkable. While a teenager in China, I had many fraught conversations with my mother about who should run errands after dark. The kidnapping and murder of Yingying Zhang occurred in Urbana, Illinois on June 9, 2017, when Zhang, a visiting Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was abducted by Brendt Allen Christensen, a Champaign resident and former physics graduate student at the university. The U.S. Attorney for Central Illinois, John Milhiser, as he spoke, Zhang's mother, Lifeng Ye, sobbed and the woman standing next to her appeared to be holding her upright. Im puzzled over this question to the judge, why the distinction was necessary. On June 9, 2017, Yingying had left to catch a bus to go view an apartment to rent and was never seen alive again. A black sedan circles around the block and stops in front of her. Beckett planned to address the development at a news conference beginning at 3 p.m. CST, but that news conference was later postponed. 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