A Virginia Tech graduate student from China was decapitated with a kitchen knife in a campus cafe by another graduate student whom she had been having coffee with, police said Thursday.
The victim in Wednesday night’s slaying was identified as 22-year-old Xin Yang. She had arrived on the Blacksburg campus from Beijing earlier this month to study accounting. Her accused attacker, 25-year-old Haiyang Zhu, also is from China. Zhu is a doctoral graduate student studying agricultural and applied economics, police said. He began his studies at Virginia Tech at the start of the 2008 fall semester and was listed as one of Xin’s emergency contacts. He was in custody Thursday on first-degree murder charges. Police still are seeking a motive for the slaying.
