On February 6, 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 there. The couple went hiking and ice fishing, followed by dinner at her home in the affluent East Rock section of New Haven. Police say that around 8:30 p.m., Jiang left her apartment and drove his Prius to his home, where he lived with his mother.
Kevin Jiang was a 26-year-old graduate student at Yale, 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 small fender bender. Police believe he got out of the car, possibly to check on the other driver 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 broadcast on Paramount+.
Zaweski said a witness told investigators he heard the minor fender bend, looked out a window, heard gunshots and saw flashes from a gun. And another witness added that he not only heard the shots, but saw the shooter – dressed in black – standing over the fallen victim, continuing to fire bullets at him after he fell. Detectives would later recover a chilling home surveillance video that captured virtually Kevin’s last moments alive, corroborating the witness’s account.
But deepening the mystery was the fact that the eight spent casings 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 police, a gunman has fired .45-caliber bullets into four homes in the past few months. In those cases, no one was injured. Investigators interviewed the owners but were unable to find any connection between them.
At first glance, Jiang’s killing had all the earmarks of a violent case of road rage. But Zaweski and his colleague Steven Cunningham quickly began to wonder if there was more.
“It feels a little more personal,” Zaweski told Green. “When you have someone lying on the ground and they’re not moving, what would make someone keep shooting?”
Cunningham questioned the car accident. “Was it intentional to remove him from the vehicle? Possibly something that was planned?” he said.
“And if he was specifically targeted,” Zaweski continued, “what could have happened in his life to cause someone to do this?
It was a logical line of investigation to follow, but after breaking the tragic news to Jiang’s mother and his fiancee, investigators say the portrait that emerged of Kevin was that of a talented young man who couldn’t have had an enemy in the world. He lived with and took care of his mother, whom he brought 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 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 newly engaged young couple for Green. “They clearly shared a lot in common,” he began. “They both loved nature. Zion was a scientist who studied 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 were facing a daunting investigation. Jiang’s killing may have been another random shooting by the mysterious .45-caliber gunman. Whoever the shooter was was still at large.
“The suspect was there,” Zaweski said. “He wasn’t identified. We didn’t know where he went … and we didn’t know what he was going to do next.”
With few leads to follow and a vague image of a dark SUV from surveillance footage at the scene, they knew they’d probably need a break. And they got one the next day when they got an urgent call from Sgt. Jeffrey Mills of the nearby North Haven police. He gave them startling information about two different 911 calls.
The first occurred about half an hour after Jiang was killed. A driver was stuck on a snow-covered railroad track outside a scrap yard he accidentally drove into, he said, while searching for a nearby freeway entrance. the driver, Qinxuan Panhe was from Malden, Massachusetts. His record was clean and he was calm with an excuse Mills had heard before from others who had wandered near the scrap yard. So he helped Pan get a hook and a hotel room nearby. At the time, Mills was unaware that a murder had occurred in New Haven.
But about 15 hours later, at 11 a.m. on Feb. 7, Mills responded to another 911 call at an Arby’s, where employees had found a bag containing a gun and a box of .45-caliber bullets. Arby’s was right next door to the Best Western where Pan had been taken. And by then he knew that Kevin Jiang had been killed by someone driving a dark SUV similar to Pan’s. Then he got to the New Haven homicide.
It turned out that Pan had checked into the hotel, but had never stayed there. And when Zaweski sent detectives to Malden, where Pan went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and lived with his parents, no one was home.
Zaweski turned to his computer searching for Pan, hoping to find a connection to Jiang. “We’re going to use Facebook as a tool to try to get information about a person they’re friends with,” Zaweski explained. But there seemed to be no connection with Jiang.
“And so, you’ll go down the list of names,” says Green, “Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then you’re like, ‘whoa.’
“That’s where our connection is,” Zaweski replies. That connection was Zion Perry, who was listed as Pan’s friend. She and Pan had met at a Christian group when Perry was a student at MIT. And though Perry barely knew Pan and hadn’t communicated with him since he left MIT and moved to New Haven to attend Yale, the homicide detectives sensed they had more than a break. They had a potential suspect who went missing from his home. And one possible reason: an obsession with Perry.
“It seemed like there was a secret Pan obsession behind the scenes that Kevin wasn’t aware of and Zion wasn’t aware of,” Zaweski said. After all, Jiang’s killing happened just a week after Perry posted her engagement on Facebook, along with earlier photos of them dating.
Qinxuan Pan / Credit: Qinxuan Pan/Facebook
Investigators believe Pan was also responsible for the four .45 caliber shootings and that the shootings were part of a premeditated plan. They theorized that those shootings were done to mislead them when Jiang was finally killed, to make them think his death was just another random incident.
“He planned it, Cunningham said. And he knew we were going to look at the other stuff.”
“This was not a random incident there,” Zaweski added. “It was targeted.”
Now, their murder investigation and massive manhunt for their brilliant, tech-savvy fugitive has taken off. 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 try to flee the country. The pressure was high.
“This got so high so fast,” U.S. Marshal Joe Galvan told “48 Hours.” “It was just intensified.”
The marshals galvanized their vast resources to find Pan. They noted that Pan’s parents withdrew large amounts of cash and that they took a long trip south with their son immediately after the murder. When the parents were pulled over in Georgia, they were in the car, but their son was missing. They said he just got out of the car and left and they didn’t know where he went. Investigators were skeptical.
“They would go to the ends of the earth to support him and hide him,” said Matthew Duffy, a supervisor with the US 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 track down the family.
Weeks passed, but eventually their patience paid off. Pan’s mother eventually made a mistake that led the marshals straight to her son. He made a phone call from a hotel using a clerk’s phone. Investigators spoke with the clerk and were able to trace that call, leading them to Pan’s location at a boarding house in Alabama.
“They went there with a little army,” Duffy said. “About 20 guys … he just came out and said, ‘I’m the one you’re looking for.’
At the time of his arrestPan had about $20,000 in cash, several communication devices and his father’s passport on him. He was CHARGED with Jiang’s murder, he accepted a plea deal and was sentenced in April 2024 to 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 hadn’t gotten stuck on the train tracks that fateful night in February, Jiang’s murder may never have been solved.
“Could he have gotten away with murder?” Green asked Zaweski.
“He very well could have,” 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 and said she felt 35 years was too short a sentence for the man who killed her only son.
Perry agreed. “I wanted to address Pan in particular,” she said at the sentencing. “Although your sentence is far less than you deserve…there is mercy. May God have mercy on you. And have mercy on us all.”
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 would have forgiven Pan?” Green asked Jamila Ayeh and Nasya Hubbard, who served with Jiang in the military.
“Yes, yes,” said Hubbard. Added Ayeh: “Without a doubt.”
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