Brendt Christensen convicted of killing Chinese scholar Zhang Yingying as jury returns guilty verdict in less than 90 minutes
- Trial will proceed to next phase, where defendant faces death penalty
- Prosecutors say killer abducted Zhang, then raped, stabbed and beat her to death before beheading her
Jurors deliberated for less than 90 minutes before returning a guilty verdict on Monday at the federal death-penalty trial of a former University of Illinois doctoral student who killed a visiting scholar from China after abducting her at a bus stop as she went to sign an off-campus flat lease.
The swift conviction was expected because Brendt Christensen’s lawyers acknowledged from the start that he raped and stabbed Zhang Yingying in June 2017. Prosecutors say he beat her to death with a baseball bat and decapitated her.
The judge has said there will be a break of a week or more before the penalty phase, a sort of mini-trial that could last several weeks. Illinois no longer has capital punishment, but Christensen could be sentenced to death because he was convicted in federal court.
There are more than 5,000 Chinese students of the 45,000 attending the University of Illinois in Champaign, among the largest such enrolments in the nation. They have closely followed developments from the trial at US District Court in Peoria.
Zhang had been in Illinois for just three months – her only time living outside China. The daughter of working-class parents, she aspired to become a professor in crop sciences to help her family financially. Friends and family described her as caring and fun-loving.