Thomas Breen File Photo
Pan at an earlier court hearing.
Three years after Kevin Jiang was shot to death at Lawrence and Nicoll streets, his killer has pleaded guilty.
The killer, Qinxuan Pan, 32, pleaded guilty to murder Thursday before Superior Court Judge Gerald L. Harmon.
Pan, a former MIT artificial intelligence researcher, now faces up to 35 years in prison at a hearing scheduled April 25, 2024.
The late Kevin Jiang.
He shot Jiang, a 26-year-old Yale graduate student, on Feb. 6, 2021, near Jiang’s fiancee’s apartment on Lawrence Street in East Rock. The night of the murder, North Haven police allegedly encountered Pan in a deserted scrap metal yard—and then let him go. Pan, who knew Jiang’s fiancee, then fled the state. U.S. marshals arrested him in Alabama after a three-month manhunt.
The murder of Jiang, a grad student at Yale’s School of the Environment who served as a U.S. Army National Guardsman and was an active member of Trinity Baptist Church on State Street, sparked outpourings of grief from shocked city residents and the Yale community more broadly.