Report: Wrong arrest at UNC spurs racial-profiling fear

Police first got the wrong Asian man while searching for the suspect in a fatal shooting last week at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reportedly increasing fears of racial profiling at the campus.

UNC Police Chief Brian James told reporters the misidentified person's close proximity and "the description that we were given of the suspect" led to the error.

Local media outlets showed coverage and shared accounts of an Asian man in handcuffs who was later let go. "We determined very quickly that that was not, in fact, the suspect," James said.

The actual suspect, Tailei Qi, a graduate student at the school, was charged Aug 28 with first-degree murder and possession of a gun on educational property.

Zijie Yan, an associate professor of applied physical sciences, was identified by UNC police as the faculty member who was killed. Both men are Chinese.

But before police arrested Qi after an hour-and-a-half search, students of Asian descent, particularly men, told NBC News that they were worried not only for their safety from the gunman but also about being profiled as the suspect by authorities.

Johnson Wei, a 21-year-old Chinese international student, told NBC that he and his Asian male friends on campus were terrified to step outside in public.

"We are all international Chinese. Sometimes I wear contacts, but the other day I wore glasses. So, I was a little bit afraid the police couldn't differentiate me with the killer. If I came outside, I [could] also get handcuffed," Wei said.

Asian students told NBC that fears around racial profiling began to surface with the release of Qi's photo and news of the person who had been mistakenly detained.

The anxieties, Wei told NBC, only grew after the lockdown was lifted. "When I walked outside, I was worried. I was afraid that people would stare at me, look at me in different ways," he said.

Mai Nguyen, a former faculty member at the university, told NBC that text exchanges with faculty staff members who were barricaded revealed fears of being racially profiled by authorities, as well. That prompted Nguyen to warn anyone around of Asian descent of the possibility.

"Please stay safe and if you are an Asian male, do not go outside until this is over. The suspect is an Asian male and you don't want to be mistaken," Nguyen posted on social media.

Michael Zhang, a 21-year-old junior at UNC, told NBC that even though he felt supported by those he was in lockdown with, he wondered whether the shooting would lead to more hostile tensions and increased discrimination when school resumes.

"I don't know what's going to happen when we go back to classes and I'm more out into the public," Zhang said.

Zhang said he and his friends were eating lunch at the student union at the center of campus when alerts went off about a person of interest. As images of the first person who was detained, an Asian American man, made the rounds on local media, Zhang told NBC that he instinctually felt a deep sense of worry. "We understood a little bit about what this might mean for how folks like us are viewed around campus."

UNC's Asian American population is roughly 17 percent of the undergraduate student body, which was 17,743 in the fall of 2022. It enrolled more than 2,500 international students then.

NBC said the university didn't respond to a request for comment about the campus environment for its Asian and Asian American students.

Sean Nguyen, a UNC alum who graduated in 2021 and was active in establishing the school's Asian American Center, said that while many Asian Americans have reported feeling "othered" in the past, international students have long felt they were being further marginalized.

"There was a pattern I noticed in my conversations. The folks I spoke to felt a really deep sense of alienation from the university and from campus life, because they were not engaged and integrated into campus life," Nguyen, 25, told NBC. "I'm sure that exacerbates mental health issues, feelings of isolation, feelings of alienation, of loneliness."

Wei told NBC that he is nervous not only that innocent Asian students could be wrongfully blamed for the tragedy, but also that they could be associated with violence. Those perceptions aren't easy to change, he said.

"I want to tell other people around me to unite. I want us to make friends, especially with the local people, and tell them we're not associated with a killer," Wei said. "The killer doesn't represent Chinese international students."

Zhang told NBC that he has felt disappointed looking through X, formerly Twitter, and seeing social media users try to connect the shooting with coronavirus conspiracy theories and the Asian community.

"My mom had told me this whole story about how I should be careful about going outside, because what if people associate us with the virus," Zhang said. "And I think I hear her voice right now telling me to be a little bit more careful, because I understand now."