Qinxuan Pan pleads guilty to 2021 murder of Yale student Kevin Jiang in New Haven

Qinxuan Pan, 32, of New Haven, pleaded guilty before Judge Gerald L. Harmon to a charge of murder, in connection to the February 6, 2021 death of Yale student Kevin Jiang in New Haven

The man accused of murdering a Yale student in 2021 pleaded guilty Thursday, according to judicial officials.

Qinxuan Pan, 32, of New Haven, pleaded guilty before Judge Gerald L. Harmon to a charge of murder in connection to the Feb. 6, 2021 death of Kevin Jiang in New Haven

As a result of a plea agreement, Pan faces a sentence of 35 years in prison when he is sentenced in New Haven Superior Court on April 25, according to judicial officials.

Pan had been in custody since he was arrested in connection to the fatal shooting of 26-year-old Jiang on Lawrence Street.

Jiang, a Chicago native, U.S. Army veteran and National Guard reservist, was a graduate student at the Yale School of the Environment when he was found laying beside his car on Lawrence Street, not far from campus, suffering from several gunshot wounds, according to police and court records.

Police identified Pan, who had been in the area at the time of the shooting, as a person of interest a few days later. But by then, he had disappeared.

The New Haven Police Department issued a warrant for Pan’s arrest in 2021. Two months passed before he was arrested by U.S. Marshalls in Montgomery, Alabama, where he had been renting an apartment under a fake name and trying to elude police, according to police and court records.

Court records revealed the high-tech manhunt that led them to Pan through cellphone location data, surveillance cameras and license plate readers in addition to traditional detective work. Authorities pieced together that Pan had known Jiang’s fiancé, Zion Perry, at MIT. The two hadn’t been in contact since Perry’s graduation, but were still connected on social media, according to police and court records.

Pan was arrested by federal agents in Alabama, more than three months after Jiang’s death, where he was renting the apartment under a false name and had in his possession seven cellphones, $19,000 in cash and his father’s passport, prosecutors have said.

Pan was born in Shanghai but has lived in the U.S. since 2007 and is an American citizen, defense attorney William Gerace said at the time of the arrest. Gerace had described him as an engaging young man with a “stratospheric” IQ who worked as an artificial intelligence researcher at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Jiang was shot moments after dropping Perry off at her home in New Haven. She heard the gunshots.

Jiang had been an active member at Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven, where he and Perry planned to be married.

State’s Attorney John P. Doyle Jr. said in a statement that he extends his gratitude to the law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation, including New Haven, Hamden, Meriden, North Haven, Yale University and Newington Police Departments, the Connecticut State Police, the Mansfield, Mass., Police Department, Massachusetts State Police, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Department, as well as federal authorities from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service.