Murder Cut Short Romance Nurtured In Nature

On what would be the newly engaged couple’s last day together before a brutal murder, Zion Perry and Kevin Jiang went ice fishing, caught a pickerel, and cooked dinner at her East Rock apartment.

For Perry, that Saturday — spent marveling at the wonders of the outdoors, sharing in each other’s faith-filled company — embodied so much of what she loved about her late fiancé.

Jiang, a 26-year-old Yale School of the Environment graduate student, was shot multiple times and killed at the end of the day, around 8:30 p.m., near Perry’s apartment, on Lawrence Street between Nash and Nicoll in the Goatville section of the East Rock neighborhood.

His death — New Haven’s sixth homicide already in 2021 —has come amidst a nearly year-long spike in violent crime across the city, and country, since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last spring.

It has also united town and gown in tragedy, with Yale University President Peter Salovey making a rare city press conference appearance Monday morning alongside Mayor Justin Elicker and Police Chief Otoniel Reyes to describe the community-wide hurt caused by the ​“loss of an extraordinary young man.”

City police, still investigating the case, announced that they believe the shooting may not have been a random act of violence.

During a Monday afternoon phone interview with the Independent, Perry — a 22-year-old, first-year Yale doctoral student in biophysics — reflected on the relationship that she built with Jiang over the past year.

That relationship started during a church retreat in Norwalk in early 2020. It culminated with their engagement on Jan. 30 while hiking at a state park in Middletown. And it was anchored by the young couple’s shared Christian faith.

“The first thing that comes to mind is Jesus,” she said about Jiang. ​“He was a vessel for his love. [Jiang] touched so many people. He showed God’s love to so many people. I feel like he was such a gift to so many. I can’t believe I had the privilege of actually knowing him. I don’t regret a single memory.”

In addition to being a grad student at Yale’s School of the Environment, Jiang served in the U.S. Army National Guard and was an active volunteer at Trinity Baptist Church on State Street. He and his mother, who had moved east from Seattle to be closer to her son, lived in West Haven.

At Monday morning’s presser, Salovey described how Jiang distributed food and cooked for a homeless shelter, mentored young people, helped manufacturing companies comply with local and federal environmental laws, and conducted research on mercury levels in fish in the Quinnipiac River watershed.

“He wanted to use his education and experiences to make a positive difference in the world,” Salovey said. ​“Kevin gave so much to this community, and he had more to give, and so we remember him. We remember him fondly. We feel for his family, and his fiancée, and we express our condolences to them.”

From Church Retreat To State Park Hikes

Perry said that her path first crossed with Jiang’s a little more than 12 months ago.

She was still an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He had started grad school at Yale. They both attended a church retreat in Norwalk in late January 2020.

It was in a meeting room at a Double Tree hotel in Norwalk.

“I almost didn’t go, because it was my senior year of undergrad, and I was kind of burned out,” Perry recalled. A friend encouraged her to make the trek to Connecticut, saying she thought it would be ​“refreshing to connect with God” away from school.

“I’m so glad I did,” Perry said, ​“because that’s where I met dear Kevin.”

On the third day of the retreat, she said, attendees were instructed to pray for the person they were sitting next to. She and Jiang happened to be in adjacent seats. They prayed for one another.

Perry said the two became close friends. They met again at another Christian conference in February around his birthday, then another time when she visited Yale in person to interview for grad school.

In May 2020, having met in person only three times but built their friendship across phone calls and Facebook Messenger chats, they decided to start dating.

Jiang was in New Haven. Perry was back home in eastern Pennsylvania, finishing her senior year remotely.

Jiang drove from New Haven to her home in Pennsylvania roughly eight times over the ensuing months, sometimes spending just the day together with her before driving back to Connecticut.

“God brings a lot of good things out of evil, whether it be a disease or sickness or murder,” she said when asked what it was like starting a relationship long-distance during Covid-19. ​“God brought this. I felt like this was such a beautiful friendship out of this pandemic.”

When he visited her in Pennsylvania, they would often go out hiking.

“He loves fishing, hiking, visiting national parks, gardening,” she said about Jiang. ​“He just loves being in God’s creation. We had a wonder of God’s creation. We just looked at the world” and marveled.

On their first hiking date in Pennsylvania, they went out to a state park near her house and walked around a lake. They saw a log in the middle of the lake, and on that log were seven turtles lined up from smallest to largest, she said.

“We crept through the forest to the edge of the lake, looking at these turtles,” she remembered. ​“We were walking over trails, over logs. He’d hold my hand and help me over a muddy puddle in the path.”

“We love seeing cool things in nature,” she said about the delight they felt upon seeing those turtles.

Back at her family’s house, Perry remembered, Jiang played the piano as she played the flute. They played ​“worship songs,” she said. He also loved playing ​“Chinese love songs,” as well as Elvis’s ​“Can’t Help Falling In Love.”

“Peaceful” New Haven

As a bioengineering student at MIT, Perry applied to graduate school programs throughout last spring.

She initially had her heart set on going to school in California. She wound up picking Yale because when she visited the campus, she said she felt ​“so peaceful here.”

In addition to being impressed with the research opportunities afforded by the Yale program she had gotten into, she said, ​“I feel I can truly be myself here. I can really talk about my faith here, and no one’s judgmental.”

Plus, New Haven is where Jiang already lived. ​“He was floored” when she told him that she would be attending Yale, and that they would be living close to one another for the first time in their young relationship.

She moved to New Haven in August 2020 to start her PhD program. Soon thereafter, she said, Jiang moved to Texas for two months to participate in a basic officer leadership training program through the National Guard.

When he came back to Connecticut later in the fall, she joined Jiang’s mom in picking him up at the airport in Hartford.

While in Connecticut together, they picked up on the hiking dates they had first gone on during his visits to Pennsylvania.

She remembered going to the Elizabeth Park rose garden in Hartford.

They’d hike in East Rock Park, Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden, Gillette Castle State Park in East Haddam.

On Jan. 30, they got engaged on one such state park outing, by the waterfall at Wadsworth State Park in Middletown. It was on the one-year anniversary of their meeting at that church retreat in Norwalk. A friend came along and snapped a picture of the two soon after Jiang proposed.

Last Day At Silver Lake

Perry and Jiang turned to lake visits and ice fishing as the winter set in.

“The spot we liked the best was Silver Lake” in Berlin, she said.

That’s where the two spent their last day together, this past Saturday. ​“That was our last memory together.”

They went ice fishing on Silver Lake. She went ice skating. Jiang shuffled along on the ice in his boots. ​“We were laughing.”

He caught a pickerel during the trip. They then went back to her apartment on Lawrence Street, and he showed her how to cook it.

“We had a beautiful dinner together,” she said, not just with Jiang, but also with her roommate.

Later that night, he took her to the grocery store. ​“He had a car,” while Perry didn’t, so ​“he helped me shop for groceries. He carried the groceries up to my apartment.”

“I gave him a hug good-bye,” she remembered, before Jiang left her apartment for the last time.

Perry declined to comment on how the rest of the night played out, and where she was when the fatal shooting took place. At this moment, she said, she wants to focus on the happy memories she had with him.

“We had such a beautiful day” together, she said about Saturday. She plans to hold onto that, even with the pain of knowing what came next.

She said that Jiang is now in heaven, and that she’ll be reunited with him whenever her time comes.

“Kevin truly changed my life,” she said in a follow-up email after Monday’s phone interview. ​“I am a much better person for knowing him.”