JUSTIN COOK The Roanoke Times

Haiyang Zhu leaves the Montgomery County Courthouse in Christiansburg after his preliminary hearing on Friday. Zhu is charged in the slaying of fellow Virginia Tech student Xin Yang in January.

CHRISTIANSBURG -- As he used a butcher knife to decapitate Xin Yang at a Virginia Tech cafe, Haiyang Zhu wore "a blank, determined look" on his face, an eyewitness testified Friday.

Au Bon Pain employee Corey Cox testified that he heard Zhu let out a growl as he attacked Yang. After that, Cox said, he didn't hear anything else from Zhu.

Cox said he was standing behind the cash register at the cafe in Tech's Graduate Life Center the evening of Jan. 21 when he heard the growling sound. He looked up to see Zhu with a knife in his hand, "just cutting away." Zhu and Yang were seated together at first, he said, but fell to the floor.

Everyone else inside Au Bon Pain ran, Cox said. He ducked behind the counter and called 911, peeking up a few times to describe to a dispatcher what he saw.

Montgomery County General District Court Judge Gino Williams certified a first-degree murder charge against 26-year-old Zhu to a grand jury Friday after hearing Cox and Virginia Tech police Officer Nicole Irvine testify at an hourlong preliminary hearing Friday morning.

The grand jury, which next meets in July, will decide if Zhu should face a trial in circuit court. If convicted, the maximum penalty he faces is life in prison.

Zhu's mental state had been questioned, but a psychologist who evaluated him found that he was competent to stand trial. Zhu was treated at Central State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Petersburg.

At Friday's hearing, Zhu seemed to show no expression, even when Cox and Irvine pointed at him when asked if the man they saw at Au Bon Pain was in the courtroom.

Zhu's defense attorney, Stephanie Cox, told Corey Cox she assumed that what he saw was very startling and upsetting.

"Yes, very," he said. "Atrocious."

Corey Cox said he was about 10 feet from Zhu at the time. He stayed on the phone with a 911 dispatcher until he was told he could hang up and leave.

Montgomery County Commonwealth's Attorney Brad Finch said an autopsy report showed that, in addition to cuts to her neck, Yang suffered "numerous defensive-type injuries" that included cuts to her hands, forearm and shoulder, and blunt force injuries to her head. Her shoes had apparently been knocked off her feet, Irvine testified.

Irvine was the first officer to arrive at Au Bon Pain.

She said she saw a body on the floor, the victim's hands curled into fists on her chest near her neck.

"I saw a gentleman walking toward me carrying a head in his hand," she said. "He was carrying her head in his left hand by the hair," heading toward the door.

She told him to put his hands in the air; he complied. She then told him to lie on the floor and put his hands behind his back.

"He was very calm," Irvine testified.

She said she saw a knife lying on a table in a puddle of blood and asked Zhu if he had any other weapons. He told her he had knives and a hammer in his backpack, she said.

The butcher knife used in the killing didn't belong to the cafe, Corey Cox testified.

After Zhu had been arrested and was at a magistrate's office later the evening of the killing, Irvine testified, someone referred to Yang as Zhu's girlfriend.

"He made the comment that she was not yet his girlfriend," referring to Yang in the present, she said.

Yang, 22, was a graduate student from Beijing who had arrived Jan. 8 to begin studies in accounting at the Pamplin College of Business. She lived in the Graduate Life Center.

At the time of the killing, Zhu was a doctoral candidate at Tech, where he began studying at the start of the 2008 fall semester. He and Yang, who was engaged to be married, met for the first time in early January. Because both were from China, Zhu was helping Yang in her transition to Blacksburg.

Wearing eyeglasses and an orange jumpsuit from the Montgomery County Jail, Zhu sat quietly between Stephanie Cox and an interpreter during Friday's hearing. The interpreter spoke to Zhu during very little of the proceedings.

During part of the testimony, the handcuffed Zhu took notes on a legal pad in his lap. When the interpreter gave him a different pen than the one he was using, one of several deputies standing behind him took it away and told him to use the first pen.