Monday, December 21, 2009
Former Va. Tech student pleads guilty to murder
Haiyang Zhu was accused of attacking and decapitating a fellow student in a campus cafe. Zhu will be sentenced in April.
Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times
Haiyang Zhu listens to the judge explain court procedures in Montgomery County Circuit Court in Christiansburg on Monday.
Related
Earlier coverage
- Zhu may plead guilty in knife attack on fellow Virginia Tech grad student
- Evaluation could delay Zhu's trial
- Trial over Virginia Tech cafe killing pushed to February
- Judge certifies Virginia Tech murder charge
- Virginia Tech slaying suspect undergoing treatment
- Student did not indicate threat, Tech says
- Slaying suspect visited counseling center
- Shock from killing ripples through Tech
- Virginia Tech releases gruesome details of student's killing
- Police search for motives in Tech killing
CHRISTIANSBURG -- A former Virginia Tech graduate student pleaded guilty this morning to first-degree murder in the January killing of a fellow student.
Haiyang Zhu, 26, was charged with murder in the Jan. 21 death of Xin Yang, 22. Zhu was accused of attacking and decapitating Yang with a knife as the pair had coffee together at Au Bon Pain in Tech's Graduate Life Center. Zhu will be sentenced in April.
Zhu has for months been scheduled for a four-day jury trial beginning Feb. 1 in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
According to evidence presented this morning by Commonwealth's Attorney Brad Finch, if the trial had gone forward, he would have presented two letters written by Zhu, claiming that he killed Yang because he loved her and she had rejected him.
The first letter was a love letter written and delivered to Yang in January saying he would "treasure her forever."
The second letter was written by Zhu in jail and titled, "A will." In it, he claimed he had no other choice but to kill her because he "loved her too much" and she broke his heart on Jan. 20 when she told him she had a boyfriend who she planned to marry. In the letter, Zhu said Yang's boyfriend could not compare to him in education and background, and that she should have made the sensible decision to marry him instead.
Yang was a graduate student from Beijing who had arrived Jan. 8. Zhu was a doctoral student at Tech, where he began studying in the fall of 2008.
Because both were from China, Zhu was helping Yang in her transition to Blacksburg.
