Two Years After a Campus Shooting, Is UNC-Chapel Hill Safer?

On August 28, roughly 75 students, faculty, and administrators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill formed a semicircle in the courtyard of Caudill Laboratories, gathered to honor the life of professor Zijie Yan.

Yan was shot and killed in the building two years earlier, just days into the school year. 

Gathered around a bench and plaque dedicated to Yan, colleagues in the applied physical sciences department remembered him as a talented scientist and a “man of grace,” as professor Richard Superfine put it.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Superfine said.

Chancellor Lee Roberts, who joined the university after the shooting, said he hoped Yan’s death would inspire the institution to “learn some lessons about how to prevent something similar happening in the future.”

UNC-CH came under scrutiny for its handling of public safety issues after the shooting. The News & Observer reported that the university had been advised three years earlier to require active shooter training for faculty but hadn’t done so. Faculty, students, and staff complained that they had been left sheltering in place for hours, with few updates from the university. In the information vacuum, rumors and misinformation spread quickly.

An after-action report released nine months later recommended a host of changes at UNC-CH, from requiring active-assailant training to improving communications and police coordination during public safety incidents. UNC-CH officials say they have made progress on many of the recommendations in the last two years, including improvements to the Alert Carolina notification platform, and they formed a new Behavioral Assessment and Management Team within the Campus Safety department.

“When you have a tragedy like that, it really forces you to move at a faster rate and really to look at all the options that might be available within reason to try to improve campus safety,” UNC-CH Police Chief Brian James said in an August 27 interview. “I feel like we are more safe.”

But some faculty say the university still needs to require more training and improve mental health services. Students interviewed by The Assembly said they either didn’t know of the existence of the Behavioral Assessment and Management Team or were unclear on how to report other students’ threatening or concerning behaviors.

The killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk while he spoke at Utah Valley University last week has drawn fresh attention nationally to security on college campuses. Fayetteville State University and several other historically Black colleges and universities around the country received unspecified threats in the wake of the Kirk shooting.

Some students who grew up in the era of school shootings, however, said there’s only so much the university can do to protect them.

“Seeing so many kids on campus—they’re so excited for their first day of class,” said junior Ashley Ju. “But for my second week ever, I had a shooting on our campus, and everyone here experienced the same thing. So there’s a lot of anxiety with that.”

Chaos and Tragedy

On August 28, 2023, at approximately 1:02 p.m., police say graduate student Tailei Qi entered the Caudill Laboratories building and shot and killed Yan, his academic adviser. Qi then fled the scene on foot and was arrested roughly 1.5 miles north of campus an hour later.

Nick Willets, now a senior, recalled the tense, confusing hours after the shooting.

“I remember getting the text from the Alert Carolina on my phone, there was an active shooter on campus and to avoid windows, and I’m like, ‘Is this a glitch in their system or something? This can’t actually be happening,’” Willets said. “A friend texted me and said, ‘I heard two people got shot.’ So I was just hearing various things.”

Harini Somanchi, who graduated in May, said she sheltered in place with a group of students in a classroom building. Somanchi said rumors spreading on social media only added to her stress and anxiety. She said, for example, that a teaching assistant incorrectly told her group after only a few minutes in lockdown that the shooter had been apprehended.

“And we were like, ‘Is that true?’” she recalled. “But obviously that wasn’t true.”

James acknowledged that there were long stretches during the lockdown when officials didn’t send updates. Law enforcement officials maintained the lockdown for two hours after Qi’s arrest as they searched the campus for the murder weapon, James said. It was never found. (Qi was charged with first-degree murder, but he was later declared unfit for trial due to schizophrenia.)

The university canceled classes for the remainder of the week as the campus grappled with the tragedy. 

The state agreed to settle a wrongful death claim from Yan’s wife and children for $750,000 earlier this year. The claim asserted that the school bore some responsibility for his death because Qi had “severe mental illness, including schizophrenia” and had threatened Yan on several occasions.

The Aftermath 

UNC-CH hired Angel Gray as its threat assessment and management director in October 2023, and brought Jody Marks on as assistant director in January 2025. The Carolina Behavioral Assessment and Management Team, composed of four case managers, gathers information about people who have shown concerning behaviors and determines ways to prevent violence. Gray and Marks told The Assembly they are developing a referral system for students or others to share concerns about friends or classmates.

Gray acknowledged many people on campus still don’t know her team exists.

“We’re hoping during the fall semester to really push out the message that we are here,” she said.

“People who commit targeted attacks don’t just snap—they decide,” Gray said. “We need people to look out for those warning and concerning behaviors, report those to a team who knows what they’re looking for, so we can assess that person and hopefully come up with some management strategies to address the concerning behavior before they commit an attack.”

The school also contracted a nonprofit security analysis company, CNA of Arlington, Virginia, to create an after-action report. Released in May 2024, the report outlined six priorities for UNC-Chapel Hill to focus on in hopes of preventing another tragedy on campus. They were:

• Offer active-assailant training to students, faculty, and staff.
• Improve public safety response, including hosting a multiagency exercise drill to test how local law enforcement entities would react to a major incident.
• Ensure better training and communication between campus police and other local law enforcement.
• Make improvements to the Alert Carolina system, including preparing for more frequent updates. 
• Enhance campus counseling and behavioral health services.
• Upgrade security infrastructure on campus, including improved camera surveillance and building and room access controls.

University officials told The Assembly that implementing the recommendations is expected to be a three-year process and that they have made progress on many of them.

Darrell Jeter, director of emergency management and planning at UNC-CH, said the university rolled out a 25-minute online emergency preparedness course for the more than 4,600 faculty last fall, and this year they began encouraging staff to complete the same training. Jeter said the university is now working on a strategy to provide that training to the more than 31,000 students on campus. 

UNC-CH’s communications office said in a statement that the program “guides faculty and teaching assistants in how to prepare for and respond to a range of crises.” The university added that the training sessions “are not mandatory but are encouraged.”

Erin Siegal McIntyre, a professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, told The Assembly that she has never been required to complete emergency preparedness training.

“This feels like a bad joke, to be honest,” she said. “I think if the university were to be more serious about active-shooter training, or any kind of basic hostile classroom environment training, I think those need to happen in person, and I think they do need to be required.”

McIntyre said two years ago she worked with UNC Police and organized an in-person active-shooter training seminar at the journalism school. She said it was well-attended and helpful to be able to ask questions.

“We all wish we live in a world where we don’t have to prepare, but it’s better to be prepared with some basics,” McIntyre said.

James said another area of focus over the past two years has been improving the Alert Carolina platform, both in terms of frequency of updates and trying to make the language clearer. UNC-CH also added an “I’m OK” feature to its Carolina Ready Safety app in March 2024.

When a man walked into Alpine Bagel Café in the Student Union and brandished a firearm just 16 days after Yan was shot in fall 2023, Campus Safety issued Alert Carolina updates every 15 minutes, James said. 

“Even in that short span of time, we tried to clean that up,” James said.

Somanchi said she noticed the change at the time. Regular updates telling students and employees to stay in place helped, she said, because during the first lockdown “people had literally no idea whether they should stay where they are or whether they’re free to leave.”

“I think [the university] tried to incorporate feedback from the first shooting and sent a lot more constant messaging about what was going on, which I think was really helpful,” Somanchi said.

‘Send Everything You Got’

The report also included recommendations for law enforcement leaders, who in interviews described a chaotic initial response.

Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood said he first heard about the shooting minutes after it took place when he got a phone call from Eddie Buffaloe, secretary of the N.C. Department of Public Safety, asking if he needed any additional resources. Blackwood had a deputy make some calls, and the deputy reported back that the suspect was in custody and UNC Police didn’t need help, Blackwood recalled. But that turned out to be incorrect; James called moments later to request help, Blackwood said.

“We had a lot of people on the way very quickly,” Blackwood said. “By the time I drove approximately seven minutes from Hillsborough to the UNC campus … it wasn’t anything but black, silver, and blue going in there.”

He acknowledged there needed to be more “cohesive communication” in the critical minutes following the killing.

Carrboro Police Chief Chris Atack said he sent seven patrol officers, but it was challenging to get timely, accurate updates from campus.

The university’s after-action report said the school should hold a multiagency drill to test its capabilities in responding to an active threat on campus. James said UNC-CH held a “tabletop” exercise last spring with the Chapel Hill Police Department, Carrboro Police Department, and Orange County Sheriff’s Office. But the agencies have not held a joint live drill in the past two years.

The report also called for enhanced security on campus, including new surveillance camera systems. James said the university installed 23 license plate readers around campus 16 months ago. Qi was apprehended after fleeing on foot, but James said most crimes involve a vehicle in some way.

“The license plate readers serve two purposes—first, I think it serves as a deterrent,” James said. “And if someone commits a crime and they’re using a vehicle in the commission of that crime, it gives us an excellent opportunity to identify that person.”

Enormous Need

Another priority identified in the report was making campus counseling and behavioral health resources available to all members of the university community following an incident on campus.

Avery Cook, director of UNC Counseling and Psychological Services, or CAPS, said that the university actually had done that before the report. She said counselors were in place to assist students, faculty, and staff less than 24 hours after the 2023 shooting.

“We staffed three different locations on campus where students were able to come in and get support,” Cook said. “We felt like we really met students’ needs at that time and feel like we’re still in a place to do that.”

Still, Beth Moracco, chair of the faculty council, said the mental health needs of students, faculty, and staff at UNC-CH—for many reasons, not just related to the 2023 shooting—far outweigh the resources currently available on campus.

“I think the university has done a good job of expanding accessibility to resources, but I don’t think it’s adequate and just because the need is so enormous,” Moracco said.

Some students said the changes they most wanted to see were out of the school’s hands. Days after the shooting, Sloan Duvall and other members of the UNC Young Democrats organized a rally on the steps of South Building calling for stricter gun laws in North Carolina. They were joined by David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Duvall, who graduated from UNC-CH last May, noted that North Carolina’s elected officials in 2023 made it easier to buy handguns by removing the requirement for a permit. Court documents show that Qi purchased a Glock 43X 9mm pistol after the law changed.

“Obviously, there was a lot of sadness, but there was also a very large feeling of outrage that our state lawmakers and our government had kind of failed us and put us in the situation where we were unsafe inside our classrooms,” Duvall said. The group also went to Raleigh to demonstrate at the legislature.

This year, the GOP-led legislature passed a bill that would eliminate the permit requirement to carry a concealed handgun. Gov. Josh Stein vetoed it, and the Senate voted to override the veto; the House has not done so. 

Moving Forward

During the ceremony last month at Caudill Laboratories, students and faculty focused less on the tragedy than on Yan’s work and impact on those around him.

“Zijie was a brilliant scientist,” said Theo Dingemans, chair of the applied physical sciences department. “Zijie was deeply respected, not only for his groundbreaking research in nanotechnology and nanoscience, but also for the way he inspired his students and colleagues to think boldly.”

Roberts described the bench dedicated in Yan’s honor as a physical reminder of the bonds the university community shares. Superfine, Yan’s former colleague, said the bench was fashioned from a felled post oak tree by Carolina Tree Heritage, a university program that repurposes downed historic campus trees.

“I like to think that Zijie would love resting on a bench made from a Carolina tree in the Carolina blue sky,” he said.

Keith T. Barber spent 10 years working behind the scenes of Hollywood feature films and network TV shows before receiving his master of fine arts degree in Film & Media Studies from UNC Greensboro in 2016. For the past two years, Keith has served as adjunct professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, leading graduate and undergraduate courses in Digital Storytelling and Audio Journalism.