Qi made a brief court appearance on Tuesday afternoon. He was ordered held without bail until his next scheduled court appearance on September 18.

His motive was unknown, he did not enter a plea and the weapon had not been recovered as of Tuesday afternoon, law enforcement officials said at a press conference.

The officials added that they were still “exploring” the relationship between the men, saying the two knew each other.

Qi was one of three graduate students working for Yan’s group in Caudill Labs, a chemistry studies building on the UNC campus. Qi worked together on at least two research papers with other members of the team, the most recent released on July 30, according to the group’s website.

Qi joined the group in January 2022. A last “group news” posting on the website dated October 2022 read: “Tailei published his first paper in Nano Letters. Congratulations!”

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“We should think first of the terrified staff members and UNC students,” said Merlin Chowkwanyun, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University and an expert in ethics, community health and racial inequality.

“But to see another person who looks like this, playing into the narrative, all I could think of was: ‘Oh my God, why does it have to be another Asian?’”

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“Our nerves are already on edge given everything that’s happening,” said Leo Chan, executive director of the Midwest USA Chinese Chamber of Commerce. “This does not help our community at all. It does not help America at all. It’s just another thing that drives us crazy.”

According to a 2010 report on online Chinese news site Sina about Qi and his brother, the two earned high scores on their national college entrance exams in Henan province and were headed for top universities.

The brothers came from limited means and their farming parents were worried about school fees, said the report, which could not be independently corroborated.

Qi’s unverified LinkedIn page said he received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Wuhan University and a master’s in materials science and engineering from Louisiana State University before joining UNC.

In his brief court appearance on Tuesday, he had unkempt hair and wore glasses, wearing a white singlet under an orange prison jumpsuit.

Without knowing many of the particulars of Qi’s case, which are expected to emerge later, community members said the stress on immigrants could be enormous. A Chinese student from a poor family near the Cincinnati, Ohio community where Chan lives recently went to a gun range, obtained a gun and shot himself, Chan said.

Once they arrive, they may face extreme culture shock, long hours in laboratories, poor pay, little or no academic credit for their work, suspicion they are spies when they apply for grants, and rising youth unemployment and a sagging economy back home.

There have been more than 470 mass shootings across the US and more than 450 murder-suicide incidents so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection and research group.

In March, North Carolina passed a law allowing the purchase of a handgun without a permit, eliminating the need for a character evaluation or criminal history checks.

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“It’s a tragedy that people resort to this,” Chan said. “It speaks to the availability of weapons in the US.”

According to the American Psychological Association, all racial and ethnic groups struggle with mental illness, yet according to one recent study, Asian-Americans were three times less likely to seek mental health services than their white counterparts.

The factors include racial discrimination; pressure to live up to the “model minority” stereotype; difficulty balancing two or more different cultures; parental pressure to be successful academically; and taboos in many Asian cultures against mentioning psychological problems, leading them to their deny their symptoms, the association said.

It was not immediately clear whether Yan was a Chinese national. But according to the UNC website, he obtained bachelor’s degrees in computer science and in materials science and engineering from Wuhan’s Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

UNC police were notified of shots fired on the campus at around 1pm on Monday, prompting a university-wide lockdown that lasted several hours. The suspect was apprehended at around 2:30pm at his residence, according to university officials.