Grad Student Xin Yang Murdered on Virginia Tech Campus

The Associated Press is reporting another tragedy on the Virginia Tech grounds. Xin Yang, a 22-year-old graduate student from China, was decapitated with a kitchen knife in a campus café.

Police have arrested a graduate student, 25-year-old Haiyang Zhu.

Xin Yang had arrived on campus from Bejiing on January 8 to study accounting. The suspect, Haiyang Zhu, came from Ningbo, China last fall to earn his Ph.D. in agricultural and applied economics. According to school records, Zhu was listed as one of Yang's contacts.

According to witnesses, the AP said, Yang and Zhu had been having coffee in a café in the Graduate Life center where Yang was living. Witnesses in the café told police that the two hadn't been arguing before the attack.

Shortly after 7 p.m. Wednesday, police received two 911 calls and were on the scene in little more than a minute. Zhu was charged with first-degree murder and is being held without bond at the Montgomery County Jail.

The murder is the first since the mass killing on campus in 2007, when a student shot 32 people, then took his own life.

Bill Roth, a broadcaster for Virginia Tech sports wrote in an article today, "We were experiencing that all-too-familiar taste of horror and rage that we tasted two years ago following the Norris Hall shootings. . .She hadn't been here two weeks. . .That's not enough time to learn your way around our campus, is it? How unfair. How despicable. How tragic."

Over 30,000 people, including students, staff and parents, were alerted by the campus alert system, which was put into place after the mass shooting Wednesday night.

No motive for the slaying has been determined.

When the mass murder on Virginia Tech took place, I was caught up in the flurry of my last year of college. Papers had to be written, presentations had to be given. Everything in my life was focused on school. Then we were alerted to the tragedy on Virginia Tech campus. As a campus we sent our condolences, but individually, all of us looked around clearly for the first time in a long while.

We were a small campus. We didn't have a shortage of characters, but we never thought anything like that would happen to us. But after Virginia Tech, that changed. Campus authorities did their best to attempt to develop an alert system and took steps to make campus safer.

After Virginia Tech, I lived in a slight bubble of paranoia, just praying I would make it through to graduation. Perhaps it's silly, but for the first time, I became aware that I didn't know what I would do in that situation. Where would I go? Would I keep it together enough to think properly? What if I didn't make it?

I still don't know how I would have reacted if that had happened on my campus. I can only imagine how Virginia Tech feels to have such a tragedy happen again.

Sue Lindsey, Victim of Virginia Tech Slaying Was Decapitated, Associated Press

Bill Roth, A Time for Hokies to Prevail Again, HokieSports.com

Virginia Tech Murder Brings Back Terrible Memories, News 8.net