Former student guilty in slaying of visiting Chinese scholar

PEORIA, Ill. (AP) — Jurors deliberated less than 90 minutes before returning a guilty verdict today 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.

Brendt Christensen, 29, looked straight ahead and showed no emotion as a guilty verdict was announced against him. The swift conviction was expected because Christensen's attorneys acknowledged from the start he raped and stabbed Yingying Zhang 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 he 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 enrollments in the nation. They have closely followed developments from the trial at U.S. 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.

Defense attorneys began the trial with the rare admission that their client killed Zhang but said they said they disagreed with prosecutors over how and why. They surprising strategy was a bid to start immediately trying to persuade jurors to spare Christensen's life.