On 6 February 2021, Kevin Jianga 26-year-old Yale graduate student and former Army National Guardsman, spent the day with Zion Perry, his fiancee, who was also a graduate student there. The couple went hiking and ice fishing, followed by dinner at her home in the affluent East Rock section of New Haven. The Police say that at around 8:30 pm Jiang left her apartment and left in his Prius towards his house, where he lived with his mother.
Kevin Jiang was a 26-year-old Yale graduate student, an Army veteran, and, his friends say, a man of faith who volunteered with the homeless. / Credit: Kevin Jiang/Instagram
He barely made it two blocks before his car was rear-ended by a dark SUV in what appeared to be a minor fender bender. The Police believe that he got out of his car, probably to check how the other driver was and exchange information. Instead, the other driver shot Jiang eight times — with several bullets fired so close to his head that the exploding gunpowder left burn marks on his face.
David Zaweski, the lead homicide detective in Jiang’s murder, spoke with “48 Hours” correspondent Anne-Marie Green for “The Ivy League Murder.” An encore of the broadcast is streaming on Paramount+.
Zaweski said one witness told investigators she heard a minor fender bender, looked out a window, heard gunshots and saw a muzzle flash from a gun. And another witness added that she not only heard the shots, but saw the shooter — dressed all in black — standing over the fallen victim, and continuing to fire bullets at him after he was down. Detectives would later retrieve chilling home surveillance video that virtually captured Kevin’s final moments, confirming the witness’s accounts.
But deepening the mystery was the fact that the eight spent shell casings found near Jiang were .45-caliber bullets — and were similar to .45-caliber shell casings found at the scene of four recent shootings in the area.
According to the police, a gunman had fired .45 caliber bullets into four houses during the last months. In those cases, no one was injured. Investigators interviewed the homeowners but could find no connection between them.
At first glance, Jiang’s killing had all the makings of a violent case of road rage. But Zaweski and his colleague Steven Cunningham soon began to wonder if there was more.
“It seems a little more personal,” Zaweski told Green. “When you have someone lying on the ground and not moving, what makes someone keep shooting?”
Cunningham asked about the car accident. “Was it intentional to get him out of the vehicle? Possibly something that was planned?” he said.
“And if he was specifically targeted,” continued Zaweski, “what could have happened in his life to drive someone to do this?
It was a logical investigative path to follow, but after breaking the tragic news to Jiang’s mother and his fiancee, the investigators said that the picture that emerged of Kevin was that of a gifted young man who could not have an enemy in the world. He was living with, and taking care of, his mother, who brought her from Seattle to live with him. He volunteered to work with the homeless, was deeply religious, and was a former lieutenant in the US Army National Guard. Just a week earlier he had proposed to Perry, which she posted on Facebook, practically on the anniversary of their meeting at a Christian retreat.
Kevin Jiang and Zion Perry / Credit: Facebook
Pastor Gregory Hendrickson summed up the young couple engaged to Green. “See that they shared a lot in common,” he began. “They both love nature. Zion was a scientist studying molecular biophysics and biochemistry…he was in the School of the Environment. They are both bright and hard-working students,” he said, “and yet they didn’t feel that their achievements were what defined them at the deepest level.”
Zaweski and Cunningham knew they faced a daunting investigation. Jiang’s killing could have been just another random shot by the mysterious .45 caliber gunman. Whoever the shooter was, he was still on the loose.
“The suspect was out there,” Zaweski said. “He was not identified. We didn’t know where he went… and we didn’t know what he was going to be doing next.”
With little lead to follow and a vague image of a dark SUV from surveillance footage at the scene, they knew they probably needed a break. And they got one the next day when they received an urgent phone call from Sgt. Jeffrey Mills of the North Haven police nearby. He provided them with startling information about two different 911 calls.
The first occurred about half an hour after Jiang’s murder. A driver had gotten stuck on a desolate snow-covered railroad track outside a scrap metal yard that he had accidentally driven into, he said, while searching for a nearby highway entrance. the driver, Qinxuan Panhe was from Malden, Massachusetts. His record was clean, and he was calm with an excuse that Mills had heard before from others who were lost near that scrap yard. So, he helped Pan get a tow and a hotel room nearby. At the time, Mills was unaware that there had been a murder in New Haven.
But about 15 hours later, at 11 a.m. on Feb. 7, Mills responded to another 911 call at Arby’s, where employees had found a bag containing a gun and a box of .45 caliber bullets. The Arby’s was right next door to the Best Western hotel where Pan was taken. And by then he knew that Kevin Jiang had been killed, by someone driving a dark SUV similar to Pan. That’s when the New Haven homicide hit.
It turned out that Pan had entered the hotel but never stayed there. And when Zaweski sent detectives to Malden, where Pan went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and lived with his parents – no one was home.
Zaweski turned to his computer to look for Pan, hoping to find a connection to Jiang. “We’re going to use Facebook as a tool to try to get background on an individual, who they’re friends with,” Zaweski explained. But it seemed that there was no connection with Jiang.
“And so, you’re going down the list of names,” says Green, “Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then you’re like, ‘whoa’.”
“There’s our connection,” Zaweski replies. That connection was Zion Perry, who was listed as a friend of Pan. She and Pan had met each other in a Christian group when Perry was an undergraduate at MIT. And although Perry barely knew Pan and hadn’t communicated with him since she left MIT and moved to New Haven to attend Yale, homicide detectives felt they had more than a break. They had a potential suspect who was missing from his home. And a possible motive: obsession with Perry.
“There seemed to be a secret Pan obsession going on behind the scenes that Kevin wasn’t aware of, and that Zion wasn’t aware of,” Zaweski said. After all, Jiang’s murder happened just a week after Perry posted their engagement on Facebook, along with earlier photos of them surfacing.
Qinxuan Pan / Credit: Qinxuan Pan/Facebook
Investigators believe that Pan was also responsible for the four .45 caliber shots, and that the shots were part of a premeditated plan. They theorized that those shots were done to fool them when Jiang was eventually killed, to make them think his death was just another random accident.
“He planned it, Cunningham said. “And he knew we’d be looking at these other things.”
“This was not a random incident there,” Zaweski added. “He was targeted.”
Now, the investigation into their murder, and the massive manhunt for the brilliant, tech-savvy MIT fugitive has picked up. US Marshals joined the case and learned that Pan’s family had access to millions of dollars in assets. Pan was missing, and they worried that he might be trying to flee the country. The pressure was on.
“It became so high profile so quickly,” U.S. Marshal Joe Galvan told “48 Hours.” “It was just added.”
The Marshals galvanized their vast resources to locate Pan. They noted that Pan’s parents had withdrawn large sums of money, and that they had taken a long trip south with their son right after the murder. When the parents were stopped in Georgia, they were in the car, but their son was gone. They said he simply got out of the car and left, and they didn’t know where he went. The investigators were skeptical.
“They would go to the ends of the earth to help support him and hide him,” said Matthew Duffy, supervisor of the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force in Connecticut. The Marshals focused on the parents as their way to find Pan. They knew finding him would take patience as they used all their surveillance techniques to follow the family.
Weeks passed, but eventually, their patience paid off. Pan’s mother finally made a mistake that will lead the Marshals straight to her son. She made a phone call from a hotel via a clerk’s phone. Investigators spoke with the clerk and were able to track that call, leading them to Pan’s location at a boarding house in Alabama.
“They went there with a small army,” Duffy said. “About 20 guys … he just came out and said, ‘I’m who you’re looking for.’
At the time of his arrestPan had on him approximately $20,000 in cash, multiple communication devices, and his father’s passport. He was requested with Jiang’s murder, he accepted a plea deal, and was sentenced in April 2024 to serve 35 years in prison.
Pan’s parents were never charged with anything. “48 Hours” reached out to the Pans, but they did not respond to our request for comment.
Investigators believe that if Pan had not gotten stuck on the train tracks that fateful February night, Jiang’s murder may never have been solved.
“Could he have gotten away with murder?” Green asked Zaweski.
“It’s very good,” Zaweski replied. “If he hadn’t been caught on those tracks … it would have been very difficult.”
Although investigators, friends, and family were relieved that Pan had been caught and brought to justice, Jiang’s mother spoke at Pan’s sentencing to say that she felt 35 years was too short a sentence for the man who had killed her only son.
Perry agreed. “I wanted to address Pan specifically,” she said during the sentencing. “Although your sentence is far less than you deserve… there is also mercy. May God have mercy on you. And he has mercy on all of us.”
Even four years after Jiang’s death, friends wonder what Kevin, a man of deep faith, might have thought of his killer.
“Do you think Kevin had forgiven Pan?” Green asked Jamila Ayeh and Nasya Hubbard, who served with Jiang in the military.
“Yes, I am,” said Hubbard. Ayeh added, “Without a doubt.”
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